“Wuthering Heights” asks you to feel, not think — A conversation with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi

When Australian actor Jacob Elordi says a film depicts “all the things you shouldn’t do in real life,” he commands some attention. 

With director Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation slated for release on Feb. 13, Elordi and his co-star, the Academy Award-nominated actor and producer Margot Robbie, are all the rage — and they’re ready to discuss what made such a dynamic pair, both on screen and off. 

“Some movies are designed to make you think,” Robbie said. “And some movies are designed to make you feel. And I feel like this is all feeling.”

If the film’s press tour is any indication, “Wuthering Heights” is big — and deliberately so. The pair, especially Robbie, has appeared dressed to the nines in head-to-toe Emily Brontë-inspired looks, from gothic lace Alexander McQueen to custom Chanel at the film’s Paris premiere. Moments from the tour have drawn notable online attention, largely due to a fascination with the duo’s chemistry.  

The film’s ambition probably should match the scale of its source material, one of the most significant works in the English literary canon. Wuthering Heights is Brontë’s only publication before she died of an illness linked to tuberculosis at age 30. The cult classic covers themes of revenge, passion, destructive love, class relations and the psychological consequences of obsession, all set in the late-eighteenth-century northern English moors. 

The source material is dense: a frame narrative spanning multiple generations long after titular characters Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s moment in time. It’s no secret that the novel is notoriously difficult to adapt. Earlier versions, including the 1939 (Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon) and 1992 (Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche) films, famously omitted entire sections or altered characters and narrators to make the story more traditionally cinematic and film the borderline-unfilmable, so to say. 

Fennell didn’t attempt to solve that problem — she sidestepped it. Rather than pursuing a comprehensive novel–to-script translation, she based her film on how Wuthering Heights made her feel when she first read it at age 14, even titling the film “Wuthering Heights” rather than Wuthering Heights to signal its interpretive distance from the text. Robbie candidly described the result as “not a straightforward adaptation.” 

“I think because Emerald’s take on the material is so unique to her and her experience reading it for the first time as a 14-year-old, it released the burden a little bit for us in that it’s very much an interpretation of the novel,” Robbie said.

That freedom shaped not just Fennell’s directorial direction, but the performances themselves. Robbie, who has now produced all three of Fennell’s feature films, said she trusted the director’s vision immediately. “About half an hour into our very first meeting, I felt like I would follow this woman anywhere,” she said. “And I still feel that way today.”

Fennell’s previous filmography tends to favor provocative impact, whether through the unsettling moral friction of Promising Young Woman or the indulgent excess of Saltburn. Robbie’s reliance on instinct as a performer fits naturally within Fennell’s cinematic style. “I prefer that kind of emotional storytelling as opposed to cerebral storytelling,” she said.

The emphasis on emotional instinct extended to how Robbie and Elordi built Catherine and Heathcliff together on screen: less as fixed literary figures and more as forces reacting to one another in real time. They don’t just rely on each other. Robbie said “they create each other.” 

She explained that no amount of preparation could replace the process of responding to Elordi’s choices in the moment. “Everything Jacob did completely informed my performance,” she said. “If I do anything good in this movie, it’s because… he brought it that way, and then I could deliver it back.”

Elordi agreed, noting that even watching Robbie perform scenes opposite other characters reshaped how he approached Heathcliff throughout the film’s production. “It’s a constant conversation, these dueling parts, and they exist because of each other,” he added. 

Elordi suggested that pain is central to how these characters communicate and love. “I think it’s part of their language,” he said.

Robbie expanded on that idea, describing the relationship itself, not just the performances, as fundamentally extreme. “I think it’s like the most sadomasochistic relationship I can think of…it’s why this whole relationship is so intoxicating to watch or read or immerse yourself in as an actor.” 

That same emotional logic shapes the film’s visual language. Robbie revealed that she color-coded her script by emotion, marking intimate scenes shared with Heathcliff, for example, in red, a choice that carried into costume and production design. 

“It’s very passionate as a color,” she said, adding that conversely, it can be “strong,” “fiery” and “dangerous.”

For Elordi, the color took on a more visceral meaning. “It’s the blood that pumps through the heart,” he said. “And his blood, to him, is Cathy’s blood. They share a heart.”

Indeed, the film is visceral if nothing else. Sexy? Absolutely, but more interestingly, the film externalizes emotion through, for example, gritty, close-up shots of corsets tightening and an abrasive Charli XCX soundtrack, making desire, obsession and consequence feel physical rather than implied. In Fennell’s world of “Wuthering Heights,” love is rendered through color, sound, proximity and physical endurance more so than exposition.

That endurance is perhaps most evident in Elordi’s interpretation of Heathcliff’s obsession, which he described as a kind of permission structure. “It’s all the things that you shouldn’t do in real life when you love someone, and they’re not available…” he said. “Heathcliff gives you the permission… stand outside the window in the middle of the night…stand in the blistering cold and wait.” 

Elordi suggested that Heathcliff’s obsessive kind of love exists, in some form, within everyone — a heightened version of emotions most people feel but choose to restrain.

While Wuthering Heights is often remembered for its romance, Elordi said the dominant emotion he felt creating and watching Fennell’s film wasn’t love, but regret. “Moments missed and then regretting it for the rest of your life, or [moments of] overhearing or mishearing,” he said of his reflections.

Robbie pointed to Cathy’s impulsiveness — particularly her tendency to speak without thinking — as a catalyst for the narrative’s devastation and a lesson she took from the film. She was further drawn to playing a character who shapes her own circumstances rather than has things simply “happen to her.” Her comments suggest an embrace of the messy, unrestrained and consequential passion that shapes Catherine and Heathcliff’s love, despite the price their devotion demands.

Some fans of the novel have already expressed concern about the film’s departures from the original text. Robbie says not to worry – Fennell handled the coveted story with care, however raw and interpretive the film’s presentation. “The essence that you felt from Cathy in the book is what I felt in her script…I kind of felt like all I had to do was honor that spirit,” she said, hoping that lovers of the novel “feel the same way” after seeing the film.  

“Wuthering Heights” doesn’t ask to be understood. It asks to be felt — fully, uncomfortably and without restraint — inviting audiences to sit with Brontë’s deeply flawed characters rather than resolve them. 

Catch Robbie and Elordi in Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights this Valentine’s Day, and see for yourself.