Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”: Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi Reclaim Emily Brontë’s Wild Romance

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights reimagines Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel (published under her pen name Ellis Bell)  as a modern cinematic experience that honors the story’s intention from the published novel’s raw, charged energy. Fennell distills the subversive, erotic, and unnerving essence of the novel while boldly adding her personal flair into her film.

Wuthering Heights explores two extensive upland estates and their landowning families on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons; and their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws’ ostensibly non-white foster son, Heathcliff.

Fennell’s screenplay and direction absorbs the audience, preserving the book’s refusal to moralize, justify, or judge its characters. “This is not a didactic film; it takes no moral position,” she remarks. It reshapes character, tone, and scale for the screen, and asks viewers to experience Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff’s (Jacob Elordi) cruelty, charisma, and longing as both an intimate character portrayals and vivid spectacle.

It mines forbidden passion for one another turns from romantic to mesmerizing, in an epic tale of lust, love and madness.

Adapting Brontë from the Inside Out

Fennell’s approach to adaptation is, not as a literal translation of the events in the book, but as an attempt to recreate the visceral effect the novel had on her when she first read it in her teens. “I wanted to acknowledge my connection to it, to the way that it made me feel, and know that it wouldn’t necessarily be the way that it made every reader feel. I wanted to make something that was an approximation of the feeling it had given me the very first time I read it.”

Brontë’s stark approach to her romance was considered radical in its time. Wuthering Heights continues to shock audiences centuries later.

The adaptation process commenced with “boiling down the things about the book that I found exciting and subversive, the things that are still making people feel something two centuries later,” Fennell states.

Fennell first isolated the novel’s elements she labels “exciting and subversive,” the qualities that have kept Brontë’s novel alive, and reorganizes them into a cinematic language. “The book is extraordinary because it absorbs you into it, it swallows you up, so that is the feeling we endeavored to recreate for a movie audience,” she continues.

Adaptation was a matter of finding the sensory and psychological throughlines that justify departures from literal plot in service of a new filmic interpretation. Cathy and Healthcliff are much older in the film and at different life stages.

Emerald Fennell. Photo by Jaap Buitendijk/ Warner Bros. Pictures

Casting as Character Strategy

Fennell’s casting choices are strategic. On Margot Robbie as Cathy, she is precise and unromantic in equal parts: Cathy is a point of contradiction — “spoiled, capricious, fierce, a ‘belle dame sans merci,’ a movie star stuck in the middle of nowhere with no audience.” Fennell insists on Cathy’s cruelty as a structural bedrock of the character: “Brontë is very specific and says again and again in the book that Cathy likes to hurt people, she enjoys pushing to see how far she can get away with something and still be forgiven: she’s something of a sadist.”

Robbie, Fennell argues, blends the dangerous charisma and vanity that make Cathy both repellant and forgivable. “Margot is able to encapsulate all of this. Cathy needed to be played by someone with their own dangerous, life-ruining beauty and charisma.” The director recalls —“the moment Margot first read Cathy’s words she immediately understood who this person was. The only thing that makes Cathy forgivable, is her love for Heathcliff,” she explains.

“Cathy is deeply feeling, she’s naughty, she’s clever, she’s powerful, if she wanted to, she could be scary. That’s a woman you want to spend time with on screen,” Fennell adds.

On Jacob Elordi (fresh from his Frankenstein monster) as Heathcliff, Fennell leans into the paradox of the Byronic hero: “Heathcliff is the archetypical, Byronic hero, a despicable love interest. He’s defensive, angry, cruel, dangerous, but he’s also one of the most devastatingly moving characters in literature.” The challenge, she says, is to “make us love the unlovable.” In order to convince audiences, Heathcliff is also tender, lonely, and harbors a cave of unprocessed emotions. He’s both hero and villain.

These character contradictions ensure that Wuthering Heights emerges beyond a story of forbidden love and blossoms into a engaging character study of two unsvory and conflicted people.

Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Tone, Power, and Moral Ambiguity

Fennell is unapologetic about the film’s refusal to moralize, aligning her adaptation with Brontë’s original intention: a narrative that resists tidy judgments. She is drawn to the private dynamics that reveal aspects of each character: “What are the things that we do when nobody else is watching? What’s the dynamic that’s the most surprising or troubling? Where is the power in the room, who’s got it, and what happens if we invert that power?” she reflects.

Those ethereal questions shape the film’s dramatic engine. Fennell wants to stage power as a shifting, destabilizing force — an antogonistic romantic engine of push-pull attraction and repulsion that keeps the audience off-balance. The screenplay’s job, is to construct scenes that reveal power through behavior: the small cruelties, the tests of forgiveness, the moments when a character’s vanity or sadism becomes a plot point.

Reclaiming Romance for the Multiplex

Fennell describes her film as both intimate and expansive. “Nobody should be sitting in silence watching this movie. Our Wuthering Heights is a period romance, but it’s not niche. It’s a grand, epic, multiplex movie based on what I believe is the greatest love story ever written.” The film aims to be communal, to provoke audible reaction and to “connect and unleash any emotions” audiences may have been holding back.

She frames her adaptation as a reclamation of romance — “To reclaim romance via a devastatingly sexy film from a sexy book,” and as an attempt to make Brontë’s erotic spark from the era resonance in contemporary viewers. The promise is not comfort, but the exact opposite: “I hope when people see the film — whether they know the book or not — they feel destabilized, disoriented. I hope it gets under their skin in the very best way and that they leave the cinema feeling electrified.”

A Fan’s Version Of Wuthering Heights

Fennell acknowledges the risk associated with the project. “Because I love the book so much, it felt exciting to see if I could make a version that I would accept as a fan. And then obviously it was a shameless excuse to work with everyone I love.”

For writers and directors considering adaptations, Fennell’s process is a model: start with the core feelings the source evokes, identify the elements that still resonate, and write a screenplay that privileges emotional truth over tidy moralizing and neat conclusions. The result, she hopes, is a film that does what the best adaptations do: it makes the original feel newly alive.

[More: Emerald Fennell on ‘Saltburn’ & ‘Promising Young Woman’’]

by Staff Writer

From our in-house editorial team.