Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are set to star in Emerald Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights.
The casting news was initially reported by Justin Kroll at Deadline, detailing that the film will be financed by MRC and produced by LuckyChap. This marks the third collaboration between Fennell and LuckyChap, the production company known for films like Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, the latter of which earned Fennell an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Filming for Wuthering Heights is scheduled to begin in the UK in 2025, with Robbie taking on the role of Catherine Earnshaw and Elordi portraying Heathcliff. The original novel, published in 1850, explores the complex relationships between the Earnshaw and Linton families and their connection with Heathcliff, who is raised as a foster son in the Earnshaw household. There has been some controversy surrounding the casting of Elordi, a white Australian actor, as Heathcliff, as the character is described as dark-skinned in the novel.
Robbie recently starred and produced the successful Barbie film, which grossed $1.4 billion worldwide and received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. She is set to appear next in Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, slated for release next year.
Elordi was featured in Fennell’s film Saltburn and also played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which premiered in 2023. He has upcoming roles in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses and a new adaptation of Frankenstein directed by Guillermo del Toro.
In an interview with Variety earlier this year, Robbie praised Fennell’s directorial talents in Saltburn, stating, “Emerald immerses you into a world so quickly. She’s so masterful at tone and plot…She gets in your brain and she kind of taps into the most depraved parts of it, so that you’re complicit in the story. That’s the watercooler moment — the thing that people are talking about two weeks afterwards.”
Fennell is a co-founder of LuckyChap, which has produced notable films like Barbie and Saltburn, as well as its first live off-Broadway production, The Big Gay Jamboree.