It’s murder on the dark moors: the principal casting for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights was announced this week, and the internet fell off its collective Bottega Veneta stuffed-animal beanbag . Euphoria ’s resident narcissist psychopath Jacob Elordi will play Heathcliff opposite Barbie girl Margot Robbie ’s it’s-me-I’m-Cathy in the latest adaptation of Emily Brontë’s romantic tale (or brutally vengeful, horrifying, supernatural Gothic masterpiece, depending on your standpoint). Hot on the heels of her Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman and internet-decimating Saltburn , Fennell has inspired a new round of discourse.
Rose Dommu is going to “walk into traffic”, while another tweeter “will put rocks in her pockets and walk into the sea”. People are up in arms, I think, because Elordi and Robbie don’t tally with their idea of psychologically tortured lovers in late 18th-century England. With Fennell at the helm, will Barbie be slurping Elvis’s bathwater as Kate Bush plays softly in the background? We’ll be spared an excruciating extubation moment, as those weren’t invented yet, but will Heathcliff hump Cathy’s grave? He does make a somewhat macabre request to a gravedigger in regard to her buried coffin, which is firmly Fennell territory – alongside the revenge, jealousy, hysteria and dark infatuations that have made Wuthering Heights such a provocative and enduring horror classic.
And we already know she loves a big ol’ house. Personal.
