Emerald Fennell’s <em>Wuthering Heights</em>: What We Know So Far

For her next film project, Academy Award winner Emerald Fennell is taking on a beloved classic novel: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. On June 12, 2024, the filmmaker behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn posted a tease on X, formerly known as Twitter, sharing an illustration with a quote from the Gothic romance. Alongside the drawing by the artist Katie Buckley was a quote, reading, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad.” Beneath it, Fennell wrote, “A film by Emerald Fennell.” Here’s what we know about the film so far. What is Wuthering Heights about? In Fennell’s hands, the material could take any number of directions. But the original story focuses on a conflict between two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their lives in the Yorkshire countryside. At the heart of the story is the passionate romance between an orphan adopted by Mr. Earnshaw named Heathcliff and Mr. Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine. Though forbidden, their love is undeniable. Fennell wrote in a January 2024 post for the Los Angeles Times that she has always had an interest in this type of material. “I’ve always been obsessed with the gothic,” Fennell wrote. “Whether it was Edward Gorey’s children who are variously choked by peaches, sucked dry by leeches or smothered by rugs; Du Maurier’s imperiled heroines or the disturbing erotic power of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, the gothic world has always had me in its grip. It’s a genre where comedy and horror, revulsion and desire, sex and death are forever entwined, where every exchange is heavy with the threat of violence, or sex or both.” Who is in the cast? Margot Robbie will star as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi will star as Heathcliff, Deadline reported in September 2024. Robbie, through her company LuckyChap, is also producing the film. In an interview with IndieWire in April 2025, Elordi shared how he was cast in the movie. “I was really lucky,” he explained. “I was going to take a break for a while, and then Emerald just very simply texted me, and you can’t run from that text.” Of working with Robbie, he said that she is “incredible in the film; she’s a livewire. I’m so, so excited for people to see it. She’s a beautiful actor and she gave so, so much.” Elordi, in a September 2025 interview with the Wall Street Journal , described the film. “I think what [Emerald Fennell] has done is really perfect and super beautiful,” he said. “It’s electric. And it’s also like nails on a chalkboard. It does something. It moves you in some kind of way, good or bad, but it will move you.” What has Emerald Fennell said about Wuthering Heights ? Fennell defended her casting choices of Robbie and Elordi after fans of the novel pointed out that Robbie, 35, is playing a character written as a teenager, and Elordi’s character is described as “dark-skinned.” Speaking about Robbie, Fennell told the BBC that she is “not like anyone...

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