“It’s electric”: Jacob Elordi opens up on Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation

Emerald Fennel's Wuthering Heights sees Jacob Elordi in a different light, in a different version of Heathcliff. He is magnetic, ferocious and brooding, and Fennell's framing of the story as primal and passionate gives Elordi room to push the character into more volatile territory than many adaptations would allow.

For Elordi, the premise is electric, as he tells Wall Street Journal in an interview about his upcoming film. Speaking to the outlet he says:

“It’s electric. And it’s also like nails on a chalkboard. It does something. It moves you in some kind of way, good or bad, but it will move you.”

The role, however has seen criticism too. Many readers and fans of the book called Fennell out for portraying the book in a different light than Emily Bronte's original novel. Most of that was directed at Elordi's casting, who many thought was miscast and didn't match the physical description of Heathcliff in the novel.

The director, however, defended this, as she talked about Elordi and how he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read.” Speaking to a panel during Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in England, she added:

“I had been thinking about making [‘Wuthering Heights’], and it seemed to me he had the thing… he’s a very surprising actor.”

As of now, all we have seen are sneak peeks of the film in the recently released teaser, and the actual film could hold a different narrative than the one we have seen. Wuthering Heights will be in theaters next year in February, just in time for it to make it to your Valentine's Day watch list.

More details about Wuthering Heights

After Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, Emerald Fennell is now turning to a retelling of one of the biggest classic love stories in English literature, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The film promises to strip the story down to its raw, primal emotions of love, obsession and revenge, while painting it with Fennell's signature modern, provocative brush.

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie are leading the film as Catherine and Heathcliff, joined by Hong Chau, Alison Oliver, Shazad Latif, and a trio of newcomers, Charlotte Mellington, Owen Cooper, and Vy Nguyen, round out a cast that blends experience with raw freshness.

Filming took place across Yorkshire, Arkengarthadale, Swaledale, Low Row, the Yorkshire Dales National Park and Sky Studios Elstree, captured on 35mm by Linus Sandgren. So far, the visuals we have seen are breathtaking and capture the physical premise of the novel. Musically, the film balances a classic score and pop music, with Anthony Willis’ composition and original songs by Charli XCX.