Meet the unlikely star of the stunning Wuthering Heights: Martin Clunes | Wuthering Heights

IIt has been described as the sexiest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, with bodies being ripped to shreds and BDSM flirting. However, the breakout star of Emerald Fennell’s new film is not one of the film’s flaming young lovers, played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, but rather the most affable person on British television – Martin Clunes.

Clunes plays Mr. Earnshaw, the head of the Earnshaw family whose decision to bring the destitute young Heathcliff from Liverpool to the Yorkshire Moors sets in motion a devastating love story at the center of Wuthering Heights. In Fennell’s reworking, Cathy’s older brother, Hindley, is eliminated entirely, with his cruelty, drinking, and gambling incorporated into the father’s instead.

“He’s corrupt to the core,” Clunes told ITV this morning. “He’s been drinking since the beginning. He’s a misogynist. He’s a gambling addict and he’s covered in vomit.”

It’s a far cry from the roles that have defined Clunes’ career, which he describes as “exciting” and “scary” – especially at the prospect of being transported to the set of a blockbuster film. However, critics point out that the risk has paid off. “As a child, little Cathy Earnshaw is a perfect beauty queen, immersed in her father’s loud, twinkle-eyed old angel, whose role as Martin Clunes influences pretty much the entire film,” wrote Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw.

Clunes was born in Wimbledon in 1961, the nephew of actor Jeremy Brett, famous for playing Sherlock Holmes in the Granada TV series, and the son of actor Alec Clunes, who died when Clunes was eight. Clunes spoke of having to repress his grief as a child in the face of British intransigence. “The expectation was: ‘Oh, let’s not cry. Let’s grow up,'” he said last year. “How can you grow up at eight?”

Shortly afterwards, Clunes was sent to Barfield boarding school in Surrey because his paternal grandparents feared that growing up without a father figure would make him gay. “So I had to not cry and not wet the bed at boarding school, which was impossible,” he said.

He drifted into acting and studied drama at ArtsEd Theater School before working in repertory theatre. During a show at the Hampstead Theatre, he was spotted by Harry Enfield, who cast him in his sketch shows and later recommended him for the role of Gary Strang in Simon Nye’s sitcom Men Behaving Badly. The beer-guzzling, women-chasing Gary played opposite Neil Morrissey, making Clunes a household name and earning him a BAFTA award in 1996.

The show was unmistakably of its time – Clunes has since described it as a “ridiculous” and “zeitgeist” series that was swept up by “that whole loaded movement”.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Clunes worked steadily in film and television, appearing in Staggered, Lorna Doone, A is for Acid, Shakespeare in Love and Saving Grace, as well as leading roles in Goodbye, Mr Chips and the ITV comedy-drama William and Mary.

But his most defining role came in 2004 with Doc Martin, where he played general practitioner Dr. Martin Ellingham. Running for 10 series over 18 years, the show established Clunes as a fixture on British television, and continues to attract fan pleas for a revival. Meanwhile, Clunes insisted he is much brighter than his on-screen counterpart. “I will try to make everyone love me, unless they don’t deserve to love me,” he once told The Guardian.

In recent years, he has appeared in Reggie Perrin, Arthur & George, Manhunt, Warren, and last year’s Out There, in which he played a widowed farmer who takes on drug dealers on county lines. Earlier in his career, he supplemented his acting income by modeling for Gilbert and George and voicing Safeway advertisements, while also providing travelogues, documentaries, and writing books about his love of animals.

Clunes lives in Dorset with his wife, Doc Martin producer Philippa Braithwaite, five dogs, two cats, a litter of horses and chickens. The couple has one daughter who is studying to become an equine veterinarian. He has been cast to portray disgraced BBC presenter Hugh Edwards in the upcoming reality drama, The Power: The Fall of Hugh Edwards, in which he charts the inner collapse of one of British television’s most iconic figures.

However, for now, Clunes finds himself improbably at the center of one of the most talked-about films of the year. And in a brilliant, sexually charged literary adaptation, no one expected his “depraved” patriarch to leave one of the deepest impressions.