There are few books as compelling to Hollywood as Emily Brontë’s Gothic classic, “Wuthering Heights.” The Victorian era novel has been adapted, yet again, for the big screen by “Saltburn” filmmaker and British actress Emerald Fennell.
The latest in a long list of adaptations, the “Wuthering Heights” film, which opens in theaters Friday, has been ripped apart online by Brontë fans for several reasons: the story being marketed as a romance, the removal of the second half of the book from the movie, and the amped-up sexuality of the plot, to name a few. But no choice of Fennell’s has faced more scrutiny than her decision to cast Australian actor Jacob Elordi as the brooding, morally torn Heathcliff.
Heathcliff, first described in the book as “a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” is repeatedly depicted in a derogatory way with racial undertones by a slew of characters, including Nelly, a servant to the Earnshaw family; neighbor Edgar Linton; the novel’s narrator, Mr. Lockwood; and of course, Hindley, his beloved Catherine’s older brother.
Brought to the Wuthering Heights estate by Catherine and Hindley’s father, Heathcliff is originally found roaming the streets of Liverpool (the preeminent European slave-trading port in the 18th and 19th centuries), speaking “some gibberish that nobody could understand.” While Mr. Earnshaw and Cathy quickly take to the young boy, newly named Heathcliff, Hindley cannot stand the sight of him and the two launch into an animosity-filled feud that spans years (and generations).
Hindley, who is not in the movie and appears to have passed on his less-than-stellar attributes to his father’s character instead, maliciously refers to the novel’s Heathcliff as an “imp of Satan,” “a beggarly interloper,” and a “little Lascar,” Lascar being a term for Southeast Asian sailors in Victorian England. Once Hindley’s father dies, and he becomes the master of Wuthering Heights, things get exponentially worse for Heathcliff, who is now forced to the status of a servant, has his education halted, and is made to work in the fields.
Hindley’s initial hatred of Heathcliff can be based on many things: the remaining Earnshaws’ preference for him, his perceived inferior class due to his past, and also his ambiguous race. While experts have long debated Heathcliff’s origins, there is no denying that he is something that makes him “other” to the rest of British society at the time.
Was he Romani, as the use of the “gipsy” slur and later being described to resemble a fortune-teller suggest? Perhaps a mixed-race child of Black origins, with Nelly referring to him as not “a regular Black”? Did he come from a blend of ethnicities where his father was the “Emperor of China” and his mother “an Indian queen,” as Nelly once remarks to cheer him up? Maybe he was an aforementioned Lascar? Or Irish, in a time when they were seen as savages by the Englishmen? Despite centuries of research, there is no definitive answer.
Claire O’Callaghan, a senior lecturer in Victorian literature at Loughborough University, contends that’s the whole point.
“The ambiguity is really inclusive, because he, as a character, then speaks to a range of people, cultures and communities who were impacted by colonialism and who were othered and abused and oppressed,” says O’Callaghan. “Some people have said, ‘Well, maybe Emily didn’t know exactly who or what he is.’ I’m not sure I agree with that. I think that she’s been deliberately powerful in how she is representing everything, because that’s what novelists do.”
Andrea Kaston Tange, a professor of Victorian literature at Macalester College, referred to Brontë’s decision to make Heathcliff different as an “unavoidable nod to the wealth that was made in ways that people in the North of England themselves were not really willing to talk about.”
“He’s symbolic in a sense, of when you give something a name, call them what you want to, and then erase their actual past. There’s a long history of that,” Kaston Tange says in reference to Victorian England. “The set of associations that a nameless child of color who appears off the streets of Liverpool in the middle of the 19th century is important to register, which is why I think casting him as a man who can slot himself into the upper middle class and look like he belongs there seems like a weird choice.”
To argue that Brontë was unaware of the racial tensions brewing in her country and around the world, as some have suggested, or completely disregard the possibility of Heathcliff being a person of color is “naive,” according to O’Callaghan.
“[The Brontë children] were writing stories about colonialism from when they were young,” explains O’Callaghan, who is a longtime biographer of the family. “In the late 1820s, they created a federation, initially called Glasstown, that was based on Africa, where they had British toy soldiers going to this land, setting up camp, and taking over. Those stories feature Indigenous populations being moved out of the way for British imperialistic soldiers. They wrote those narratives for several years, and even though there’s lots of romance in them, these are stories about colonialism. Within that, we get a few different characters of color, who are very often oppressed people who are abused.”
Although the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807, slavery in America existed throughout Brontë’s life, and was eventually abolished in 1865, 17 years after her death. During her lifetime, “questions around enslavement and abolition were at the forefront of British politics,” according to The Brontë Parsonage Museum, adding that the Brontë family was known to read the newspapers and had close relationships with abolitionists. The museum’s website further commented, “It’s interesting that Emily chose to set ‘Wuthering Heights’ in a time when the transatlantic slave trade was a large part of the economy in Britain.” (While Brontë’s life spanned from 1818 to 1848, the plot of “Wuthering Heights” begins in 1771, when Heathcliff is brought to the Heights.)
Fennell is not the first director to cast a white actor as Heathcliff. Previous versions of “Wuthering Heights” starred Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Ralph Fiennes, making James Howson the first person of color to play Heathcliff in an English language adaption with Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film. Nonetheless, many see it as a missed opportunity for a person of color to play Heathcliff.
“It’s not a response to an individual case, but really a cumulative response to decades of erasure,” says Soraya Giaccardi Vargas, a senior researcher at the USC Lear Center’s Media Impact Project. “The reality is that BIPOC communities overall are severely underrepresented in media. Regardless of the historical context of the storyline, any time in which there was an opportunity to showcase an actor of color and the decision is made against that, it raises a lot of feelings about whether or not the worthiness of those communities is really understood.”
The always-topical issue of diversity in Hollywood has most recently been in the spotlight after Odessa A’Zion’s casting as a Mexican woman in the upcoming film “Deep Cuts.” A’Zion quickly withdrew from the project upon backlash, stating she was unaware of her character’s origins, a move for which Giaccardi Vargas and others have commended her.
“Media is one of the many things that impacts our understanding of the world, but it’s a very important part. There’s a concept in the field of communications called symbolic annihilation, and it describes how the underrepresentation and the misrepresentation of social groups actually functions to uphold and maintain social inequity,” explains Giaccardi Vargas, who specializes in researching representation and inclusion in media. “The omission of certain groups on screen signals their lack of societal value and erases them from our public consciousness.”
Fennell recently faced a second wave of fury when she responded to the criticism over Elordi’s casting at the Los Angeles premiere of “Wuthering Heights” on Jan. 28. The director defended her creative liberties by adding quotation marks to the film’s title to signal it being an interpretation and said, “You can only kind of ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.”
“[Wuthering Heights] is obviously a book that means a great deal to [Fennell] and she’s talked about where [the movie’s inspiration] comes from, in terms of her first reading it at 14 or 15,” says O’Callaghan. “But one of the things people are saying is, ‘Well, even if you read it when you were younger, how did you not see these things? What did you understand by the term Lascar or the racial slur of gypsy?’”
Kaston Tange says that the books she read as a teenager now seem vastly different as an adult, “I can understand the argument of ‘I read it when I was young, so I missed some stuff.’ But now that you’re not 15, and you’re directing a movie, you should pay attention to all of it and not just [Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship] because that’s not really what the book is.”
Interestingly, the unambiguously white characters of Nelly Dean and Edgar Linton are portrayed by people of color, something that is never addressed in Fennell’s film.
“I think it confuses everything to no purpose because it obscures whatever critiques existed in the 19th-century novel in order to turn it into a ‘bodice ripper,’” says Kaston Tange, who argues that mixing up the Victorian codes for class significantly changes the plot’s messaging, reducing it to just a love story.
“It’s a book about love and hate. It’s a book about cruelty and passion, about eroticism, despair, rejection, grief, loss, haunting, and all of those things,” says O’Callaghan. “[It] is far more complex than being pigeonholed into any one thing.”
While those in the literary world remain divided in opinion, there is one indisputable fact: Fennell’s adaptation is causing interest in the novel to skyrocket. Sales of Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” in the United States more than doubled in 2025 compared with the previous year, reaching 180,000 print copies, while the United Kingdom saw a whopping 469% increase with over 10,600 copies sold in January 2026 compared to 1,875 in January 2025.
“I’m loving that people are reading and rediscovering this book. [But] I’m seeing people watching the trailer and looking at some of that content, and then being quite shocked because [the book] isn’t what they were expecting,” says O’Callaghan. “No adaptation can ever really capture a novel, let alone a long, complex book like ‘Wuthering Heights.’ As long as people accept that and they do go and read the book, I think that’s really great.”