Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi on Embracing Emerald Fennell’s Provocative Vision for ‘Wuthering Heights’: ‘I Would Follow Her Anywhere’

The lore of why Emerald Fennell decided to adapt “Wuthering Heights” for the big screen is almost as well-worn as the copy of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel that the Oscar-winning filmmaker has read a hundred times. Fennell discovered the classic tome when she was a teenager — 14 years old to be exact — and became engrossed with its lead characters, Cathy and Heathcliff, and their toxic love story.

“Like anyone who’s obsessed with ‘Wuthering Heights,’ I’m a fanatic. I just adore it,” Fennell told Variety at the film’s world premiere in Los Angeles. “The moment I read it, it just broke me open.”

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Decades later, as she started to think about her next film following a pair of provocative pictures, 2023’s “Saltburn” and 2020’s “Promising Young Woman,” an idea sparked. “I wanted to make something that made people feel, that made people physically respond,” Fennell explained. “I just went back to that book, and I was like, ‘This is it.’”

As Fennell began drafting her version, one visual immediately sprang to mind — one quite similar to the first shot she envisioned for “Saltburn,” where she imagined someone slurping the leftover bathwater of the object of their romantic desire.

“I probably can’t spoil it, but something happens on a rock,” Fennell teased. “I think people will know.”

But, with the film now playing in theaters, it’s safe to say the steamy scene she’s referring to depicts Cathy’s (Margot Robbie) sexual awakening, as she masturbates under her skirts after she and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) accidentally witness someone else’s steamy coupling. There are more overtly sexy moments in Fennell’s movie — the physical intimacy is ratcheted up significantly from the book — but this scene underlines the Brontë’s themes of desire and repression — and the friction between them — that imprinted on the filmmaker as a teen.

That said, the prospect of adapting Brontë’s classic was still intimidating. After all, the story is so endlessly compelling that people are still discussing and dissecting it 200 years later.

“It’s such a gargantuan masterpiece, I couldn’t possibly attempt even to touch its coattails,” Fennell said. “What I could do, though, was look at how it made me feel, and hope that that would connect with some people. That’s all you can ever do, because Emily Brontë’s the best. So, I hope to make somebody’s favorite movie.”

To translate the stormy romance into a bodice-ripping piece of cinema, you need actors whose chemistry crackles, and Fennell didn’t have to look any further than her past collaborators, Robbie and Elordi, to heat up the famously chilly Yorkshire Moors.

Fennell wrote “Wuthering Heights” (stylized in quotation marks) with Elordi in mind. She’d been inspired by the sideburns he’d sported for “Saltburn,” which reminded her of the Heathcliff pictured on her old copy of Brontë’s book.

“Emerald loves this work with her soul. This book pumps through her,” Elordi said about working with Fennell. His only reservations about stepping into the iconic role, previously portrayed by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy, were, “Can I do it justice? And can I bring something of my own biography into it?”

Signing on for the part also helped Elordi cross an item off his bucket list: to work with Robbie, his fellow Aussie. “She’s always been on my list of the greats, so I expected her to be excellent. And she was,” Elordi said. “As a human being and as an artist, she’s the true package.”

Robbie and Fennell had been circling one another for years — Robbie’s Luckychap production company backed both “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn,” plus Fennell played a small role in “Barbie” — but they hadn’t yet collaborated as actor and director. Luckychap was producing “Wuthering Heights” too, so after reading Fennell’s screenplay, Robbie pitched herself to play Cathy.

“I would follow her anywhere,” Robbie said of Fennell. “I think working with directors who you would follow anywhere is the best thing that you can do. Find those people that you really believe in, and then just follow them.”

Josey McNamara, Robbie’s partner at Luckychap, concurred: “With anything that Emerald does, it’s always the emotional roller coaster of how you experience the movie. Hopefully, we’ll have people who laugh, who cry, who are turned on. You run the gamut of emotions.”

Indeed, Fennell intended to tap into something sensual and melodramatic with her take on “Wuthering Heights.” And with a fourth season of “Bridgerton” underway and the hot hockey romance “Heated Rivalry” dominating the streaming charts, it’s evident that yearning is so back. What is it about this particular brand of romance that keeps audiences coming back for more?

“It’s all the stuff that we’re still contending with today,” Alison Oliver said about the trend toward longing. (Oliver plays Isabella, a young maiden who finds herself embroiled in Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive relationship.) “I just love Emerald’s vision and the things that she’s interested in investigating. And the way that Emily Brontë explores that is just extraordinary; it really touches on something. There’s a reason why people keep going back to the classics like it again and again. There’s something in it that helps us understand ourselves better.”

“Wuthering Heights,” which also stars Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Martin Clues, Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper, with music by Charli xcx, is now playing in theaters.