What does Emerald Fennell regret about Wuthering Heights?

Emerald Fennell regrets not showing Margot Robbie’s “extremely hairy armpits” in Wuthering Heights.

The director filmed a scene with for the 2026 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic novel, which featured Robbie’s character Cathy with hairy armpits but “unfortunately the scene that we see them didn’t make it in there”.

According to The Guardian newspaper, Fennell made the remarks at Hay Festival in Wales, where she added that Cathy having unshaven pits “was so important to me.”

She went on to share that when watching period adaptations, she often wonders: “Where are the razors that these women are using? They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like: ‘What’s going on? It’s completely mad.’”

In the movie, Robbie stars as Cathy Earnshaw, alongside Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.

Fennell described the movie as a “sister, not a twin” of the classic Brontë novel, saying that she “couldn’t make [the original]. It’s so brilliant”.

Fennell – who directed and wrote the 2023 psychological black-comedy film Saltburn, starring Jacob Elordi as aristocrat Felix Catton and Barry Keoghan as struggling student Oliver Quick – also defended the controversial fish scene in the film, where Cathy sticks her finger into a dead fish’s mouth.

She said: “I saw a fish in aspic and I thought: ‘I want to stick my finger in its mouth.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, I think if you were trapped, and you were extremely sexually frustrated, the first thing you’d do is …’

“We had all of the different fish, we had fish with lipstick on, we had real fish, fake fish, in the end that was a real fish. But poor Margot. I mean she had to do that. There were 12 of them.

“Being embarrassing, being cringe is a really big thing [for me].

“Especially now in our culture, we are so phobic and terrified of being cringe, or being earnest, and so we’ve got this deadening ambivalence about everything, and I feel, for me, I want to get in and go for it and push it off a cliff.”