Why Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi will make purists angry

You have been warned.

Anyone expecting a faithful adaptation of Wuthering Heights is in for a rude shock.

Emerald Fennell’s upcoming movie has already caught flak for casting Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the lead roles of Catherine and Heathcliff, but the production’s casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, has said that’s not the end of it.

“There’s definitely going to be some English lit fans that are not going to be happy,” she said at the Sands film festival in Scotland, as reported by Deadline. “Wait until you see the set design, because that is even more shocking. And there may or may not be a dog collar in it.”

Cochrane’s comments more than suggest that Fennell has taken an irreverent approach to bringing Emily Bronte’s beloved story to the screen. Perhaps it’s set in a different time period, which would explain on-set photos of Robbie in character and the anachronistic wedding dress she was pictured in.

Bronte’s novel is considered one of the grand romances of Western literature, an epic doomed romance which also explores themes of class and privilege. The story was published in the mid-19th century but it’s set in the late-18th.

Fennell’s two previous films, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, were provocative and unconventional. She has revealed no details about what her version of Wuthering Heights will be like, including the time period.

The concerned reactions from book fans started immediately after Robbie, 34, and Elordi, 27, were announced. The characters are described in the book as being in their late teens for most of their romance, and (178-year-old spoiler alert!) Catherine’s death at 19 is all the more tragic because of her youth.

Thornier still is Heathcliff being described as having dark features and dark skin, which many readers have interpreted to mean his ethnicity is not Anglo-Saxon.

Past screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights have ignored this and cast white actors such as Tom Hardy and Ralph Fiennes but “whitewashing” Heathcliff, as it has been labelled in online reactions to Elordi’s casting, in 2025 plays awkwardly.

Clearly there have been passionate responses. Cochrane added at the festival, “There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot. But just wait until 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. That is not based on a real life. It’s all art.”

There have been plenty of TV shows and films that have taken inspiration from a literary classic and tweaked it or updated it completely, which Fennell is also entitled to do.

Some are so different, audiences may not even initially know what the source material is until later.

Teen movies loved doing that with the likes of Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That, and Cruel Intentions drawn from Jane Austen’s Emma, William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses respectively.

The Lion King was a reworking of Hamlet, the TV show Revenge was an update of Count of Monte Cristo and Bridget Jones’ Diary was inspired by Pride & Prejudice.

Perhaps it’s because Fennell’s film still bears the name Wuthering Heights so fans are expecting strict fidelity to Bronte’s novel but the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke version of Great Expectations transported the story to modern-day New York City.

Like Cochran said, wait until you’ve seen the film before getting too upset. But once you have and if you still find the casting and the promised dog collar objectionable, then it’s fair game.