This Is Not the First Miscast Wuthering Heights

Margot Robbie is no Cathy Linton. That hasn’t stopped her, however, from standing on the English hillside in a billowing wedding dress on the set of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. There was a brief but notable outcry when Robbie and Jacob Elordi, playing Brontë’s brooding Heathcliff, were announced: These stars are too old, too tan, too Australian. The first surreptitious shots of Robbie in costume, however, lit up the internet anew.

What we know with certainty about Cathy and Heathcliff is that they meet in their adolescence, their tumultuous courtship lasting until Cathy’s death at age 19. Cathy is canonically brunette, while Heathcliff — a foundling, or orphan — has a dark complexion that leads characters to suggest he may have Romani heritage. Neither are, despite Fennell’s casting, Australian, but it’s always good to double-check that kind of thing. Their relatively young ages and social differences contribute to their doomed romance, but Brontë’s novel is more often defined by its depiction of cruelty and morality within the rigid English class system. You know, classic Emerald Fennell stuff.

That Fennell’s adaptation is being picked apart before we even have approved press stills is perhaps mostly indicative of her reputation as a divisive director, prone to exaggeration and excess. Fennell’s films often elide both history and plausibility — strict adherence to period-appropriate accuracy in casting, costume, or feel is besides the point. We don’t yet know what Fennell’s “take” on the material is — if any — or whether the ages or costumes are gestures of purpose or convenience of star power. But even if the director isn’t doing something crazy with the text, that doesn’t necessarily mean her film is doomed so much as it joins a catalogue of “miscast” Wuthering Heights.

Since the publication of Wuthering Heights in 1847, more adaptations than not have abandoned faithfulness to the text in lieu of artistic vision. The very first adaptation of the novel was a silent film in 1920 directed by A.V. Bramble, starring Anne Trevor (who was around 20 at the time of shooting) and Milton Rosmer (who would have been nearly 40). Since then, Wuthering Heights has traveled around the globe with adaptations in French and Spanish and Hindi, starring actors of all sorts of ages and backgrounds. Most of those who have played Cathy and Heathcliff — Juliette Binoche, Merle Oberon, and Rosemary Harris, for instance, as well as Ralph Fiennes, Laurence Olivier, and Tom Hardy — are far older than the required ages for the duo.

There are certainly some good adaptations of Wuthering Heights, but part of why the book has endured is because of how difficult it is to bring to life. Cathy and Heathcliff are tricky characters, moody and selfish and destructive (teenagers …), whose inconsistent qualities are their only constant. Their relationship is both fated and impossible to root for. Set in the dreary English moors, Brontë’s book is steeped in mist and mystery. Wuthering Heights was her only novel, and it feels apt that no one adaptation has ever really nailed that which makes her book so literally singular.

You don’t have to go back 100 years, however, to get the most “accurate” adaptation of the novel so far, only about a decade. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 take on the novel, starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson, indulged in the dark, swampy qualities of the novel, emphasizing the bleak and animalistic qualities of the two lovers over the explicitly erotic (though there was some of that, too). Scodelario and Howson are fantastic and as close to age-appropriate as any. The film is solid if not harsh, like walking directly into the wind, but its adherence to literary canon didn’t necessarily carry Arnold’s film into the beloved literary classic canon. All of which is to say, there’s time yet for Fennell’s adaptation to delight (or disappoint) us. Besides, no one can unseat the best adaptation, Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” It would be foolish to even try.

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