Wuthering Heights’ showmance promo: Is anyone buying what Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are selling?

Do you know the word “showmance”?

The word, a portmanteau of “show” and “romance,” is relatively new, having only come into popular use this century, but the concept is old. Hollywood history is replete with stories of co-stars who hammed it up for the press and the public in service of ticket sales.

Back then, it would be studios who planted the stories with gossip columnists such as Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons about their contract stars, but in more recent years, it’s fuelled by social media as well as traditional media.

The idea is to blur the line between reality and fantasy, tease your intended audience with a little of what they’re in store for – no, not the story, everyone more or less already knows that - but with what they really want to see, which is two people falling in love.

You want to know, beforehand, that the chemistry is going to be hot, that you’ll feel feverish, that it’ll be worth the two-plus-hours and the $30 ticket fee.

For almost two centuries, Wuthering Heights has been sold as a gothic romance, even though Emily Bronte’s book is really more an exploration of how generational abuse and trauma manifests in horrific violence.

But in the popular consciousness, especially more recently in no small part thanks to Kate Bush’s song, what you think you know about Wuthering Heights is that the doomed Cathy and Heathcliff are forever entwined in life and death, haunting the wild Yorkshire moors.

That explains a lot about the film’s promotional tour, and especially what its leads Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have been doing and saying.

The two Queenslanders have played up their offscreen bond as a signal of the heat you’ll see in the film, as if to say, if this is the foreplay, wait until you see the real thing.

It’s a marketing tactic for sure, and one that also seeks to counter some of the more negative responses that has dogged the project since it was announced. Writer/director Emerald Fennell had also cast them both, contrary to how they were described by Bronte (she’s too old, he’s too white, so the criticisms went).

Among the carefully chosen titbits the actors have revealed include matching jewellery Robbie gifted Elordi right before the press tour commenced – rings which feature a pair of skulls and a Bronte quote, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”.

Last month, Robbie recounted in a Fandango interview about how the two became co-dependent on set. “I remember the first couple of days on set, he would just be like, always in the vicinity of where I was, but in a corner, watching.

“On the third day, I found myself starting to look around to see where he was. I was like, ‘Well, obviously he’s going to be somewhere close by. Where is he right now?’.”

She added that when she couldn’t see him, she found herself unmoored: “I felt quite lost, like a kid without their blanket or something”.

Elordi spoke of how he became enamoured by her, and that he even found himself watching how Robbie drank her tea or ate her food.

In a Vogue Australia interview a week later, the pair reinforced this dynamic, and said they both missed each other when they were off filming scenes with other actors, such as co-stars Shazad Latif and Alison Oliver.

“I really didn’t like shooting when Margot wasn’t there,” Elordi said, to which she responded, “I hated shooting when you weren’t there”.

She added, for effect, “Love (Latif and Oliver) more than anything. But I was like, he’s mine!”

Robbie said that on Valentine’s Day, Elordi had filled her dressing room with roses and handmade crafts, and that it had made her day. “I remember thinking … ‘oh, he’s probably a very good boyfriend because there’s a lot of thoughtfulness in this’.”

Fennell had a hand in this too. She told The Guardian she had made shrines of Robbie and Elordi for their respective rooms, so that, “when Jacob went into his room, he had an insane shrine to worship not just Cathy, but Margot Robbie, and then she had the same thing”.

All of this is … a lot. Which ties in perfectly, one might even say, intentionally, with Fennell’s version of Wuthering Heights, a grand romantic epic of yearning and desire that transcends even death.

For fans who love to form a parasocial relationship with characters and actors, the convergence of both is the ideal. It’s giddy, even. There’s even a term for it – affair-baiting. Make people think there was something else going on behind the scenes, even the tiniest of hints, enough to get the tongues wagging on social media.

That kind of semi-method publicity is good for business - at least it usually is.

But let’s get real here. Robbie has been married since 2016 to Tom Ackerley, who is also a producer on the film and would have sat in on at least some of the meetings in which they all discussed marketing and publicity strategy.

She was also a new mum at the time of the production who was not only No.1 on the call sheet but a producer to boot. She would have been way too tired even if she wanted to embark on an affair.

Elordi has also been linked for years to Olivia Jade Giannulli, an influencer famous for being one of the key names in the 2019 US college admissions scandal when it was revealed her mother, Full House actor Lori Loughlin, had paid bribes to secure her and her sister a spot at the University of Southern California.

Being both otherwise taken didn’t stop the rumour mill working in overdrive when paparazzi photos of Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney on the set of Anyone But You emerged, sparking frenzied speculation the two actors were secretly hooking up.

The narrative was a huge marketing boon to the film, especially when Powell and his long-term girlfriend broke up in between shooting and the movie’s release. It powered Anyone But You, a generic rom-com with no existing intellectual property (other than being loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing), to a $US220 million box office.

A year later, Powell admitted that it was part of the marketing strategy, and it had been Sweeney’s idea to play it up.

“The two things that you have to sell a rom-com are fun and chemistry,” he told The New York Times. “Sydney and I have a ton of fun together and we have a ton of effortless chemistry.

“That is people wanting what’s on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit – and it worked wonderfully.”

Wicked too went with this play, when actors Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande hung off each for months in the lead-up to the first instalment’s release. You couldn’t turn your head without seeing them hand-in-hand, which is actually a remarkable feat given how long their nails were.

It seemed as if every interview was a joint one, as if they were holding space solely for each other. They gazed, googly-eyed at each other, couple-dressed in pink and black/green, all selling the core concept of their characters’ bond – a love story in friendship. Inseparable, almost ineffable.

It also helped to distract from the other romance narrative the cast and studio didn’t want centred – which is that Grande and co-star Ethan Slater started dating after meeting on the Wicked set, and he was still married with a newborn when production started.

Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson were also accused of showmancing during the promo tour for The Naked Gun, but in that case, they confirmed they were madly in love. It was super cute, especially as both had previous heartbreaks which were well established in their public narratives.

A few months later, it was off.

Was it ever on? For Neeson and Anderson, probably? But it is also the case that a lot of the times when co-stars actually hook up, they tend to keep it quiet, especially when it’s sticky like Grande and Slater, or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Generally, the more it’s played up during publicity, the more likely it’s an act. They are, after all, actors.

So, where does that leave the audience who these narratives are being spun for, whether it’s overt or not?

There have been some backlash to the Robbie and Elordi act, with social media reactions accusing them of being cringe or inauthentic.

When it came to promote and release Wicked: For Good, the sequel, the studio and the actors’ teams of publicists, agents and managers knew they wouldn’t be able to repeat Erivo and Grande’s dynamic so soon. That would have definitely crossed the line into too much.

But everyone is in on the secret, right? No one really believes those little grazes on the arm during an interview, or the effusive, disproportionate praise heaped on a co-star. We believe it only in so far as to go, “aww, cute” but you know it’s all part of the sell.

Once the movie is out, once the contractual publicity period is up, everyone goes back to their lives and their next projects.

Elordi has to do a hard pivot as soon as the Wuthering Heights promotional tour wraps up next weekend in Australia. Come the following Monday, Elordi will be back on the hustings, but for something completely different.

He needs to be hitting that Oscars trail, campaigning to win a best supporting actor gong for his performance in Frankenstein. It’ll be publicity whiplash, although there are similar strains between Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, both maximalist and gothic, and for him, different degrees of broody.

How much do you think he’ll be waxing lyrical about how Robbie drinks her tea when he’s pressing the flesh in those rooms with Oscars voters? Or will he be singling out director Guillermo del Toro for adhering to his long-held vision for Frankenstein?

It’ll be the latter, because Elordi has a job to do, just as he did for Wuthering Heights.