©Courtesy of Z for Zachariah
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are reportedly poised to star in Emerald Fennell‘s upcoming new filmic adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic romance novel, Wuthering Heights.
News of the casting was first reported by Justin Kroll in Deadline, who revealed that the movie will be financed by MRC and produced by LuckyChap. The project would mark the third collaboration between Fennell and LuckyChap, which produced Saltburn and Promising Young Woman. The latter film won Fennell an Academy Award for best original screenplay.
Shooting of Wuthering Heights will start in the UK in 2025, with Robbie starring in the role of Catherine Earnshaw and Elordi playing Heathcliff. Brontë’s original novel, published in 1850, depicted the travails of the Earnshaw and Linton families and their relationship with Heathcliff, the foster son of the Earnshaws. The choice of Elordi, a white Australian actor, has been controversial because Heathcliff is described in the novel as dark-skinned.
Robbie was most recently seen as the star and producer of the Barbie blockbuster, which grossed $1.4 billion globally and garnered eight Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. She will next appear in Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, to be released next year.
Elordi starred in Fennell’s Saltburn and played the role of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which debuted in 2023. He’s also about to star in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses and in a remake of Frankenstein as directed by Guillermo del Toro.
In an interview with Variety in January of this year, Robbie paid tribute to Fennell’s directorial skills in Saltburn by saying: “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 co-founded LuckyChap, which produced Barbie and Saltburn, among other films, as well as its first live off-Broadway production, The Big Gay Jamboree.
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