Thanks to its inclusion in the movie Saltburn, Sophie Ellis-Bextor‘s 2002 song “Murder on the Dance Floor” — a hit in Europe and the U.K. when it was first released — is being played on the radio in the U.S. And Sophie wishes she could go back in time and tell her younger self what’s coming.
“It’s just wonderful,” she tells ABC Audio. “I kind of want to go back to 22-year-old me, which is how old I was when I recorded it … and be like, ‘You won’t believe what happened with this.'”
Sophie will sing the song at the BAFTAs, the U.K. equivalent of the Oscars, on February 18. She says she’s not nervous about performing in front of all those famous attendees, including Saltburn star Barry Keoghan, who did a dance to the song in the film that left little to the imagination.
“I’m not up there on my own. I’ve got lots of dancers. I’ll be hopefully wearing something pretty fantastic,” she says. “I just think it’s fun. I just think, like, ‘What a blast.’ It’s awesome.”
While Saltburn director Emerald Fennell initially told Sophie the song would be used to soundtrack a scene where someone dances in the nude, Sophie says she could not have imagined what that would actually look like.
“I didn’t know it would such a triumphant dance of bad behavior,” she laughs. “But I thought the film was brilliant. I thought it was dark and twisted, but funny and smart. … I just felt very happy to be a small part of it, really.”
And when she sings the song on Sunday, Sophie hopes Barry won’t be “too traumatized when he hears it.” Or, she says, “It might make him spontaneously start shedding his black tie.”
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