- - Emerald Fennell defends her changes to “Wuthering Heights”: 'You've got to make those hard decisions'

Emlyn TravisFebruary 14, 2026 at 1:00 AM

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Emerald Fennell; Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in 'Wuthering Heights'

Tristan Fewings/Getty; Warner Bros.

This article contains spoilers for Wuthering Heights.

Emerald Fennell is well aware that her version of Wuthering Heights contains some major differences from Emily Brontë's 1847 novel.

The writer-director, who fell in love with the gothic classic as a teenager, tells Entertainment Weekly that she began developing the film's script by challenging herself to recall as much as she could about its tragic story.

"It was funny, you know, I think the things that I remembered were both real and not real," she says. "So there was a certain amount of wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I'd sort of forgotten or consolidated."

It also became clear early on to Fennell that she "wanted to make something that was my response and interpretation to that book and to the feeling of it" rather than a direct adaptation of Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff's (Jacob Elordi) star-crossed relationship and its multi-generational fallout.

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in 'Wuthering Heights'

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

"When you look at not just other movie adaptations of this, but Kate Bush's song, or Balthus' lithographs, or a lot of the kind of contemporary illustrations, most of them tend to focus on Cathy and Heathcliff," she says. "Because I think that's really the moment that draws to an end in the book."

As a result, Fennell's take on Wuthering Heights focuses primarily on the first half of the novel, which details Cathy and Heathcliff's relationship. This approach required the director to make "hard decisions" on what additional characters and plot points to include.

"And I think, really, I would do a mini series and encompass the whole thing over 10 hours, and it would be beautiful," she says. "But if you're making a movie, and you've got to be fairly tight, you've got to make those kinds of hard decisions."

'Wuthering Heights'

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

That meant cutting characters like Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff's nosy new neighbor who learns of his and Cathy's tumultuous affair through the grapevine, as well as Heathcliff and Cathy's jealous and rageful brother, Hindley.

"Hindley still exists, I believe, but in the form of Earnshaw," Fennell explains, referring to Cathy and Heathcliff's father, played by Martin Clunes. "I tried to, wherever I could, gather people together in the same way that we don't have Lockwood, either. It's such a complicated structure, the novel, that really it would have been very, very difficult to turn that into a coherent movie because it would just be much more time."

Mr. Earnshaw's role is greatly expanded in Fennell's film, transforming him into a complex character whose alcohol addiction has a real effect on everyone around him.

"It was [about] taking, 'What is it about Hindley? What is it about his relationship with his sister and his half-brother, I suppose, in Heathcliff? And how does it shape their lives? How did the love of their father shape their lives?'" Fennell explains. "And so what we have instead is a character who is both, who is like, I think, a lot of people who know alcoholics… extremely, deeply loving and charismatic, and on the other hand, extremely abusive and cruel."

Earnshaw's involvement in the film also reminds viewers that Heathcliff and Cathy are "pseudo-siblings," Fennell notes. He is, after all, the one who brings Heathcliff home one evening and raises him as his own.

"There's a lot about the book — and probably the film, too — that is transgressive, complicated, difficult, dark," she says. "It's why there's still so much argument about whether it is a love story or not. Of course, I believe firmly that it is a love story, which is why I think it's endured for so long. That's not to say it's a love story that's easy or healthy, but it's extremely potent nonetheless, like a lot of love affairs."

Emerald Fennell and Margot Robbie on the set of 'Wuthering Heights'

Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.

In addition to removing characters, Fennell also makes several significant changes to the ending of Wuthering Heights. In her version, Cathy loses her and Edgar's (Shazad Latif) child and is, perhaps most heartbreakingly, not visited by Heathcliff before her death as in the book. Instead, she speaks to him in a fever-induced fugue state, but he is not actually present.

Fennell explains that the decision to keep Heathcliff and Cathy apart in the end is "partly structural" and also to showcase how the doomed pair can't get on the same page.

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"There are about three different meetings and three different speeches, and so part of it was consolidating that," she says. "But also, we talk a lot about Romeo and Juliet and, obviously, when we meet Isabella, she's talking about that kind of story and about that missed thing, and I feel so much that Cathy and Heathcliff's [romance] was about missing each other. And so what I did was I brought a lot of the love forward, and a lot of those really important conversations forward, to give them some time so that it didn't just happen at the end."

The film also closes with Cathy's death and, notably, does not depict her return to Wuthering Heights as a ghost begging to be reunited with Heathcliff, as in the novel. Fennell explains why she felt that it was a fitting end for Cathy and Heathcliff's romance.

"It begins where it ends and ends where it begins," she says. "And that's the thing about love, and it's the thing about the book, right? It's that it's forever and it's cyclical, and so there's no stop — even when there's a terrible, sad, tragic stop, it's not really a stop — because that's what the book feels so much about."

She adds, "It's about the depths of human feeling and how it exists in a profound way, not just a physical one. And so that, I don't know, that felt like the right way to end it for me."

Wuthering Heights is in theaters now.

on Entertainment Weekly

Original Article on Source

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