‘Wuthering Heights’ casting director defends Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi choices

From the moment news broke that Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie would be starring in a new adaptation of Wuthering Heights from director Emerald Fennell, some fans have questioned whether they’re the right actors for the roles.

Now the project’s casting director is offering some insight into Fennell’s vision and hinting that the filmmakers are looking to put their own spin the source material.

“There’s definitely going to be some English lit fans that are not going to be happy,” casting director Kharmel Cochrane said during a recent Q&A at the Sands International Film Festival of St. Andrews in Scotland, according to Deadline Hollywood. Some of the backlash to Elordi and Robbie’s casting in the adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel was so extreme, Cochrane said she encountered “one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot.”

Kochrane, who cast Fennell’s previous film Saltburn and has worked on films by Alex Garland and Robert Eggers, joked that fans ought to “just wait [until] you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not… But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”

Robbie is set to play Catherine Earnshaw, a spirited young woman who is torn between the restrained and polite Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and the brooding rogue Heathcliff (Elordi) among the gloomy moors of West Yorkshire.

Some observers have balked at Robbie’s casting due to her age (the character describes herself as “almost 17” in the novel, and Robbie is 34) and the decision to keep her hair blonde, as seen in a recent set photo (Brontë describes Catherine as having “brown ringlets”). But much of the controversy centers on Elordi’s casting.

Heathcliff is described as a “foundling,” or orphan, who is discovered in Liverpool, taken home by the Earnshaws, and raised as a foster son. Brontë makes repeated reference to Heathcliff’s skin color and hair in lines like “He is a dark skinned-gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman,” and in one scene the character even pleads, “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin.”

While scholars have speculated that the character may have African or Romani roots, Heathcliff’s origins are left deliberately vague in Wuthering Heights.

There have been plenty of film and TV adaptations of the novel in the nearly two centuries since its publication, most of them casting fair-skinned white actors like Ralph Fiennes and Laurence Olivier in the role of Heathcliff. Andrea Arnold broke the mold with her 2012 adaptation, however, by casting two actors of Afro-Caribbean descent, James Howson and Solomon Glave, as the older and younger versions of Heathcliff.

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Cochrane also gestured to some pushback to the set photo of Robbie wearing a modern-looking white wedding gown by quipping, “Wait until you see the set design because that is even more shocking… And there may or may not be a dog collar in it.”

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is slated to hit theaters Feb. 13, 2026.