Emerald Fennell on ‘Wuthering Heights’: Primal, Sexual, and Defending Casting Choices of Margot Robbie & Jacob Elordi

Interestingly, her longtime ambition to adapt “Wuthering Heights” doesn’t necessarily translate to a desire to make the adaptation as faithful as possible to the beloved source material. The trailer for Fennell’s new film has drawn attention for focusing on eroticism to a degree that was very uncommon in 19th-century fiction. Indeed, she admitted that the movie itself features certain racy elements that are not present in Brontë’s novel.

These elements, Farrell explained, are things that she misremembered from her teenage introduction to “Wuthering Heights.” She believed that they were present in the book, but didn’t find them upon rereading it. “It’s where I filled in the gaps aged 14,” she remarked, “[to] see what it would feel like to fulfil my 14-year-old wish, which is both good and bad.. I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it’s an emotional response to something. It’s, like, primal, sexual.”

The Casting Controversy

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” has already stirred the waters with more than just the promised emphasis on sexuality. The casting of each of the movie’s two leads, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has been criticized for distinct reasons. Robbie plays the wild-spirited young aristocrat Catherine Earnshaw, while Elordi portrays Heathcliff, the roguish foster son who becomes her star-crossed love interest. Both leads have struck some commentators as questionable choices to play their respective iconic characters.

In Robbie’s case, the source of the controversy is her age. In the novel, Catherine Earnshaw is a teenager for a substantial portion of the story. Robbie is 35 years old; while it’s not uncommon for teenaged characters to be played by actors in their early twenties, it’s hard to imagine anyone in her mid-thirties successfully passing as a character who’s nearly two decades younger. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” will either have to adjust Catherine’s age accordingly or risk undermining its visual credibility.

Meanwhile, Elordi’s casting has drawn accusations of White-washing. In Brontë’s novel, Heathcliff is of indeterminate ethnicity, but he is speculated to be of Romani heritage and described as having dark skin, hair, and eyes. Moreover, his physical appearance makes him the target of racially charged contempt and hostility at several points in the book. The casting of Elordi, a fair-skinned actor of entirely European descent, may stand to erase this particular dimension of the story’s class-based tensions.

Farrell on Robbie and Elordi

Nonetheless, Fennell stands firmly by both leads as exactly the actors she wanted to embody the two principal characters of “Wuthering Heights.” She explained that Robbie possesses a certain matchless uniqueness that makes her perfect as Catherine Earnshaw. She described Robbie as “so beautiful and interesting and surprising, and she is the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything. I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind. And that is who Cathy is to me. Cathy is somebody who just pushes to see how far she can go.”

As for Elordi (who also starred in “Saltburn”), Fennell maintains that his physical appearance matches that of Heathcliff far more than critics have claimed. She approached him for the role of Heathcliff while they were filming “Saltburn,” after realizing that he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read.”

Of course, regardless of whether a character’s physical attributes have meaning to a movie’s story, casting an actor strictly on the basis of his appearance would seem to be a laughably misguided decision. Fortunately, Fennell subsequently explains (albeit quite vaguely) how his acting chops convinced her that he was the right person to cast as Heathcliff: “It seemed to me he had the thing… he’s a very surprising actor.”

A Deeply Personal Adaptation – Faithful or Otherwise

All in all, no matter how she may deviate from the original novel, Fennell’s passion for this upcoming film cannot be denied, and neither can her respect for the source material. Her characters may look different from the ones written by Brontë, but they’ll sound almost identical. Fennell professed that “I was really determined to preserve as much of her dialogue [as possible] because her dialogue is the best dialogue ever. I couldn’t better it, and who could?”

Moreover, Fennell fully appreciates the formidable challenge that she set for herself in adapting this all-time classic, so beloved by English-literature buffs in general and by her in particular. “I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious,” she proclaimed, “…But it’s been a kind of masochistic exercise working on it because I love it so much, and it can’t love me back, and I have to live with that. So it’s been troubling, but I think in a really useful way.”