It’s murder on the dark moors: The principal casting for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights was announced this week, and the internet fell off its collective Bottega Veneta stuffed-animal beanbag. Euphoria’s resident narcissist psychopath Jacob Elordi will play Heathcliff opposite Barbie girl Margot Robbie’s it’s-me-I’m-Cathy in the latest adaptation of Emily Brontë’s romantic tale (or brutally vengeful, horrifying, supernatural Gothic masterpiece, depending on your standpoint).
Hot on the heels of her Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman and Internet-decimating Saltburn, Fennell has inspired a new round of discourse. Rose Dommu is going to “walk into traffic,” while another tweeter “will put rocks in her pockets and walk into the sea.” People are up in arms, I think, because Elordi and Robbie don’t tally with their idea of psychologically tortured lovers in late 18th-century England. With Fennell at the helm, will Barbie be slurping Elvis’s bathwater as Kate Bush plays softly in the background? We’ll be spared an excruciating extubation moment, as those weren’t invented yet, but will Heathcliff hump Cathy’s grave? He does make a somewhat macabre request to a gravedigger in regard to her buried coffin, which is firmly Fennell territory— alongside the revenge, jealousy, hysteria, and dark infatuations that have made Wuthering Heights such a provocative and enduring horror classic. And we already know she loves a big ol’ house.
Personally, I don’t think either actor will have trouble depicting landed gentry: Robbie seems ergonomically designed to be corseted on a hilltop, and the female-rage vein of the novel could be exciting for her to play. On the other hand, while Brisbane-born Elordi would not be the first white actor to play the ethnically ambiguous, “dark-skinned gypsy” Heathcliff, it feels like a misstep on Fennell’s part to skip over the brutal racism at the heart of this canonically non-white character, who famously cries as a young boy: “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed, and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!” We’re now so aware of how deeply race seeps into our worldview, of how insidious its roots are, that we know well it isn’t something that can—or should—just be swept under the carpet. So, I’m keen to see how Fennell’s capable hands grapple with a prominent race storyline, fronted by white guy.
The film isn’t hitting screens until 2026, so we’ll be speculating on the outcome (image it’s set in Australia!? Will they do Yorkshire accents!?) and gobbling up pap shots from the set for months to come. In the meantime, all I can say is Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Barbie I’ve come home.
