Emerald Fennell to make a new version of Wuthering Heights with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi
by David Katz
- The Academy Award-winning British director is the latest to tackle Emily Brontë’s iconic gothic romance, reuniting with the producer and star of her last film, Saltburn
“Heathcliff, it’s me, Cathy, I’ve come home…” So goes perhaps the most treasured adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, the debut single from Kate Bush. But it hasn’t stopped generations of filmmakers through cinema’s history having a crack at it, and the latest is Emerald Fennell, of Saltburn [+see also:
film review
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film profile] fame, with her new version being announced to much online chatter on Monday. Margot Robbie, whose production company LuckyChap is behind Fennell’s previous features, will star as Catherine Earnshaw, whilst Jacob Elordi is the next in a long line of handsome thespian rakes to play Heathcliff, the adopted son of Catherine’s family, whose feral presence disrupts the harmony of life on the Yorkshire Moors, the text’s famous setting.
US studio MRC is funding the US-UK production together with LuckyChap, and Fennell, who won a screenwriting Academy Award for Promising Young Woman, will write, direct and produce. A shoot on location in the UK is planned for next year, although there’s no indication of how close Fennell will hew in plot terms to the text originally published in 1847, which was Brontë’s sole novel. The Australian backgrounds of Robbie and Elordi would require an effort to produce believable Yorkshire accents, and some critics have already expressed disbelief on platforms such as X on the casting’s appropriateness. UK critic Christina Newland probably put it best, saying, “I'm sorry (love them both) but these two clearly have faces that have seen an iphone [sic].”
Given Saltburn and Promising Young Woman’s plot-driven nature, we can predict some alteration of the narrative, particularly if it only adapts the novel’s first half, as previous versions have preferred to. And perhaps it could be brought into the present as well, with Saltburn offering a modern spin on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, being set amongst a new, more amoral generation of British “aristos”. There is no global distributor currently announced, whereas Saltburn was released by Amazon (where it found the majority of its audience on streaming), and Promising Young Woman was unluckily brought out during the pandemic by Universal.
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