Margot Robbie Likens ‘Wuthering Heights’ to a Gut Punch (in a Hot Way)

Margot Robbie is Vogue U.K.‘s January cover star—and apart from a few expected anecdotes about how she loves food and how she was totally down to scale rocks and run up hills (crazy) during her 12-hour photoshoot in the South Downs, pretty much the whole interview is about Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation, which premieres on February 14. There’s a large population of English majors who will hate this interview and this movie, and won’t be happy until there’s an adaptation where two actors read Emily Brontë’s novel word-for-word in the dark. But that is not me.

So I happily stomached the more inane celebrity bits of this cover story (she sings karaoke until 2 a.m.! Can you imagine?!) and felt sufficiently rewarded. For starters, Robbie said the script “absolutely wrecked me.” The project came to her through her production company, LuckyChap (Robbie also produced Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and Saltburn), and that Jacob Elordi had already been cast as Heathcliff by the time she read it. “I didn’t know what was coming,” she told the magazine. “By the end, I was just so full and so destroyed at the same time.”

She didn’t quite touch the third rail of the Elordi’s casting discourse (in the novel, Heathcliff is definitely not white), but she did offer: “I saw him play Heathcliff. And he is Heathcliff. I’d say, just wait. Trust me, you’ll be happy.” Fair enough, I am still watching the trailer…

“It goes there,” Robbie says of the BDSM-fever-dream scenes teased in the trailer. “Everyone’s expecting this to be very, very raunchy. I think people will be surprised. Not to say there aren’t sexual elements and that it’s not provocative – it definitely is provocative – but it’s more romantic than provocative.”

“This is a big epic romance. It’s just been so long since we’ve had one–maybe The Notebook, also The English Patient. You have to go back decades,” she continued. “It’s that feeling when your chest swells or it’s like someone’s punched you in the guts and the air leaves your body. That’s a signature of Emerald’s. Whether it’s titillating or repulsion, her superpower is eliciting a physical response.” You can inject that right into my seasonal depression.

“‘What reads to us as hot or exciting or sexy?’ And it’s not just a sex position or someone taking their shirt off,” Robbie said of her discussions with Fennell on set. The writer lists two such examples: Heathcliff shielding Cathy’s face from the rain, and Heathcliff picking Cathy up (“With only one arm!”)—both of which are featured in the official trailer and both of which I would consider very fucking hot.

“It was the little things that we loved as two women in our 30s, and this movie is primarily for people in our demographic,” Robbie said. “These epic romances and period pieces aren’t often made by women.” Sold.

And finally, Robbie thinks Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet is the closest reference. “It’s a literary classic, visually stunning and emotionally resonant,” she said. “In one of our first conversations about this film, I asked Emerald what her dream outcome was. She said, ‘I want this to be this generation’s Titanic. I went to the cinema to watch Romeo & Juliet eight times and I was on the ground crying when I wasn’t allowed to go back for a ninth. I want it to be that.’”

---

Like what you just read? You’ve got great taste. Subscribe to Jezebel, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll get access to a bunch of subscriber benefits, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that) ad-free. Plus, you’ll be supporting independent journalism—which, can you even imagine not supporting independent journalism in times like these? Yikes.