Emerald Fennell has revealed that Margot Robbie asked if she could play the lead role in the adaptation of Wuthering Heights before she had approached the actor to do so.
Robbie, whose production company LuckyChap Entertainment produced the film, asked if she could play Cathy after reading the script. “I sent it to them to produce, and Margot luckily asked if she might play Cathy,” said Fennell in conversation at the BFI Southbank in London.
“I was very nervous to ask her, because I think we have a different relationship, and I didn’t want to put her on the spot,” she said. “I was like: ‘Do I go for it?’ No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t, because she’s braver than me. She asked me.”
However the decision to cast Robbie in the role of Cathy has led to much scepticism and scrutiny ahead of the film’s release, specifically for its departure from the original 1847 novel by Emily Brontë.
Robbie, 35, will play Catherine Earnshaw who is written to be in her late teens in the original novel. The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has also been criticised. In the book, the character is described by Brontë to be of “Gypsy” and “Lascar” (South Asian) descent, which accounts for the prejudice against the him in the book.
However Fennell defended her decision. “I can’t adapt the book as it is but I can approximate the way it made me feel,” she said.
The casting director Kharmel Cochrane also defended the choice at the Sands film festival in Scotland last summer, saying that “there’s no need to be accurate” and it’s “just a book”.
Robbie co-founded the production company LuckyChap Entertainment in 2014 with her husband, Tom Ackerley, as well as producers Josey McNamara, and Sophia Kerr. The company produced Fennell’s previous two films, Saltburn and Promising Young Woman.
The adaptation of Wuthering Heights will premiere on 5 February in London’s Leicester Square and will be released in cinemas in the UK on 13 February for Valentine’s weekend.
The film first premiered in Los Angeles on 28 January, with critics calling it “intoxicating, transcendent, tantalising, bewitching, lust worthy, hypnotic” – although full reviews are embargoed until 8 February.
Fennell’s directorial style has been characterised by her daring, provocative and at times indulgent social commentary. Speaking about how this style will continue in her latest feature she said: “Wuthering Heights needs to provoke a sort of primal response.”
The director also spoke about the background behind the set design in the film, revealing that the wallpaper in Cathy’s bedroom was inspired by images of Robbie’s skin.
“We asked her to send us all her veins and her freckles, and then we printed it on silk and stuffed it and put latex over it so that it could sweat,” she said. “At first glance, you don’t see any of it, it’s just a beautiful pink room.”
“It’s like a visual example of what it feels like to be made a wife, to be made an object of beauty, to be a collector’s item.”
Other unconventional behind the scenes activity involved shrines Fennell made of Elordi and Robbie as a way to mimic the infatuation their respective characters have with one another in the film. “I was like: ‘I’m going to go through the internet, I’m going to find their best photos and then I’m going to make shrines in their bedrooms for each other,’” she said
“So 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. There’s nothing more humanising than somebody’s first press photo.”
Fennell also spoke about the process of getting Charli xcx onboard to create the soundtrack for the film: “I sent Charli the script. Even though she was in the middle of the brat tour, the most busy person in the entire world, she read it immediately.”
“She called me and said: ‘What do you want?’ I said: ‘Well, a song would be nice.’ And she said: ‘How about an album?’ And I was like: ‘Yeah, cool.’”
“It’s so dorky, but it is my favourite album I’ve ever, ever heard in my life. She just got it.”
