If Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights is not on your radar yet, allow us to explain what’s going on. Fennell, the director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, is adapting Emily Bronte’s classic for the big screen and has cast the buzzy Australian actors, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, both of whom she has worked with before, as the leads. It is expected in cinemas on 13 February 2026.
Here's the issue: Catherine Earnshaw (Robbie) is 14 years old when Heathcliff (Elordi) first arrives at Wuthering Heights. She is 22 when she gets married later in the novel and (spoiler) 26 when she dies. Robbie is soon to celebrate her 35th birthday. In March, the X account Film Crave shared first look images of Robbie on set and the response was less than approving. ‘This is not giving Wuthering Heights vibes,’ wrote one user. ‘Everything about this is wrong,’ commented another. ‘This is very odd casting. It seems two big names were just thrown at the project,’ posited a third.
Now this is no shade to Robbie specifically – she is one of the most celebrated and adored actresses of her generation and is often lauded as one of the most beautiful women in the world. It’s the fact people have been closely studying this text for almost 280 years and she has been cast in a role that she is, at least on paper, wrong for.
Then there’s Heathcliff, described by Bronte as a ‘dark-skinned gypsy’ with ‘black eyes’ and later as a ‘a little Lascar’, a 19th century term for an Indian sailor. Elordi hails from Brisbane and has distant Spanish ancestry. Fennell has been accused of ‘whitewashing’ the original text, with many fans taking issue with the fact Heathcliff was not offered to an actor of colour. This was made worse by the fact Elordi did not even audition; he revealed to IndieWire that he was planning to take a career break when ‘Emerald just very simply texted me, and you can’t run from that text’.
This casting decision prompted similar backlash online with X users writing, ‘He should’ve taken that break’ and ‘you can run from that text though, you should’ve run’. Again, none of this is about Elordi’s acting chops, he proved he can do a passable English accent in Saltburn, and we all know what he’s capable of, but the role could have been opened up to so many other actors who better fit the part. A Reddit thread discussing who fans would have liked to see as Heathcliff put forward Assan Zaman (Hotel Portofino), Dev Patel (Lion, Slumdog Millionaire) and Cosmo Jarvis (Shogun) as popular suggestions.
Now that filming has wrapped, the casting director Kharmel Cochrane has spoken out in defence of her choices. ‘If something is clearly written as white, for example, a script reads “she tied her blonde hair back,” but there’s no specific reason for it, I will just put people on tape,’ she said during a Q&A session at the Sands Film Festival in Scotland. ‘And then it’s almost like I dare to question why I’ve done it, and they don’t. So then it just becomes normal. Years ago, I would get people saying, “Did you read the brief?” And I’d say yeah, and this is my interpretation of it, just like when you can read a book.’
In reference to the backlash specifically, she added, ‘There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot. But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. This is not based on real life. It’s all art.’ To put it bluntly, she said ‘there’s definitely going to be some English lit fans that are not going to be happy’.
It's worth mentioning at this point that this is not the first adaptation of Wuthering Heights to exist – and hopefully it won’t be the last. The 1939 film version starred Laurence Olivier (a white actor) and Merle Oberon, the 1970 film starred Timothy Dalton (a white actor), the 1992 iteration saw Ralph Fiennes (a white actor) and Juliette Binoche as the leads and the two-part ITV series from 2009 cast Tom Hardy (a white actor) opposite Charlotte Riley.
Still, though, it’s not unreasonable for fans to ask more from a modern interpretation. It’s clear from the behind-the-scenes images, and the casting, that Fennell is straying from the source material. She has a reputation for being an experimental, if not controversial, director, but sadly she does not ever seem to extend that boldness to her casting choices. In fact, the backlash is probably a helpful marketing strategy. Come next February, Bronte doyens, naysayers and those who have no intention of ever reading the book will all flock to the cinema to form an opinion and the internet will be flooded with ‘discourse’ either way.
Cochrane’s comments prove that the influx of casting contentions fall on deaf ears – for her and Fennell ‘it’s just a book’ after all.
Nikki Peach is a writer at Grazia UK, working across pop culture, TV and news. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things TV for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow shows with equal respect).