Wuthering Heights: Hollywood’s worst casting decisions

The news that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are starring in Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë’s romance has caused a storm – no surprise in an age of increased casting scrutiny.

Catherine is a teenager who lives on a farm in England in the late-1700s. Heathcliff is a dark-skinned foundling of around the same age. As the heroine and hero of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, their love story has been imagined by countless readers since the novel was published in 1847, but not many of those readers will have pictured them as the spitting images of Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Jacob Elordi (Elvis Presley in Priscilla). Still, Emerald Fennell is not like the rest of us. The Oscar-winning writer-director of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn is making a film of Wuthering Heights, and she announced earlier this week that her Catherine and Heathcliff would be played by two impossibly good-looking Australians, one aged 34, the other aged 27.

The online response hasn’t been wholly positive. Brontë fans on social media called the casting “disappointing”, “terrible” and “bizarre”, and The Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey asked: “Did anyone actually read the book before deciding this?”

To be fair, we don’t know what Fennell has planned. Maybe her adaptation will be a glitzy and irreverent update with a disco soundtrack and a naked dance routine on the windswept Yorkshire moors. But there is no doubt that at first glance the casting seems fundamentally, egregiously wrong: it has that mind-boggling, what-were-they-thinking quality which brings to mind a crass producer in a Hollywood satire, barking: “Wuthering Heights is kinda drab – let’s get Barbie and Elvis to play Cathy and Heathcliff!”

The wrongness comes down to several factors – the factors that separate interesting and even divisive casting from casting that has irate citizens waving online pitchforks. One such factor is the disparity between the ages of the characters and the actors. When the 45-year-old Kevin Spacey starred in Beyond the Sea as Bobby Darin, a singer who died aged 37, Mick La Salle of the San Francisco called it “one of the most embarrassing spectacles of 2004”. The fact that Spacey directed, co-wrote, and co-produced the film only made things more cringe-worthy.

In the case of Wuthering Heights, you could argue that Fennell was simply sticking to Hollywood tradition: Laurence Olivier was in his 30s when he played Heathcliff in the classic 1939 film of the novel. But we are a lot more judgemental about age-inappropriate casting than we used to be. With Wikipedia just a click away, it’s all too easy to check whether a star is pinching a job from a younger or older actor, and it’s all too hard to overlook it. Why, the world wondered, did Oliver Stone cast Angelina Jolie (born in 1975) and Colin Farrell (born in 1976) as mother and son in Alexander (2004)?

We’re more sensitive, too, to questions of authenticity and representation, especially where race is concerned. Speaking of Olivier, he wore skin-darkening make-up to play Othello in the 1965 film of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but today that would be as unacceptable as Mickey Rooney’s racist turn as Holly Golightly’s Japanese neighbour in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), or John Wayne’s as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956). The whitewashing of several characters wasn’t the worst thing about M Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender (2010), for instance, but it deepened the impression that the film got just about everything wrong.

The issue with Wuthering Heights is that the darkness of Heathcliff’s skin is mentioned several times in the novel, so it seems perverse of a new film to ignore it. Considering that Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights featured a black Heathcliff (James Howson), Fennell’s choice can’t help but feel like a leap in the wrong direction.

A more glaring issue is that both Robbie and Elordi seem too glossy and glamorous for their roles. They belong on a red carpet, not in a muddy field. One aspect of this is that they have so-called “iPhone face” or “smartphone face”, a term applied to actors who look too contemporary to be credible in a period drama. When someone has pearly white teeth, flawless skin, sleek hair and a gym-honed physique, then it’s almost impossible to buy them as living in the days before stylists, nutritionists and personal trainers.

Think of Cameron Diaz in Gangs of New York, Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Tom Cruise in Far and Away: all three actors are only really at home in snazzy surroundings in the late-20th and early-21st Centuries. They shouldn’t play any character who hasn’t driven a high-performance motorbike to a beach in California. As for Robbie herself, in Mary Queen of Scots (2018) she played an ageing, raddled Elizabeth I who was jealous of her cousin Mary Stuart’s (Saoirse Ronan) youthful beauty. Quite a bit of suspension of disbelief was required.

Still, it’s their very glamour that accounts for Robbie and Elordi’s casting in Wuthering Heights. When two actors have the popularity and the sex appeal that they do, the prospect of seeing them both in the same film will, in theory, be too much for audiences to resist. Another small point is that Robbie didn’t just star in Barbie, the highest grossing film of 2023, she produced it, too – and she also produced Saltburn. If she wants to star in Wuthering Heights, then who’s going to stop her? Tom Cruise, again, is not known for his mountainous height, his bulging muscles or his blond hair, but he was the A-list producer of the two Jack Reacher films, so when he made the ridiculous decision to play Lee Child’s giant vigilante, nobody was going to say no.

The good news is that whatever else Robbie and Elordi may be, they are also brilliant actors. If anyone can make such problematic casting work, then they can. Finally, we should bear in mind that things could always be worse. In 1996, there was a Wuthering Heights musical called Heathcliff, which starred and was co-written by Cliff Richard.

The show opened just after Richard’s 56th birthday.