P. Claire Dodspn: What did Emerald Fennell tell you about how each of your characters is supposed to be when they're a young teenager?Charlotte Mellington: Cathy's so sassy. She bosses everyone around, she owns the place. Because her dad iOwen Cooper: I think Emerald just mostly said, "Look vulnerable." And there was a scene where I meet Cathy's dad for the first time, and it's got the two maids there, and then Cathy (Charlotte) grabs my hand, and we'd run. **~~into the thing.**I always remember Emerald saying, "These people could be doing anything to you. They could be planning to kill you. You don't know." Because [my character doesn't] really know how to speak, read, write anything then, I was just new to it all. I thought it was a bit weird to act at first, and then Emerald—being an amazing director—she just helped me through it.CM: Also in that scene, to you, I'm this psychotic child. I'm like, "Ugh, can I dress him up?" He's like, "What the hell? Who is this kid?" I'm quite frightening, honestly, in that. I would be frightened anyway, because it seemed really weird. (...)P. Claire Dodspn: : The ending scene: We come back to Heathcliff and Cathy as kids again. What did that feel like to have it end right where we began?CM: I think it tries to keep the innocence of their love. They do love each other. All these things have happened, and they're trying to get revenge, and it's all quite messy. But when you strip it down, they do love each other. I think that reminds you of the innocence and how they were.
The Wuthering Heights box office performance kicked off with a bang during Thursday night previews. Warner Bros reported that the film pulled in an impressive $3 million from 3,000 theaters nationwide – and that was just the appetizer.But here’s where it gets really interesting. The studio is sitting on $14 million in advance ticket sales for the full weekend, which has industry analysts predicting something special. “We’re looking at potential opening weekend numbers between $40-50 million,” says entertainment analyst Mark Rodriguez. “That’s the kind of start that can make or break a film’s entire theatrical run.” (Bella Parker)
- Okay, what I thought were sex sounds are actually the sounds of someone being hanged.
- Can’t say I care for these puppets.
- Not the hanging dickprint! Emerald, you’re so crazy for this one.
- As someone who dressed pretty sluttily to see this movie, I identify with this woman showing off her corset rack.
- OMG, the titular moors.
- The film’s name spelled out in hair is so creepy and cool and really doing it for me.
- “You look like a plate of corned beef” is an amazing way to greet your child.
- Oh, so this is baby Cathy.
- Pretty good likeness to Margot Robbie.
- Hats off to casting!
- Why did it just sound like someone yelled “SKINNER,” Superintendent Chalmers-style, from offscreen?
- She just named this random-ass kid Heathcliff?
- After her dead brother?
- I probably should have reread the book before seeing this movie, but here we find ourselves.
- Get this total bitch’s ass, Miss Nelly.
- It’s almost as though giving your child a human being and saying, “He shall be your pet” might lead to a weird dynamic between the two kids!
- If your initials aren’t woefully carved on a rock, is it even a proper period English romance?
- Aw, poor Nelly.
- There’s a solo adult man in my theater loudly shushing two giggling teenagers, which... I mean, they’re annoying me too, but get a life, bro.
- This dad is a dick, but smashing plates at your forgotten-about birthday dinner does look like fun.
- :(
- This sad, romantic little English lad is so “Wells for Boys”-core.
- Oop, Heathcliff and Cathy are adults now!
- With neighbors!
- Who made their fortune in textiles!
- Jacob Elordi’s wig is strongly giving Jesus, but it’s not not working for me.
- BRB, Googling “how to get cathy wuthering heights cheek blush.”
- HONG CHAU!
- Fellas, is it gay to make your fortune in velvet?
- Mist AND high-spirited horseplay? Things are getting horny!
- Who ever could have put eggs in Heathcliff’s bed?
- This Heathcliff-touching-the-eggs shot is soooooo vintage EmFen.
- Ahhhhh, Heathcliff keeping the rain out of Cathy’s eyes is proper hot.
- No offense to our boy Elordi, but I saw someone on Instagram say they can’t forgive Fennell for not casting Dev Patel as Heathcliff, and now I cannot stop thinking about it.
- Ladies, a man who will smash a chair for you is generally a red flag, but in this case, since he’s creating firewood, I approve.
- We have our first shirtless Heathcliff shot, ladies and gents.
- And neither I nor Cathy mind the sight, apparently.
- God, I’m so straight for this movie!
- I feel like everyone else on this property has a real “You two fuck yet?” attitude about Cathy and Heathcliff.
- This girlypop passionately discussing Romeo & Juliet is really serving me Shoshanna Shapiro.
- I hate the Lintons already.
- Cathy’s makeover is giving LoveShackFancy.
- I feel like Isabella may, in fact, not be the sweetest person alive.
- A ribbon room sounds lit, though.
- Mean Heathcliff is so hot.
- I fear I’m part of the problem.
- Why do all girls secretly want to be treated like a nuisance?!?
- JK, we actually want reproductive rights, but this dynamic is still mysteriously sexy to me.
- Is this the sexually violent turn that Tina Fey spoke of?
- But it’s not even Act 3!
- HOT!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Sorry, is me yelling “HOT” going to become tiresome over the course of this recap?
- Blame Emerald!
- And the definition in Elordi’s biceps! (Emma Specter)
What is the effect of giving Nelly such a power-player role? Certainly, it gives Hong Chau a little more to do than she might otherwise have: she plays Nelly with a steely internality that is a stark contrast from the other performances in the film. But it also gives Cathy and Heathcliff something of a moral get-out – that they are the pawns in someone else’s sublimated psychodrama, rather than slaves to their own malignant natures. It might not be as subtly proposed as it is in the book, but Brontë’s Nelly would certainly, perhaps secretly, be gratified by her promotion to centre stage. (Miranda Collinge)
In the newly-released "Wuthering Heights" (purposefully stylized with quotation marks to distance the adaptation from its source material), on the other hand, filmmaker Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn) paints Isabella (played by a scene-stealing Alison Oliver) as the shy, skittish, and sexually repressed young ward of Shazad Latif's measured and mature Edgar—her guardian rather than, as in the book, her brother. Titillated by the introduction of Margot Robbie's Catherine into their lives, and even more so by the subsequent arrival of a newly rich and polished Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the delightfully unhinged Isabella transforms before our eyes."There are a lot of descriptions in the book about how she is infantile and ill-mannered, and can be quite like a petulant child, and obviously very romantic and spoiled," Oliver told ELLE Canada of her character's spin. "[This] Isabella is this sort of baby-woman, and she’s been kept a child by Edgar. The experience of having Cathy and Heathcliff come into her home is her stepping into a new phase of her life."Despite some mean-spirited warnings from Cathy that Heathcliff will destroy her, Isabella ultimately gives in to Heathcliff's advances and consents to a loveless marriage in which she will serve as his tormented plaything. The novel's Isabella is coerced and tricked into this arrangement, and finds herself miserable, alone, and at the mercy of a sadistic abuser once the wedding deed is done. The Isabella of "Wuthering Heights," however, not so much.When Catherine's handmaid Nelly (Hong Chau) shows up at Wuthering Heights in an attempt to retrieve Isabella from Heathcliff's clutches, she finds her chained up like a dog—an apparent dark wink to the reveal in the book that Heathcliff has hanged Isabella's beloved springer spaniel. But in a raunchy and unexpected twist on Brontë's tortured naif, when Isabella crawls across the floor and peers smirkingly up at Nelly with a mad glint in her eye, it becomes decidedly (if somewhat uncomfortably) clear that she's not only a willing participant in Heathcliff's cruel game, but also seemingly enjoying her role as submissive pet."'Emerald’s interpretation of Isabella’s story is the reverse of Cathy's; there's an uncorseting of her," Oliver told ELLE UK. "Like she becomes undone. There’s something so powerful about being underestimated." (Megan McCluskey)
Brontë’s romantic gothic novel is now considered to be one of the Best Books Ever Written. Her doomed romance between Catherine Earnshaw and her childhood friend (and possibly half-sibling) Heathcliff has since become a set text for adolescents, the subject of myriad adaptations, the spur behind a thriving tourist market in Yorkshire and a bastion of pop culture thanks to Kate Bush, whose own contribution to the discourse, the 1978 single “Wuthering Heights”, is celebrated globally by thousands of people re-enacting her iconic dance.Suffice to say, the book is robust enough to withstand wild interpretation. But, like a good student, I felt obliged to reacquaint myself with Brontë’s OG version before heading to the multiplex. I dusted off a copy (a GCSE paperback, RRP £2.25) found tucked into the bookshelf and now gently yellowed over time. I could feel the call of my younger spirit stirring as I opened its pages, the words “vivid as spectres” swarmed alive. The cold clutch of my own sad adolescence tapped me etc . . . etc . . . OK, you get the point.Mainly I reread Wuthering Heights so that I could gorge on the spectacle of Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie getting mucky while keeping my integrity intact. I wanted to wallow in lusty admiration for Elordi’s epic hugeness (hey, it’s February) while wearing an intellectual sneer. Fennell, a filmmaker who has evolved a successful franchise of soft-core erotic thrillers (see Saltburn), well understood the job. Her slimy, albumen-obsessed adaptation is ripe with innuendo, violence, pseudo-masochistic teasing. There’s also lots of sex.The plot, meanwhile, only glances at the shallowest features of the novel, derived mainly from the short romantic denouement of the couple’s love. Elordi’s Heathcliff is hot and broody, but neutered of any menace. And Margot Robbie’s “Cath” has been transformed from the dark, tormented victim of “perverted passion” (as Charlotte wrote in the preface), and reincarnated as a simpering blonde whose feral instincts now recall a Fulham Sloane post “sups” at Annabel’s.Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a maddeningly slight, pink turd of an adaptation. Nevertheless I am eternally grateful to her for reacquainting me with Brontë’s book. The wonderful side-note in all the hype building to this “god-tier new classic” (as one breathless X post called the adaptation) is that the 178-year-old novel is trending once again. UK sales of Wuthering Heights have more than doubled since the trailer was released last autumn, says Penguin Classics, with sales having risen by 469 per cent since last year. Likewise, in the US, sales have doubled to 180,000 print copies compared with the previous year.Moreover, the adaption has spurred new conversation. We’re all eng-lit scholars now. Vogue launched its new book club with a study of the novel, and thousands of others are, like me, combing through a book not touched since high school in order to get up to speed. In desecrating one of the world’s favourite stories, Fennell has arguably reasserted its genius on a wider stage. Arriving hot into my WhatsApp chat group: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia’s book of essays from 1990. I spent the weekend considering her theory in “Romantic Shadows” that “Emily Brontë’s sexual metathesis into Heathcliff is inseparable from the incestuous-twin theme.” Gor blimey. And of Brontë’s casual disregard for Christian taboos. I was especially taken also with Paglia’s appreciation for the “delicate lesbian eroticism” in which the book abounds.Many have tutted about the lusty licentiousness with which Fennell has approached the text. She has called it an extreme story for extreme times. If only her interpretation was as demented as Brontë intended: this version is limp and curiously boring, a series of jump fucks designed for TikTok memes. The casting decisions have been tested — Heathcliff is supposed to be “a dark-skinned gypsy”. Cathy’s ghost has been exorcised. No! But the great sadness of this adaptation is in its refusal to embrace the madness at its centre. Wuthering Heights is a dark, deranged story about incest, appalling violence, sexual abuse and torture. It should be utterly unhinged. (Jo Ellison)
Having the main characters—played by Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie—be sexually intimate isn’t the only way Fennell strayed from the original text. How do you feel about the liberties she took?Some of her liberties are nothing new. Like many “Wuthering Heights” adaptations, this one ignores the novel’s second half. The elaborate framing devices are gone, too; Emily Brontë’s book is, among other things, a story about storytelling, and Fennell’s film is not. My issue isn’t with the liberties themselves—every good adaptation takes its share of them. It’s more that Fennell pares away so much of Brontë’s great narrative material and, the glossy maximalism of her approach aside, I don’t think she gives us much in return. (Hannah Jocelyn)
He arrives as a foundling, a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child” found in the streets of Liverpool and deposited on the Yorkshire moors. He speaks “some gibberish that nobody could understand.” He is given a dead son’s name and raised among strangers who never let him forget he does not belong.For nearly 180 years, readers of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights have debated the origins of its most enigmatic character. Is he a gypsy, as the novel repeatedly suggests? A “Lascar” – the period term for an Indian or Southeast Asian sailor? The son of African slaves? An Irish famine orphan?A growing body of evidence, drawn from the Brontës’ own reading material and juvenile writings, points to the possibility that Heathcliff may have been imagined as an orphaned Indian prince.“There are lots of possible identities to him,” says Corinne Fowler, professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester and co-curator of the exhibition “The Colonial Brontës” at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. “So one of them is, is he a gypsy? Some of the characters in the novel think he’s a gypsy, some of them think he’s a Lascar. So it could have been an Indian sailor. Some people think that he was descended from African people.”The textual evidence is, by design, inconclusive. When Mr Earnshaw returns from Liverpool with the starving child, his wife threatens to throw “the gypsy brat” out. Later, the Lintons speculate that he might be “a little Lascar” – a term derived from the Urdu lashkar, meaning soldier or camp follower, and commonly used in the 18th century for Indian sailors employed by the East India Company.But it is the servant Nelly Dean who opens the most intriguing possibility. Attempting to comfort the boy, she indulges in fantasy: “Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?”As Fowler says, “Nelly even says, ‘if you were a regular black,’ and she also suggests at one point he might be an Indian prince.” That distinction matters. Heathcliff is dark, but not “regular black” – a qualification that opens space for imagining a non-European origin that is not African. An Indian prince. A Lascar sailor. The orphaned child of some distant colonial encounter. (Aishwarya Khosla)
While those in the literary world remain divided in opinion, there is one indisputable fact: Fennell’s adaptation is causing interest in the novel to skyrocket. Sales of Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” in the United States more than doubled in 2025 compared with the previous year, reaching 180,000 print copies, while the United Kingdom saw a whopping 469% increase with over 10,600 copies sold in January 2026 compared to 1,875 in January 2025.“I’m loving that people are reading and rediscovering this book. [But] I’m seeing people watching the trailer and looking at some of that content, and then being quite shocked because [the book] isn’t what they were expecting,” says O’Callaghan. “No adaptation can ever really capture a novel, let alone a long, complex book like ‘Wuthering Heights.’ As long as people accept that and they do go and read the book, I think that’s really great.” (Arushi Jacob)
I think it’s beautiful that people are creating TikTok guides on how to tackle each section of the novel for those who don’t understand it immediately. As a friend told me recently, “Reading something requires you to sit with a certain degree of friction. Focusing, slowly getting into the flow of the text and either stopping to look up the period, location, specific language or glossing over it – it’s all a part of reading.” Instead of sneering at people for admitting that they find something difficult, we should recognise that we’re all just trying to use our brains, even as capitalism is trying its best to turn them to mush. (Halima Jibril)
To gain an understanding of the Brontë sisters, this setting and their lives, I started my trip where their Yorkshire story began, in the village of Thornton, around five miles from Bradford and six from Haworth. Emily Brontë and her siblings Charlotte, Anne and Branwell were born here and lived in a house in the village until 1820. The house is now a community-owned museum, education centre and cafe called Brontë Birthplace, opened in May 2025 by Queen Camilla.On a tour of the Yorkshire sandstone building with education officer Charlotte Jones, I saw the fireplace in the family parlour that local legend says the sisters were born in front of, walked on the original scullery flagstones that Charlotte told me “little Brontë feet would have run across” and climbed the original wooden staircase that the family used every day. [...]Anna Gibson, general manager of the Brontë Birthplace, told me that the last month has been the accommodation’s busiest since opening in August 2025 and that both Charlotte and Emily’s rooms are extremely popular in February.I stayed in Charlotte’s room, where there’s a pink and gold flock bedspread on said four-poster bed, a dusky pink chaise longue, an original fireplace and a small en-suite bathroom. The family’s original furniture is in the Brontë Parsonage, so antiques, books and furnishings here have been chosen to match the period and standard of the family. [...]Anna Gibson, general manager of the Brontë Birthplace, told me that the last month has been the accommodation’s busiest since opening in August 2025 and that both Charlotte and Emily’s rooms are extremely popular in February.I stayed in Charlotte’s room, where there’s a pink and gold flock bedspread on said four-poster bed, a dusky pink chaise longue, an original fireplace and a small en-suite bathroom. The family’s original furniture is in the Brontë Parsonage, so antiques, books and furnishings here have been chosen to match the period and standard of the family.The museum is also home to the largest collection of Brontë items in the world, including Charlotte Brontë’s mourning bracelet, which is believed to be made from the hair of her sisters Emily and Anne. Margot Robbie wore a replica of this to the Wuthering Heights premiere in London. [...]Whether you’re a fan of the new film or love the book, the Brontës’ “special place” deserves to be experienced. Just come prepared for the wild, “wuthering” weather I drove through; it’s all part of the romance. (Cathy Toogood)
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