Jacob Elordi's Great Unhinged Reaction to the "Saltburn" Candle

If you, like me, are still emotionally scarred by that bathtub scene from Emerald Fennell’s 2023 psychological thriller Saltburn, you may want to proceed with caution before watching the video below.

As Saltburn audiences will recall, Barry Keoghan’s character Oliver spies on Jacob Elordi’s Felix while the latter is taking a bath and engaging in some NSFW behavior. After Felix leaves the bathroom and drains the water, Oliver sneaks in, presses his face against the drain, and begins slurping, heartily.

Horrifying! Yet somehow, the scene has inspired the production and sale of “Jacob Elordi bathwater”–themed candles. And Thursday night when he appeared on The Tonight Show, the actor finally publicly addressed the questionable Saltburn merch.

“Cailee [Spaeny], my costar from Priscilla, actually sent me the videos of people doing this,” Elordi told host Jimmy Fallon, and joked, “I want to know who’s making the money. My first thought was: Great, where’s my money?”

Fallon then revealed he had purchased one of these candles. “Do you wanna smell your own candle?” he asked, handing it over to the Kissing Booth star. “There you go, bud.”

Elordi gently lifted the candle to his nose as if to take a sniff—and then abruptly began slurping out of it, mimicking Oliver’s enthusiastic gulping in the film, to the delight of Fallon and the Tonight Show crowd.

“Does it smell anything like you?” Fallon asked when the laughter died down.

“[It] smells like a washing room,” Elordi said.

You can watch the moment below at the 5:50 minute mark.

Writer and director Fennell talked to Variety last fall about filming all of Saltburn's graphic scenes.

“We just want to make something that makes people feel something. I want to make stuff that you go and sit in a dark room full of strangers, and you don’t know what you’re going to feel, and you don’t know where you’re going to be probed. And everyone has a different take on it,” she said. “Some people are screaming, some people are squealing. Some people are turned on, some people are freaked out, and some are furious. Some people don’t really care. What you want is for people to spill out into the street and want to go and have a drink and talk about it.”

As an associate editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com, Chelsey keeps a finger on the pulse on all things celeb news. She also writes on social movements, connecting with activists leading the fight on workers' rights, climate justice, and more. Offline, she’s probably spending too much time on TikTok, rewatching Emma (the 2020 version, of course), or buying yet another corset.