What can you tell us about Cathy and Heathcliff as characters – what sort of Heathcliff and Cathy will we see in this version of Wuthering Heights?
L: I’m a bit more intense than Cathy in my actual life.
A: I think what’s quite clear is that we have some similarities to our characters in real life.
I think I’m a lot like him, especially the version that we are doing here. We were saying the version of Heathcliff here isn’t colourblind casting, he is black, he’s got a Jamaican accent. He’s spurned and treated like an outcast, not only because of his poverty or social standing but because of his colour, and that anger that is brewed up within him is a righteous anger.
It’s something that I have felt – I think he is me if I hadn’t found my peace. I actually think that he is less brutal than the Heathcliff in the books, and there was a desire to show that people are not entirely bad or entirely good.
Why do you think this is a story to be telling now?
A: For me, it’s specific to what’s going on in the world and with me and my relationship with my blackness and masculinity. I’m hoping there are people who are going to see this and identify with Heathcliff and his struggles, if you treat someone like a monster then you create a monster.
Hopefully people see that reflection and even out of that can come love and positivity, and if you do face that and deal with your demons something good can loom from it.
L: It’s like reality TV, these awful people play out their lives and people love to look in on it and their mistakes and hopefully learn from them.
It’s a classic story of dysfunctional people making mistakes and hopefully an audience can analyse it and see where it went wrong. Because people can be rubbish. And that’s never going to change, unfortunately.
This is a classic Yorkshire tale, how are your accents coming along?
A: I’m speaking with a Caribbean accent – I love it because of the lyricalness of it. I can’t imagine doing it another way and also where it places him and my voice. It is there to differentiate him from everyone else, you can’t get away from his otherness.
The choice that when he comes back a gentleman, that he hasn’t changed his accent, he’s a more refined posh deeper Jamaican accent but he’s not trying to change who he is, he’s owning it – it’s beautiful.
L: What was weird for me is that it’s close to my accent but not my accent. I’ve almost found that harder than say an American accent or whatever else I’ve done. It’s just working on that subtle difference. Tweaking my own voice. It’s quite annoying!
What can audiences expect to feel after watching this adaptation of Wuthering Heights?
A: Exhausted! It’s a whole gambit of human emotions! Emma hasn’t left anything out.
L: They are going to laugh, they’re going to cry. And feel celebratory at the end but they will have gone through a journey. (Rachel Rogers)
In Lily King’s short story “Creature,” 14-year-old Carol has fled the ruins of her parents’ marriage to spend her summer babysitting for the children of a wealthy family in her New England town. She’s just read “Jane Eyre,” and, like Brontë’s heroine, she’s ensconced in a big house with turrets and falls for its broodingly handsome male occupant.
“You cannot know these blistering feelings,” Carol writes in a tumescent letter to a friend, “— you have not met your Rochester. But believe me, they are so powerful that now every novel, every line of poetry, makes perfect and vivid sense.” (Megan O’Grady)
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