"It’s very illicit" : Wuthering Heights’ Director Emerald Fennell defends her adaptation and Jacob Elordie's casting

Just a teaser drop of Wuthering Heights was enough to stir a controversy months before its release. Directed by Emerald Fennell, the film is based on Emily Brontë’s 1874 novel of the same name. Critics and avid readers have labeled the film ‘’whitewashed’’ for turning it into a romance film between white characters and ignoring the original themes of class and racial difference.

For Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation, she was seen defending her choice of casting Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Barbie star, Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw.

She said in a panel at Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in England that she wished to show ‘’the same feelings she had when she first read the book as a teenager.’’

Finnell was targeted for not sticking to Bronte’s original portrayal of the characters. The scholars found Elordi to be a wrong fit for the character as he is described by Bronte in her book as “dark-skinned gypsy” with “black eyes.”

Not only Elordi, according to them, actress Margot Robbie was an unsuitable choice too. 

Questions were raised about casting Robbie as Catherine, as in the book, she is almost a teenager, but in reality, Robbie is 35, making her almost 7 years older than Elordi (28). 

Amidst the liberty Fennell took for the characters, she said she has preserved Brontë’s original dialogue in Wuthering Heights 

To brush off the controversy surrounding Wuthering Heights. She said, 

“I was really determined to preserve as much of her dialogue [as possible] because her dialogue is the best dialogue ever. I couldn’t better it, and who could?”

Fennell said that she got her Heathcliff while she was filming ‘’Saltburn.’’ When she first met Jacob Elordi on the sets, she was sure of casting him because he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff in the first book that I read.’’ She added:

“And it was so awful because I so wanted to scream. Not the professional thing to do, obviously. I had been thinking about making [‘Wuthering Heights’], and it seemed to me he had the thing… he’s a very surprising actor.”

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not the first time that the book has been adapted.

Many films have already been made based on the novel, with the 1992 version starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes being iconic. 

She said, 

“I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious. It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think.”

Supporting her, another casting choice of Robbie, Fennell, 39, said,

“Barbie star is so beautiful and interesting and surprising, and ’she is the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything and she is not like anyone I’ve ever met — ever — and I think that’s what I felt like with Cathy,”

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.”

Wuthering Heights' director felt a lot of sadomasochism in the book 

Disagreeing with the criticism of adding a lot of ‘’eroticism’’ in the movie, Fennell said that after reading the book, she felt that ‘’it’s like, primal, sexual.” 

She added, 

''There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published]. 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. So it’s been troubling, but I think in a really useful way.” 

The film is set to be released this Valentine's season on February 14, 2026.