While Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights proved itself a lightning rod for controversy from the jump, Margot Robbie has the stamp of approval from Emily Brontë herself – or, as close as one can get to it, anyway.
For the London premiere, Robbie wore a replica of a bracelet once made of the writer’s own hair. A piece of Victorian mourning jewellery, the original piece was owned by Brontë’s sister, Charlotte, and made from Emily and Anne Brontë’s hair. Haworth-based Wyedean Weaving fashioned a reproduction of the 175-year-old bracelet. (Hannah Jackson)
"Wuthering Heights has been around for so long that I think we all have a sense of what the story is that we’ve seen or heard about many times, but most of us really don’t know it, don’t know the text as well as we think. Hopefully, this film will reignite ideas that others already have about Wuthering Heights, as it did for me," he says. [...]
He shares his thoughts on getting into the project and choosing the script, "I knew that with Emerald Fennell, this wouldn’t be the traditional character that we know in our consciousness, but that it would be Heathcliff interpreted through her lens, with her unique point of view. She knows the character and this story so thoroughly, and I was really interested in that interpretation. I believe in her as an artist and especially as a director, and I want to be in her cinematic world, however I can."
This interpretation by Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve, Saltburn), who has scripted and directed the film, comes amid a lot of questions about turning it into an almost-erotica. However, the actor himself is quite well-versed with it, expecting so while stepping into the project. He is ready to provide full support to the filmmaker and adds, "What Emerald captured in her script and ultimately in the film is the spirit of Emily Brontë, the spirit of Wuthering Heights, what is happening in the subtext of the book. She’s interpreting it through her own lens, through a modern lens, and that was exciting to me." (Ayushi Agrawal)
Ever wondered how an actor from Brisbane, Australia, perfects a Northern accent?
The answer may surprise you.
"I just practise it in the bath, over and over and over and over," said Jacob Elordi, who is starring as Heathcliffe in the hotly anticipated new film Wuthering Heights, set on the tempestuous Yorkshire moors.
"I like the meks and the teks, instead of take. I like the M-E-K, T-E-K," he said, spelling the words out. (Noor Nanji)
"Everyone's talking about how steamy it is, but I think people might be surprised about how emotional it is," Robbie, who also produced the movie, said on the red carpet. "It's pretty heart-wrenching, but beautiful. It leaves you with that full feeling, if that makes sense."
Elordi described the experience of making the movie as "the greatest journey" and "a wonderful adventure", saying that his version of the famed literary character was grounded in Fennell's vision.
"I just wanted it to be as, I don't know, sort of, truthful as possible, I suppose. But really, I'm in service to Emerald, so I just wanted to do whatever she wanted with him," said Elordi, who previously starred in Fennell's 2023 film "Saltburn". (Hanna Rantala)
Emerald Fennell has revealed that Margot Robbie asked if she could play the lead role in the adaptation of Wuthering Heights before she had approached the actor to do so.
Robbie, whose production company LuckyChap Entertainment produced the film, asked if she could play Cathy after reading the script. “I sent it to them to produce, and Margot luckily asked if she might play Cathy,” said Fennell in conversation at the BFI Southbank in London.
“I was very nervous to ask her, because I think we have a different relationship, and I didn’t want to put her on the spot,” she said. “I was like: ‘Do I go for it?’ No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t, because she’s braver than me. She asked me.”
However the decision to cast Robbie in the role of Cathy has led to much scepticism and scrutiny ahead of the film’s release, specifically for its departure from the original 1847 novel by Emily Brontë.
Robbie, 35, will play Catherine Earnshaw who is written to be in her late teens in the original novel. The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has also been criticised. In the book, the character is described by Brontë to be of “Gypsy” and “Lascar” (South Asian) descent, which accounts for the prejudice against the him in the book.
However Fennell defended her decision. “I can’t adapt the book as it is but I can approximate the way it made me feel,” she said. [...]
The director also spoke about the background behind the set design in the film, revealing that the wallpaper in Cathy’s bedroom was inspired by images of Robbie’s skin.
“We asked her to send us all her veins and her freckles, and then we printed it on silk and stuffed it and put latex over it so that it could sweat,” she said. “At first glance, you don’t see any of it, it’s just a beautiful pink room.”
“It’s like a visual example of what it feels like to be made a wife, to be made an object of beauty, to be a collector’s item.”
Other unconventional behind the scenes activity involved shrines Fennell made of Elordi and Robbie as a way to mimic the infatuation their respective characters have with one another in the film. “I was like: ‘I’m going to go through the internet, I’m going to find their best photos and then I’m going to make shrines in their bedrooms for each other,’” she said.
“So when Jacob went into his room, he had an insane shrine to worship not just Cathy, but Margot Robbie and then she had the same thing. There’s nothing more humanising than somebody’s first press photo.”
Fennell also spoke about the process of getting Charli xcx onboard to create the soundtrack for the film: “I sent Charli the script. Even though she was in the middle of the brat tour, the most busy person in the entire world, she read it immediately.”
“She called me and said: ‘What do you want?’ I said: ‘Well, a song would be nice.’ And she said: ‘How about an album?’ And I was like: ‘Yeah, cool.’”
“It’s so dorky, but it is my favourite album I’ve ever, ever heard in my life. She just got it.” (Sinéad Campbell)
I first read Wuthering Heights when I was 10 years old, growing up in Paris. Or rather, it was read aloud to me in French by my babysitter, every Wednesday night, one chapter at a time, as I lay in bed. I remember the anticipation more than anything, counting the days until the next installment. But I also remember a persistent dread that felt inseparable from the thrill of the story. I could see it all so clearly in my mind: the wild windswept moors, the oppressive house, the dark Victorian clothes. Heathcliff especially felt terrifyingly, seductively alive. I was afraid of him and drawn to him in equal measure.
Nearly 30 years later, I picked up the novel again and read it in English for the first time. What surprised me most wasn’t just how different it felt but how difficult it was. The language is dense, complicated. I realized how much I had misremembered—or maybe how much I had romanticized. What I had held onto from childhood was the heat, the drama. But what I encountered as an adult was something dark and violent. Wuthering Heights offers very little comfort. It is a novel steeped in resentment and cruelty, in emotional and physical violence. There is very little tenderness or intimacy anywhere to be found.
And yet my attachment to the book never faded. In fact, it deepened. I loved Wuthering Heights so much that it became the starting point for my fall-winter 2025 collection. I was drawn to its severity, the way desire and repression exist side by side. I loved its darkness, its melancholy, and translating that emotional landscape into clothes felt instinctive. I even gifted the book to everyone who came to see the show, tucking small mementos and pictures within its pages to invite them into the same world that had shaped the collection.
When I reread Wuthering Heights for the third time recently, in anticipation of the upcoming film adaptation, I was also, like many people, absorbed (to use a euphemism!) in Heated Rivalry, a contemporary romance that shares, at least on the surface, striking similarities with Emily Brontë’s novel. Both stories are fueled by obsession, by that feeling that certain connections are inevitable, magnetic, impossible to resist. Both are about people who cannot stay away from one another, no matter the cost.
Yes, there are the obvious differences of time and place. And in Wuthering Heights, passion is not so much a choice as it is a sentence. Catherine and Heathcliff don’t just fall in love; they are overtaken and destroyed by it. Their love, which Catherine compares to “the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary” (ouch), leaves no space for tenderness, compromise, or peace. Heated Rivalry, by contrast, begins with obsession but doesn’t end there. Desire is acknowledged; feelings are named. Vulnerability is allowed to enter the story. Passion is not punished; it is tested, shared, and ultimately transformed. Love becomes something Shane and Ilya actively choose, not just something that happens to them. It is something that eventually heals them.
But both works—separated by two centuries—are not just stories of passionate love but of something more specific: exquisite, almost painful yearning. (You could add Bridgerton and The Summer I Turned Pretty to this genre.) Time and time again, we return to narratives built around ache and longing, stretched over long periods.
I wonder if this says something about what we are collectively missing. We live in a world of constant stimulation and access—to people, to images, to desire itself. Romance has become efficient, frictionless. Connection is everywhere, yet true intimacy often feels elusive or absent. We have, as a culture, become so good at swiping, ghosting, blocking, moving on, keeping things light that yearning almost feels subversive.
These stories don’t just promise romance; they promise intensity. They make desire feel consequential. In Heated Rivalry it shows up in the constant texting, the sense that Shane and Ilya are always thinking about each other, reaching for one another when they are apart. In Wuthering Heights, it takes a more feral form: an obsession that lingers long after separation and even death, an excitement bordering on mania when Catherine and Heathcliff are reunited. To want something—or someone—badly and over long periods of time feels almost radical in an age defined by immediacy and ease.
And both stories are about a fear of transgression that interferes with love. Brontë, of course, was writing in a world that allowed romantic love very few viable happy endings, especially for women and especially across class lines. Wuthering Heights was written at the dawn of the Victorian era, in a culture defined by rigid class hierarchy and strict gender roles. Marriage was economic.
Heated Rivalry is also shaped by constraint, just a modern version of it. Set within the hypermasculine world of professional hockey, where being openly gay can define—and destroy—a career, the risks are real. This is a love story between two men unfolding at a moment when “traditional” puritanical values are being reasserted, when gender roles are once again being tightly policed and social conformity is rewarded. And yet the story allows for the possibility of love blooming; it insists that intensity and tenderness can coexist.
Maybe this is why stories of yearning continue to grip us: They remind us that feeling deeply still matters, no matter what societal or other lines it crosses. That we all deserve passion, to yearn, to be yearned for. But where Wuthering Heights imagines love as destructive, contemporary stories like Heated Rivalry allow for revision. For choice, agency, care.
That evolution mirrors my own. I was once seduced by the idea of a love that overwhelmed, that burned. Today I am moved by passion that endures, that evolves, that makes room for tenderness, vulnerability, and intimacy without losing heat. If Wuthering Heights is a warning about what happens when love has no future, Heated Rivalry is a hopeful rewrite. Together they trace an arc from fatalism to agency, from tragedy to happy ending. And isn’t that an ending worth believing in?
Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, tells the story of Jane, a strong-willed protagonist who grows up an orphan and faces cruelty at her childhood home and her boarding school. She grows up and becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets her employer, Mr. Rochester. Jane and Rochester’s deepening connection is put to the test by hidden truths and societal pressures. The novel points to themes of independence, morality, love, and social class structure following Jane's journey to find personal and emotional fulfillment in a restrictive Victorian world.
Wuthering Heights
The Brontë sisters, or should we say, Bell Brothers, were on a roll in 1847. The same year her sister Charlotte published Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë (Acton Bell) published her only novel, Wuthering Heights. Set on the wild Yorkshire moors, this Gothic tale unites intense themes of passion, obsession, revenge, and conflict. The story unfolds through multiple narrators, the primary being housekeeper Nelly Dean, as the orphaned Heathcliff grows up with the Earnshaw family and forms a deep and unstable bond with Catherine Earnshaw. After Catherine marries another man, Heathcliff returns rich and ready for revenge, manipulating the Earnshaw and Linton families. With its brooding atmosphere and hints of the supernatural, Brontë’s novel overflows with passion and lingering resentment. (Logan DeLoye)
People who enjoy actual so-called spicy novels are going to be massively disappointed.
8 ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1847) – 'Wuthering Heights' (1939)
"Oh, God! It is unutterable." This one's back in the conversation thanks to the upcoming Emerald Fennell adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Emily Brontë’s only novel remains one of literature’s most tempestuous love stories. Set on the storm-battered Yorkshire moors, it follows Heathcliff, a foundling consumed by his obsession with Catherine Earnshaw, a passion so violent it transcends life and death. The book is gothic in its claustrophobia and psychological intensity, delving deep into revenge, class, and the self-destructive power of love.
William Wyler’s 1939 film adaptation, with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Catherine, powerfully captures the tale’s doomed romanticism and elemental fury. It's a faithful reproduction of the novel's tone, if not all its narrative beats. The Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography transforms the moors into a landscape of emotional chaos, while Olivier’s brooding performance brings the character vividly to life.
7 ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847) – 'Jane Eyre' (2011)
"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me." Emily's sister Charlotte revolutionized Gothic romance in her own way with this morally serious, psychologically complex tale. The novel follows orphaned Jane from a brutal childhood to her position as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls for the enigmatic Mr. Rochester, only to discover his terrible secret. Beneath these Gothic trappings is a moving story of integrity, independence, and female selfhood.
Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 adaptation, starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, restores the novel’s eerie sensuality and feminist fire. It’s one of the most emotionally authentic versions of the book, with less melodrama and more moral clarity. Fukunaga frames Brontë’s world not as fantasy, but as realism touched by ghosts of memory, trauma, and forbidden love. The film's muted palette and candlelit interiors evoke both repression and longing, while strong lead performances (from Wasikowska, especially) do the rest of the heavy lifting. (Luc Haasbroek)
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