If you’ve still yet to fully recover from Saltburn’s bathtub scene, then it’s perhaps best to look away now: Oscar-winning provocateur Emerald Fennell has set her sights on her next project, and her choice—and casting—have already proven divisive.
On July 12, 2024, the director took to X to share an illustration of a ghostly skeleton by artist Katie Buckley. At its heart sits the title Wuthering Heights, and below it the strapline “A film by Emerald Fennell.” Above the image, it reads, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad,” the immortal words Heathcliff utters after the tragic death of Catherine Earnshaw.
Given her last feature, and Promising Young Woman before it, were both about obsession—the former about one student’s infatuation with another, the latter about a woman’s single-minded determination to avenge the death of her best friend—the decision to adapt Emily Brontë’s seminal tale of doomed love, as well as the accompanying tagline, make perfect sense.
However, it did leave us with a number of questions, too. Will this be a faithful period adaptation? How will it compare to the countless other big-screen renderings of this particular story, from Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s 1939 version, to the 1992 film starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 reimagining with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson?
Would it be Barry Keoghan, I wondered, who’d don a waistcoat and tousled mane to play our brooding Byronic hero? And who could possibly take the part of Cathy? Well, we now have answers: on September 23, it emerged that it was not the Irish Oscar nominee but—staggeringly—his Saltburn co-star Jacob Elordi who’d be delivering Heathcliff’s impassioned monologues, while Margot Robbie would embody his tormented paramour. The latter will also be producing through her company LuckyChap, after having backed Fennell’s last two films, too.
More news followed on November 20: Alison Oliver, Elordi’s onscreen sister in Saltburn, will be his onscreen wife, Isabella Linton, this time; Shazad Latif, who starred opposite Lily James in the rom-com What’s Love Got to Do with It?, will portray Isabella’s brother and Cathy’s husband, Edgar; and Oscar nominee Hong Chau (Downsizing, The Whale) has taken the part of one of the film’s narrators, Nelly Dean.
