Emerald Fennell is reminding skeptics why there are quotation marks around the title of her Wuthering Heights adaptation. Since the film’s original announcement in 2024, Jacob Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff has been heavily debated. In Emily Brontë’s classic novel, he’s described as a “dark-skinned,” racially ambiguous man. Fennell’s defending her casting choice, saying she made the movie version that she pictured in her head when she first read the book as a teenager. “I think the thing is, everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it,” she says in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t know, I think I was focusing on the pseudo-masochistic elements of it.” She continues, “Like many people who love this book, I’m kind of fanatical about it, so I knew right from the get-go I couldn’t ever hope to make anything that could even encompass the greatness of this book. All I could do was make a movie that made me feel the way the book made me feel, and therefore it just felt right to say it’s Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.”
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Elordi echoed that sentiment. “There are inverted commas for a reason,” he said. “This is Emerald’s vision and these are the images that came to her head at 14 years old; somebody else’s interpretation of a great piece of art is what I’m interested in — new images, fresh images, original thoughts.”
Fennell first had Elordi in mind during filming for 2023’s Saltburn, when she saw him with sideburns; she told British Vogue she couldn’t get the vision of him as Heathcliff out of her head. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s the Heathcliff on the cover of the book that I’ve had since I was a teenager,’” she recalled. Hell hath no fury like an inner teenager awoken by their favorite book.
