‘He’s the new Daniel Day-Lewis’: Margot Robbie defends Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights | film

Margot Robbie has defended Emerald Fennell’s remake of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which she plays Cathy opposite Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff.

Although it is months away from its release, the film has drawn criticism for its casting as well as the alterations Fennell made to the characters. In an interview with Vogue, Robbie said: “I get it… there’s nothing else that can explode at this point until people watch the movie.”

Much controversy arose from the casting of Elordi as a character, whom Brontë described as “dark-skinned” and a “lascar” (a colonial term referring to a South Asian sailor or soldier). In Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of the novel, James Howson became the first black actor to play the role. Robbie said of Elordi: “I’ve seen him play Heathcliff, and he’s Heathcliff. I’d say, just wait. Trust me, you’ll be happy.”

She added: “It’s a character that belongs in a line of other great actors who have played him, from Laurence Olivier to Richard Burton and Ralph Fiennes to Tom Hardy. To be a part of that is special. It’s incredible and I believe in him so much. I honestly think he’s the Daniel Day-Lewis of our generation.”

There was also some concern about Robbie’s casting. In the novel, Cathy is described as having dark hair and in her late teens. Ruby is in her mid-30s and early trailer versions show her with blonde hair. “There was one comment on Instagram saying I should shoot the director. But just wait until you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not,” the film’s casting director, Jharmel Cochrane, said earlier this year. “But you don’t really need to be precise. It’s just a book. This is not based on real life. It’s all art.”

In the same Vogue interview, Robbie explained her interest in the character: “I understood her and I didn’t understand her, in a way that drew me to her. That’s the mystery you have to solve.”

Fennell also defended her decision to cast Robbie in the role, saying: “Kathy is a star. She’s willful, mean, entertainingly sadistic, and provocative. She engages in cruelty in a way that’s both disturbing and brilliant. It was about finding someone to forgive in spite of yourself, someone who literally everyone in the world will understand why you love her.”

She added, “It’s hard to find that much star power. Margot comes with great energy. That’s what Kathy needs.”

Fennell has built her directorial career on constructing outrageous, social media-friendly narratives with strong provocative elements. While making her mark as an actress, most notably as Camilla Shand in the television series The Crown, Fennell moved on to writing and starring in the television series Killing Eve before making her directorial debut with Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan, for which Fennell won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. She followed this with Saltburn, which gained notoriety for scenes in which Barry Keoghan’s character Oliver drinks semen-containing bathwater and dances naked in the stately home of the title.

Fennell appears to be using similar tactics to bait the audience in “Wuthering Heights,” with reports emerging from an early test screening in August that the film was “strongly provocative and deeply false,” and includes a scene of a public hanging in which the condemned man “ejaculates in the middle of the execution.”

Robbie, who recently starred in and produced the hit Barbie adaptation, also serves as a producer on Wuthering Heights, having served as a producer on both of Fennell’s previous feature films. Robbie’s LuckyChap Production Company, which includes her husband, Tom Ackerley, among its directors, has emerged as a force in the entertainment industry, with producing credits on the films I, Tonya, Birds of Prey and My Old Ass along with the Barbie and Fennell films.

At the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing last year, Fennell defended her take on Wuthering Heights, saying that Brontë’s novel, originally published in 1847, meant a great deal to her: “I was obsessed. This book drove me crazy. I know that if someone else wrote it, I would be furious. It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. And the way we treat the characters is very private.”

She added: “[It is] It is an act of extreme masochism to try to make a film about something that means a lot to you. There is an enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book. “There is a reason why people are so deeply shocked by this.”

Regarding the film’s provocative content, Robbie told Vogue: “Everyone is expecting this movie to be very raunchy. I think people will be surprised. It’s not that there are no sexual elements and it’s not provocative – it’s definitely provocative – but it’s more romantic than provocative. This is a big, epic love story.”

She and Fennell discussed this on set: “What strikes us as hot or sexy or provocative? And it’s not just a sexual position or someone taking their shirt off.” The scene in which Elordi’s Heathcliff shelters Cathy from the rain “almost made me weak at the knees,” Robbie said, adding: “As two women in our 30s, we loved the little things, and this movie is primarily for people in our demographic. These epic romances and historical movies aren’t often made by women.”

Robbie said that Fennell’s ambition was to make “this generation’s Titanic”, and Fennell told her: “I went to the cinema to see Romeo and Juliet eight times and I was on the floor crying when I wasn’t allowed back in for the ninth time. I want it to be like that.”