With just over a fortnight to go until Emerald Fennell’s already discourse-dominating Wuthering Heights arrives in cinemas, the film’s stars have kicked off what looks set to be an incredibly stylish – and slightly unhinged – press tour.
After countless Barbie-themed looks while promoting Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar-grossing film, star Margot Robbie has pivoted to gothic-inspired fashion for her Wuthering Heights promotional engagements (think sheer lace, chokers and plenty of tousled hair).
And in a move that feels in line with the marketing for Wicked and Marty Supreme, Robbie and her co-star Jacob Elordi – who are controversially playing destructive lovers Cathy and Heathcliff – are so far drumming up interest in their film by blurring the lines between fiction and reality.
Robbie’s wrap gift for the Euphoria star has been revealed, and while the pair stopped short of getting matching tattoos à la the Wicked girlies (as far as we know), the former Neighbours actor had signet rings custom-made for herself and Elordi.
The bespoke jewellery features two skeletons entwined with each other – in the same pose as the film’s posters – and the Emily Brontë quote: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” It’s a beautiful, but rather intense, gift for a co-worker, eh?
This came just days after the release of a Vogue Australia interview, which saw the two Queenslanders trade anecdotes about their time filming the movie. Robbie – who also served as a producer – recalled how Elordi, “as Heathcliff”, filled her dressing room with red roses on Valentine’s Day.
“It wasn’t just the gesture of the roses, it was the thing written from Heathcliff, and that little tombstone thing,” she said. “I was like, ah, crafts! Love that. It was crafty, it was meaningful, it was dramatic.”
And in another interview, with US platform Fandango, Elordi admitted he had an “obsession” with Robbie during filming. “If you have the opportunity to share a film set with Margot Robbie, you’re going to make sure you’re within five to 10 metres at all times,” he said. “Watching how she drinks tea, how she eats her food, how she does it. When is it going to slip? When is the thing going to come undone? And, it never comes undone.”
It’s a confession that would, in any other industry, spark a call from HR. But to market a film in 2026? The winning vibe nowadays seems to be “the more delulu, the better”. Who cares that Robbie is married with a baby, and Elordi is reportedly back with his influencer ex? Perhaps Warner Bros think we’ll forget these key details. (Rachel McGrath)
Similarly,
The Guardian is calling it a 'showmance' and wonders how long it's going to last.
Even though it isn’t released for another fortnight, you may already have formed strong opinions about Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Perhaps you hold the position that the novel is a text so sacred that any adaptation whatsoever is equivalent to sacrilege. Or maybe you are excited to see what a noted iconoclast such as Fennell will do with something as fusty as a 179-year-old book.
Either way, it is likely that your key takeaway from the Wuthering Heights press tour so far is that it’s getting a bit much. It has now been revealed that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have matching rings decorated with two hugging skeletons and the phrase “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”.
Maybe if that was the extent of it, this would be fine. But it has come at the thin end of a campaign during which Elordi and Robbie have both tried really, really hard to make everyone think they are besotted lovers and not professional colleagues with a product to sell.
There was the interview in January in which Robbie revealed that, during filming, Elordi would always make sure he was closely watching her on set, even when he was not required, and that even his occasional absence would result in her feeling “lost, like a kid without their blanket or something.” Or the time when Elordi claimed they had a “mutual obsession”. Or when Robbie revealed that Elordi filled her room with roses on Valentine’s day, prompting her to think “Oh, he’s probably a very good boyfriend”.
It all sounds highly romantic and very sexy … at least until you remember that Margot Robbie is married to Tom Ackerley, with whom she has a child who was four months old at the time of the Valentine’s Day roses, that she and Ackerley are co-producers of Wuthering Heights, and that this campaign is probably the product of a high-level discussion between them and the Warner Bros publicity department during which everybody agreed on the precise degree to which Robbie would pretend to be gooey-eyed about her co-star.
It’s all getting a bit Wicked, isn’t it? That had a press cycle so overcooked that, in order to enjoy the film, you had to divorce yourself from the image of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo clinging to each other during every interview and sobbing like they’d just watched their childhood houses burn down.
Is this approach becoming the norm? Is this how stupid we’ve become? Obviously film campaigns have had to change with the times, because the old way of magazine profiles and formal sit-down interviews has given way to nebulous social media buzz. But to watch Robbie and Elordi go moony-eyed over each other – knowing full well they’ll drop the artifice like a stone when they each get something new to promote – is to realise that something has gone badly wrong.
Do we really need to form parasocial relationships with the people we see in films, tailored specifically to the tone of the project, in order to enjoy them? Wasn’t there a time when we just innately understood that an actor’s performance began with the opening credits and ended when the lights went up?
It makes you worry for the future. For instance, Greta Gerwig’s new Narnia film is due to be released this year, and Emma Mackey is playing the witch. Does this mean that, a few months before its release, Mackey will start pretending that her family are virulently anti-Christmas? Is she going to do TikToks in which she growls at children? Will she do a press junket next to a real life lion that she will be contractually obliged to slag off at every opportunity?
The hope has to be that all these shenanigans will help Wuthering Heights cross over and become a Barbie-style phenomenon. But it’s coming at the expense of our brain cells. We’re all adults here. We should be able to tell the difference between an actor and the character they play, or else we’re surely doomed.
Hopefully this is the high watermark of the Wuthering Heights campaign, with any luck this element of the promotion will recede, and the final fortnight will be about the film itself and not the extent to which the leads are willing to pretend to be in love. That is, unless Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi want to adopt a child before its release, and agree to raise it to adulthood. That really would be a level of commitment we could all get behind. (Stuart Heritage)
The Tab also questions the approach of the promo.
While Brontë’s book is primarily set in the late 18th century, painstakingly recreating Georgian architectural details was not at the top of the to-do list for Davies and her team, including set decorator Charlotte Dirickx. (The pair also worked on Saltburn together.) “We were aiming for an accuracy of feeling rather than period,” explains Davies. “All the design and the vision of it had to be felt before it was understood. We were playing into every sensation. We often spoke about how it’d be great if we could have Smell-O-Vision. It’d be lovely to give the audience bits of the walls that you can touch.”
Many literature lovers and fans of the book are already grumbling on Reddit about every aspect of this film, which hits theaters February 13: from the casting of Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff (these critiques are valid) to the plot (please note the quotation marks around the film’s title!) to the similarly anachronistic costumes. This is not your mother’s—or even the BBC’s—Wuthering Heights. There’s a fan-fiction-like quality to it, right down to the sexy scenes that certainly don’t appear in the novel. But whatever your opinion, there’s no denying that it is an absolutely immersive visual feast—the closest thing possible to being able to touch, taste, or smell through a screen.
Fennell has said she “wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it” as a teenager, and according to Davies, that’s exactly what they did, pulling references from things a teenager in the late ’90s or early 2000s would’ve been familiar with, such as Gone With the Wind and Stanley Kubrick’s films. “Once we found our language, we sort of knew just to keep the dials turned up,” she says. So cue the Charli XCX soundtrack, and let’s break down what all of the design choices mean.
If ever there were two literary foils, it is Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and the film leans just as heavily on this dichotomy. The former sits high on a hill where the wind never seems to cease (hence its name), and it is dark, cold, and “bruised,” says Davies, with nature always encroaching. It is where Catherine and Heathcliff bond as children. A place the inhabitants want to escape, it was only fitting for Davies to add a large, dramatic archway for characters to pass through when entering and exiting the courtyard, symbolizing a crossing of the threshold between the sad world inside and the possibilities beyond.
When Catherine leaves Wuthering Heights and goes to Thrushcross Grange for the first time, “it’s technicolor,” says Davies. “It’s like she’s never seen this before.” (She hasn’t!) There she meets her neighbors, Edgar and Isabella Linton, and is enveloped in a rainbow of colors and a cornucopia of fabrics—including drapes made of cellophane—and textures. “It looked like a jewelry box,” says Dirickx.
Make your own inference about what this means in this hot and heavy version of Wuthering Heights, but everything in this movie is wet. During AD’s video tour of the Thrushcross Grange set, the camera offers a close-up look at the clear droplets adorning the walls in the dining room. “I think my favorite thing about the room is how it looks like there is really beautiful condensation—like the walls are sweating, but in a very beautiful way,” Margot Robbie says. When Catherine eventually falls ill in the film, the walls of her room (made to look like her skin—more on that coming up!) drip with her actual sweat as well.
Up at Wuthering Heights, the exterior of the home is covered in shiny tiles, something that definitely would not have appeared on an actual home built in Northern England in the 1500s, but Davies selected it for the material’s ability to “feel the sweat and rain that happens all the time there,” she says. “I knew I wanted something shiny and moist.”
Technically, Fennell forgoes exploring Catherine’s ghost to focus much more on concerns of the earthly body…. But these houses still feel haunted, especially with all of the body parts adorning Thrushcross Grange. Plaster hands made from molds of the hands of the film crew are everywhere, appearing as candleholders, a sculpture emerging from the fireplace, and on ceiling roses in every room. “They’re quite a gothic symbol,” says Davies. “It was about [the characters] having their hands on everything. And it’s just that subconscious feeling for the audience, the uneasiness of what those hands are up to. It’s just playing on that sensuality and sexuality of the characters’ love story.”
Other human traits in the design include a table with a hair curtain and the walls of Catherine’s Thrushcross Grange bedroom, which are made to look exactly like her skin. To accomplish this, Davies printed a picture of Margot Robbie’s arm directly onto pieces of fabric, which were then covered in stretched latex to create wall panels. “In that final top shot [of the film], you can see her veins on the carpet too,” reveals Dirickx. Does the sweat pouring from her walls make more sense now? Not only that, but in one scene, tiny prop leeches suck on the walls as well as on Robbie’s body.
Can you spoil a nearly 180-year-old tale? Well, anyway, after Catherine’s first taste of color and comfort at Thrushcross Grange, she marries Edgar Linton and moves in. You’d think that escaping the prison-like Wuthering Heights (where the ceiling in the kitchen purposefully encroaches upon Jacob Elordi’s six-foot-five frame) would bring her happiness, but her longing for Heathcliff takes hold and doesn’t let go. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” she famously says. She is a prisoner all over again in her new surroundings, and this is represented in the sets. In the library, a lamb sits encased in glass. At dinner, Catherine absentmindedly sticks her finger into an aspic mold with a fish in it.
In the garden, goldfish swim in clear glass vases. And, perhaps most poignantly, everything exists in miniature as Isabella Linton’s plaything, the dollhouse that sits in the dining room at Thrushcross Grange. It was written into the script by Fennell, and “is such an important part, I think, of her understanding of that book and how she imagined it,” Davies says. (Rachel Wallace)
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