Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s Transformations

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Wuthering Heights,” now playing in theaters.

“Wuthering Heights” director Emerald Fennell gave her hair and makeup department head, Sian Miller, a mood board of imagery featuring architecture, landscape, fashion, film, photography, food and kids with grass-stained knees. The vision board gave Miller a good idea of the vibe the filmmaker was going for as she brought her longtime obsession with Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, “Wuthering Heights,” to life.

Fennell cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie plays Cathy in this tale of childhood friends turned tortured lovers, kept apart by heartbreaking misunderstandings and their own destructive decisions. When Cathy breaks her ankle while spying on their new neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and his ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver), she ends up staying at Thrushcross Grange, and Edgar becomes besotted with her. Cathy, who’s gotten a taste of the luxurious life, decides to marry Edgar, although her heart really belongs to Heathcliff. When Heathcliff overhears Cathy telling her maid Nelly (Hong Chau) “it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff,” he He doesn’t hear the rest of the conversation about how much she loves him, so he leaves town, and Cathy finds herself in a loveless marriage. That is, until Heathcliff returns to stir things up.

Fennell’s script was detail-laden, which helped Miller create the looks that would tell a story of jealousy, vengeance and lust. Robbie had more than 35 hairstyles for Cathy alone — and, in true Fennell style, “Vagina braids” and “Jesus Elordi” were some nicknames for some of those creations. Miller breaks down how the film’s hair and makeup told its own story, and why Robbie didn’t wash her hair for one key scene.

“Jesus Elordi”

When Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) is brought to Wuthering Heights as a boy, he’s a scruffy and dirty orphan. As he grows older, and Elordi’s version of the character is introduced, Miller rubbed the actor in dirt and even added fake blood to make him look bedraggled. “He’s grown up in the stables, and he should be unkempt. He’s going to hide slightly behind his hair,” Miller explains.

Over the course of the movie, she had two looks for the actor: “It was ‘Jesus Elordi’ and ‘Darcy Elordi’ as Emerald and I mockingly called it,” she says about Heathcliff’s eventual transformation into a clean-shaven gentleman. “Reading the script, [the long-haired look] really rang out. I had the pleasure of knowing Jacob before [from ‘Saltburn’]; I asked him, ‘Can you just grow everything?”

And he did. “He comes back a couple of months later and he’s grown this amazing beard,” Miller recalls. “We went, ‘Wow! This is phenomenal! We’ve got to try and keep the beard.’”

But it wasn’t going to be so simple as letting Elordi rock his natural scruff. Why? As is typical of moviemaking, Heathcliff’s arc wouldn’t be shot in order. Nevertheless, Miller persisted. “I was really, really keen to make that work. So I had to convince Emerald that I could recreate the beard in the Moors.”

Fortunately, she had recently trained with makeup and prosthetics artist Roberto Pastore to learn how to recreate Elordi’s real beard by laying on every individual hair by hand. But, the fake facial hair had to be strong enough to withstand the strong wind and rain planned for the production, so Fennell tested Miller’s handiwork before filming began.

“It was a very kind of nail-biting [experience], and Emerald, outside the studio at Elstree, got the effects guys to hose him with, I likened it to a water cannon with a Rolls-Royce engine,” Miller says. “I said, ‘Please stay on. Please stay on. Please stay on.’”

“Darcy Elordi”

As mentioned, when Heathcliff finally returns after a five-year absence, he is no longer scruffy and unkempt. He has suddenly come into money and has a new suave look, nicknamed “Darcy Elordi.”

“I thought I can just create that style for the Darcy look with him,” Miller says, referencing the iconic character from Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice.” “[Jacob] has great hair to work with and the sideburns. We just knew it was going to suit him, and he would look amazing.”

Young Heathcliff is missing a tooth, so when Heathcliff returns, Miller worked with prosthetic dental appliance creator Chris Lyons from Fangs Effects in the UK to fill the gap. “He made an overlay, an 18-karat gold tooth, and just slotted it over Jacob’s tooth. When he sat around the table in the dining room, and he’s smoking the pipe and smiles, you just see that little sparkle.”

The Vagina Braid

As detailed as Fennell’s script was, the “Vagina hair” was not written in. But having worked with Fennell on “Saltburn,” Miller says, “There were talks of vagina early on,” so she wasn’t shocked when the conversation came up.

Miller worked closely with production designer Suzie Davies, who said, “‘When we get back to Wuthering Heights, there’s going to be this big fissure in the wall where the house is falling apart, and it’s a vagina.’” In another scene, Isabella is given a gift for Christmas, and it’s a pop-up book; metaphorically, it resembles a vagina.

Miller followed suit: “I’d seen something reminiscent of this style in my search — this plait at the back of the head. I thought, ‘If I make it smaller and we dress the hair around it.’ We just called it a ‘Vagina plait.’ That’s what’s great about working with Emerald, you show her things, ‘Oh, vagina plait. Yes, I love that.’ And we gave the hairstyles names. We really spur each other on.”

Doll Braids

When Cathy moves into Thrushcross Grange after her injury, Miller needed to demonstrate a passage of time so that when she returns to Wuthering Heights, there’s a visible transformation.

“It’s the softest, and it’s the most subtle,” Miller says of Cathy’s new look. “There are ribbons in there, and they match the ribbons on the rose dress.”

When she returns to the Grange after marrying Edgar, Isabella’s ribbon room has become Cathy’s dressing room, where she’s told all the dresses are made to her measurement. Then, she’s shown her bedroom where the wallpaper matches her skin — freckles, moles and veins all included.” Isabella also tells her, “There’s hair that I’ve taken from your hair brush that actually is around the top of the bed, and underneath the pedestal tables.”

Isabella, who has led a sheltered, almost naïve life, shows Cathy to her dollhouse to present her with a doll, with braids from Cathy’s hair. “It’s a corset braid,” Miller says of the hairstyle, because of the way the ribbons tie at the bottom together like a corset. “The look on Cathy’s face is disturbing, and so begins this endless round of dress up.”

Isabella has a doll version of herself, too, of course, which captured the way her style compared and contrasted with Cathy’s. “The brief there was that she’s childlike, she’s naive, and Emerald wanted her to have this long, fabulous hair, but it had to be kind of frizzy. It had to be kind of wild,” Miller says. “It had to be adorned with these wonderful headdresses, but sort of in contrast to Cathy, who has the silky, straighter, long hair. she wanted to show [Isbaella] as this very doll-like kind of innocent girl, and quite kooky with the little glasses.”

At this point, Cathy and Isabella are both bored. “We can see that when [Cathy’s] sticking the finger in the fish in aspic. It’s all very wonderful, but it’s not where she wants to be. And so it was the hairstyles had to show that,” Miller says. “It’s really about trying to show as many emotions and as many stages of the story arc as possible, and hair really sings out, and says so much about people and where they’re at and what’s going on.”

Freckles and Horns

The Yorkshire Moors are Cathy and Heathcliff’s playground as young children, and, as adults, a place where they can be alone, so Miller added a subtle detail: freckles.

“They’re exposed to the elements, so they’ve got flushed cheeks,” Miller explains. “Little Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) has freckles, which we then see on the older Cathy.”

Miller worked with prosthetic designer Waldo Mason, who scanned both Mellington and Robbie to produce a vacuum-form mask. “I mapped out freckles onto both Charlotte and Margot, and I was able to translate those,” Miller says, noting that she used a bespoke mixture of durable makeup by Skin Illustrator so she could recreate the freckles in the same way every day and do it quickly.

Miller says, “No matter what I was doing in this, apart from the freedom to come up with a lot of looks, I knew that what I had to do was also do it quickly, because it was a 51-day shoot, it’s not an infinite amount of time. It was a hell of a lot to do. So the pressure was to come up with as much as possible.”

However, as Cathy finds herself indoors more often at Thrushcross Grange, the freckles become less prominent.

What does change is her hair. Heathcliff’s return prompts Cathy to have a more severe look, so Miller put the character in victory rolls, which she nicknamed “horns. The horns allude to the cat-and-mouse game she and Heathcliff play, almost as if she’s taunting him. Miller was inspired by Vivien Leigh’s “Gone with the Wind” look, as that character, like Cathy takes a twisted turn.

Cathy’s Death Look

In Fennell’s adaptation, Cathy dies of sepsis poisoning. She’d been pregnant with Edgar’s child amid her affair with Heathcliff, but after breaking things off with her lover, Cathy one day declares the baby has died inside her, and her health begins to deteriorate.

“Emerald said that she wanted the skin to look like wet concrete and to have that tone about it,” Miller says of Cathy’s bedridden look.

When audiences first see the sepsis on her legs, Miller says, “Emerald was keen that we should try and portray that as accurately as possible.” She adds, “Emerald and I had a meeting with medical advisor, and I’ve done a lot of research into how that can look, and so that was taken from real reference.”

Mason, who had made the freckles, also made a decal for that look. “I punched it up a bit, and then it was a case of a couple of us just placing them together, sort of bit like a jigsaw down the legs, and then free-handing in between to kind of match it all up,” Miller says. “Margot wouldn’t wash her hair for us, just letting it go in great contrast to everything that we’ve had before.”

In an effort to save Cathy, doctors place leeches over her body in hopes of removing the bad blood. Those were created by the art department. “There was an army of us spticking them in place,” Miller says.

It’s an impactful shot when Heathcliff arrives at Thrushcross Grange and learns she has died. When he gets into the bedroom, Cathy is lying on the bed, covered by a sheet.

“Heathcliff comes in and pulls the sheet back, and the contrast between his very livid face — because you can see the exasperation and the flush on his face, cheeks and the sheer desperation that upset everybody,” Miller says. “He’s so alive. He’s never been more alive, and there she is, and it’s the polar opposite.”