Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell is defending her choice to cast Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff for her upcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel.
“[Jacob Elordi] looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff in the first book that I read,” Fennell, 39, said during a Friday, September 26, panel at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in England, per Variety. “And it was so awful because I so wanted to scream. Not the professional thing to do, obviously.”
Fennell first cast Elordi, 28, in her 2023 critically acclaimed film Saltburn.
“I had been thinking about making [Wuthering Heights], and it seemed to me he had the thing,” she said of their first meeting. “He’s a very surprising actor.”
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie’s Wuthering Heights is one of the most highly anticipated films of 2026 — but the latest adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel has faced a fair share of controversy from the very start. Brontë’s 1847 novel follows the Earnshaw and Linton families during late 18th century England. The story focuses […]
Brontë’s 1847 novel follows two families, the Earnshaw’s and Linton’s, in 18th century England. When the Earnshaw’s foster son, Heathcliff, falls in love with foster sister Catherine, the pair spark an intense love affair that quickly spirals out of control. When Catherine ultimately agrees to marry someone else, Heathcliff sets out on a path of obsessive revenge and destruction.
Fennell announced in July 2024 that she would be the latest director to try her hand at a Wuthering Heights adaptation. She faced backlash months later, when it was revealed that Elordi would portray Heathcliff, as the actor is white while Heathcliff is heavily insinuated to be a person of color in the book, described as a “dark-skinned gypsy” with “black eyes.”
Others also questioned the choice to cast Margot Robbie as Catherine, who is meant to be no older than a teenager by the end of the book. (Robbie is 37 years old, while Elordi is 28.)
Fennell continued to defend her choices on Friday, noting that Robbie is “not like anyone I’ve ever met, ever.”
“That’s what I felt like with Cathy,” she explained, calling Robbie “so beautiful and interesting and surprising, and she is the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything.
She added, “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. So it needed somebody like Margot, who’s a star, not just an incredible actress — which she is — but somebody who has a power, an otherworldly power, a Godlike power, that means people lose their minds.”
Pushback came again in September, when the first teaser for the film sparked debate over the tonal choices and eroticism. Set to a remixed version of Charli XCX’s “Everything Is Romantic,” the trailer features images of a finger being placed in a fish’s mouth, a sweaty, scratched up Elordi and plenty of suggestive fantasy sequences seemingly from Catherine’s imagination.
While some wondered if the sexual nature of the film would dilute the novel’s original topics of violence, social class and race, Fennell disagrees. She claimed during Friday’s panel that there is an “enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published].”
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie’s undeniable sexual tension explodes in an official trailer and a brand new poster for Wuthering Heights. The duo star in Saltburn writer-director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the 1847 romance novel by Emily Brontë as one of the most beloved couples in literary history — Catherine Earnshaw and the orphan heartthrob […]
“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,” she explained. “So it’s been troubling, but I think in a really useful way.”
Fennel noted that while she’s taken certain liberties with the text — she also wrote the screenplay — she promised that much of Brontë’s original dialogue would remain intact.
“I was really determined to preserve as much of her dialogue [as possible] because her dialogue is the best dialogue ever,” she said. “I couldn’t better it, and who could?”
Still, Fennel confessed that the literature is an extremely “personal material” for everyone and understands the passionate responses.
“It’s very illicit,” she said. “The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think.”
