Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi to Star in Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’

The director will reunite with her "Saltburn" star Elordi — Robbie had also been a producer on that film.

Emerald Fennell has found her Cathy and Heathcliff. The “Saltburn” and “Promising Young Woman” director had set up an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” at MRC, and now it’s full speed into the moors as Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have joined the project in the lead roles of the doomed lovers.

Elordi is reuniting with Fennell after starring in her nuclear reactor of a social media buzz generator “Saltburn” in 2023, with Robbie’s LuckyChap producing for MRC. LuckyChap produced both “Saltburn” and Fennell’s Oscar-winning debut “Promising Young Woman.”

The film is now in pre-production, gearing up for a UK shoot in 2025. Fennell had already teased the project in a cryptic way, with an Instagram post featuring the title and the tagline “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad.”

Emily Brontë’s only novel, “Wuthering Heights,” published in 1847, established a type of Gothic romance that’s haunted literature ever since. There’s the brooding, maybe dangerous guy in Heathcliff (perhaps the entire idea of the “bad boy” comes from this novel?). The naive, innocent girl in Cathy. And of course the forces that tear them apart, including the class divide between them. And it’s all set in the wild countryside of Yorkshire.

It’s easy to see how this would be appealing material for Fennell, given the potent emotionality (built on injustices, vengeance, and more) of her previous directorial efforts “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn.” And it certainly has been for many before her, including Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation starring Kaya Scodelario, and perhaps the most famous one of all, William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon that powered them both to Hollywood stardom. That film received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won one, for Gregg Toland’s black and white cinematography.

This new adaptation also follow’s Frances O’Connor’s 2022 film about the life of Brontë, who died at the age of 30, simply titled “Emily.” It starred Emma Mackey and was noted for infusing a contemporary sensibility into a period setting.

Robbie’s first appearance onscreen since the world-dominating success of last year’s “Barbie” will be in 2025’s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” from director Kogonada. Elordi will next be seen in Justin Kurzel’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein.” In addition to last year’s “Saltburn,” the “Euphoria” star also portrayed Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.”