Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are caught in a bad romance in an audacious new adaptation of Emily Brontë's classic novel "Wuthering Heights."
"Wuthering Heights" isn't even out yet and people already have a ton of thoughts about it.
In the months and weeks leading up to the big-screen romance (in theaters Feb. 13), folks on social media have weighed in on the casting of Jacob Elordi, 28, as the tormented Heathcliff, who is described as a "dark-skinned gypsy" in Emily Brontë's 1847 novel.
They have also raised their eyebrows about Margot Robbie, 35, whose ill-fated heroine Catherine Earnshaw is just a teenager in the book. But there is good reason for her casting.
In an early scene of "Wuthering Heights," the headstrong Catherine is pushed to go meet her wealthy new neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). According to her father (Martin Clunes), this may be Catherine's "last chance" to get a husband before she becomes undesirable to men.
Over the course of the movie, "Cathy's in her mid-20s to early 30s, which puts so much more pressure on the marriage situation," Robbie tells USA TODAY. "A bunch of people telling an 18-year-old, 'Oh, f---, you better hurry up and get married!' That doesn't really hold the same weight to a modern-day audience member."
Whereas now, "particularly for women, there's suddenly this checklist that society has given you and you better have it all ticked off by the time you're 30: get married, get a house, have your career figured out, and start thinking about kids," Robbie continues. For Gen Z and millennial moviegoers, "watching an older Cathy have that pressure might carry more weight."
Like Brontë's book, the movie begins with a younger Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) and Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) as childhood friends who struggle to express their love for each other as adults. Through Robbie and Elordi’s aged-up casting, director Emerald Fennell wanted to capture the epic nature of the decades-spanning story.
“I really felt that in order to get that sense of time passing and of yearning and the slow burn, they needed to be children and then they needed to be adults,” Fennell says. “Everyone is so young in the book, which makes it extremely fascinating yet very hard to relate to. It’s the same (reason) why people very rarely make ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with real 14-year-olds.”
After her father falls into financial ruin, Catherine chooses to marry Edgar for the security he can offer. But she still longs for Heathcliff, who goes away and amasses a fortune of his own.
“Cathy’s decision is devastating,” Fennell says. As a woman, “the circumstances in which she is living are untenable; they’re dangerous. This isn’t an 18-year-old making a decision flippantly - this is a woman being faced with two really distinct, stark choices.”
Ultimately, “it felt like something that made more sense to me for this version.”