Margot Robbie has noted your concerns about Wuthering Heights. She just asks that you wait for the movie, please.
The Australian star has finally decided to address the storm of criticism that has enveloped Saltburn director Emerald Fennell’s new vision of the classic gothic romance by Emily Brontë.
“I get it,” she acknowledged in a new interview with British Vogue, “there’s nothing else to go off at this point until people see the movie.”
The Barbie star thinks that, at the very least, people should be relieved that Jacob Elordi, who’s best known for HBO’s Euphoria and director Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, is her leading man.
Warner Bros.
“I saw him play Heathcliff, and he is Heathcliff,” Robbie said. “I’d say, just wait. Trust me, you’ll be happy. It’s a character that has this lineage of other great actors who’ve played him, from Laurence Olivier to Richard Burton and Ralph Fiennes to Tom Hardy. To be a part of that is special. He’s incredible, and I believe in him so much. I honestly think he’s our generation’s Daniel Day-Lewis.”
Robbie portrays Heathcliff’s lover Catherine in this reimagining of the novel first published in 1847.
The star of movies such as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Wolf of Wall Street, Suicide Squad, and I, Tonya, noted that, while the movie looks sexy, she wasn’t in that place in her real life.
“I was three months postpartum when we started shooting,” Robbie said. “So I was in a very different headspace. I didn’t do my usual routine. It was more haphazard. And I remember saying to Emerald, ‘What if I’m not prepared enough?’ She kept saying, ‘I don’t want you to prepare. I just need you to be in the moment.’ Which was a lovely way of relieving my anxiety. It was about being in my body as opposed to my head.”
(Robbie gave birth to her first child, whom she shares with husband Tom Ackerley, in October 2024.)
Director Fennell, whose previous directing credits also include Promising Young Woman, has said that the story became an instant favorite when she first read it at 14.
“I’ve been obsessed,” she said at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in September. “I’ve been driven mad by this book. I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it’s an emotional response to something. It’s, like, primal, sexual.”
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Fennell said then, “If somebody else made it, I’d be furious.”
Still, Robbie assured Vogue that the movie was in the same category as sweeping love stories such as The Notebook and The English Patient.
“Everyone’s expecting this to be very, very raunchy,” Robbie told the magazine. “I think people will be surprised. Not to say there aren’t sexual elements and that it’s not provocative — it definitely is provocative — but it’s more romantic than provocative. This is a big epic romance.”
Wuthering Heights arrives in movie theaters Feb. 14, 2026.