Last week, the main cast of Emerald Fennell’s movie adaptation of Emily Brönte’s “Wuthering Heights” was announced, and the choices are, well, disappointing.
The female lead, Catherine Earnshaw, will be played by Margot Robbie, and the male lead, Heathcliff, will be played by Jacob Elordi.
Wuthering Heights is a gothic romance, centering around the life of Heathcliff and his relentless pursuit to exact revenge on the families he felt have wronged him in the past.
As a child Heathcliff was adopted by the wealthy Mr. Earnshaw, and he grows up alongside Catherine and her brother Hindley. But Heathcliff’s life with the Earnshaws was complicated by the fact that Hindley terrorized him for being dark-skinned, while Catherine loved him but married someone else.
If you are also wondering what business a White, Australian man has playing a character motivated by the racialized violence he faced in his life, you’re not alone.
Known for his roles as Nate in “Euphoria” and Elvis Presley in “Priscilla,” Elordi has established himself as a talented young actor who towers over his female counterparts. He has previously worked with Fennell as the alluring Felix Catton in “Saltburn.” But is being tall really all it takes to get cast as a brooding revenger from the Yorkshire Moors?
While Gothic authors have faced criticism for their representation of dark-skinned characters as representations of evil and unnatural, Brönte justifies Heathcliff’s vengeful and aggressive behavior by detailing the abuse he faced at the hands of the Earnshaw family.
It is essential to Heathcliff’s character that he is a man of color who moves through the world being seen as less than human. Without that complexity of race, Fennell does an injustice to Brönte by categorizing “Wuthering Heights” as an angsty period romance with a moody background.
Margot Robbie, known for her role as Stereotypical Barbie in “Barbie,” is also a unique choice to play Catherine Earnshaw. In the novel, she is described as tomboyish and willful, and I am doubtful of Robbie’s ability to break her typecast of the hyper-feminine ingénue.
Both characters are socially isolated for their non-conformity to English life in this time period, and yet Fennell wants to cast two of the most famous actors in the world at this moment. The casting choice feels antithetical to the source material.
Catherine did not marry Heathcliff solely because he was of a lower social class, they did not marry because interracial marriage would have cast her out from society for the rest of her life. Their love story may be tragic because they were star-crossed lovers, but the layer that race plays in this narrative drove home the fact that they could not have been married no matter how rich Heathcliff became.
Elordi is a fantastic actor – his fame is well-deserved – but he is not the right fit for this role. Heathcliff is not some one-sided, attractive, brooding character who tragically loved a woman who chose to marry someone else.
His dark skin is central to his motivation as a character, and eliminating that aspect of his character denies people of color the little representation in classical literature that is there for them to begin with.
People of color have been systematically erased from media, and Fennell is only contributing to that erasure.