Wuthering Heights: Hollywood’s Worst Casting Decisions

The information that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi will star in Emerald Fennell’s retelling of Emily Brontë’s love story has brought on a furore—unsurprisingly in an age of accelerating scrutiny of casting.

Catherine is a youngster dwelling on a farm in England within the late 1700s. Heathcliff is a dark-skinned foundling of about the identical age. Like the heroine and hero of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering HeightsTheir love story has been imagined by numerous readers for the reason that novel was revealed in 1847, however not a lot of these readers could have imagined them as spitting photos of Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Jacob Elordi (Elvis Presley in Priscilla). However, Emerald Fennell will not be like the remainder of us. The Oscar-winning author and director of Promising Young Woman and Burn the salt is making a film based mostly on Wuthering Heights and introduced earlier this week that Catherine and Heathcliff can be performed by two extremely engaging Australians, one aged 34 and the opposite 27.

The on-line response hasn’t been totally constructive. Brontë followers on social media have referred to as the casting “disappointing,” “horrible,” and “weird,” and Independent movie critic Clarisse Loughrey asked: “Did anybody truly learn the guide earlier than making this resolution?”

To be sincere, we don’t know what Fennell has deliberate. Perhaps her adaptation can be a glitzy, irreverent replace with a disco soundtrack and a unadorned dance routine on the windswept Yorkshire moors. But there’s little question that initially look the casting appears essentially, egregiously flawed: it has that baffling, what-were-they-thinking high quality that brings to thoughts a vulgar producer in a Hollywood satire, barking, “Wuthering Heights is a bit uninteresting: let’s have Barbie and Elvis play Cathy and Heathcliff!”

The mistake is because of a number of elements, the elements that separate attention-grabbing and even divisive casting from casting that has enraged residents waving pitchforks on-line. One of these elements is the disparity between the ages of the characters and the actors. When 45-year-old Kevin Spacey starred in Beyond the Sea as Bobby Darin, a singer who died at 37, San Francisco’s Mick La Salle he called him “probably the most embarrassing performances of 2004.” The undeniable fact that Spacey directed, co-wrote and co-produced the movie solely made issues extra awkward.

In the case of Wuthering Heights, one might argue that Fennell was merely following Hollywood custom: Laurence Olivier was 30 when he performed Heathcliff within the basic 1939 movie of the novel. But we’re far more essential of age-inappropriate casting than we was once. With Wikipedia only a click on away, it’s all too simple to verify whether or not a star is stealing a job from a youthful or older actor, and all too tough to disregard. Why, the world questioned, did Oliver Stone forged Angelina Jolie (b. 1975) and Colin Farrell (b. 1976) as mom and son in Alexander (2004)?

We are additionally extra delicate to questions of authenticity and illustration, particularly on the subject of race. Speaking of Olivier, he wore skin-darkening make-up to play Othello within the 1965 movie of Shakespeare’s tragedy, however that might be as unacceptable at this time as Mickey Rooney’s racist flip as Holly Golightly’s Japanese neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), or John Wayne’s as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956). The whitewashing of a number of characters wasn’t the worst factor about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender (2010), for instance, nevertheless it bolstered the impression that the movie received nearly the whole lot flawed.

The downside with Wuthering Heights is that Heathcliff’s blackness is talked about a number of occasions within the novel, so it appears perverse for a brand new movie to disregard it. Considering that Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights featured a black Heathcliff (James Howson), Fennell’s alternative can solely look like a leap within the flawed route.

A extra apparent downside is that each Robbie and Elordi look too polished and glamorous for his or her roles. They belong on a crimson carpet, not a muddy subject. One side of that is that they’ve what’s referred to as “iPhone face” or “smartphone face,” a time period utilized to actors who look too modern to be plausible in a interval drama. When somebody has pearly white tooth, flawless pores and skin, modern hair, and a gym-honed physique, then it is nearly unattainable to imagine that they reside within the days earlier than stylists, nutritionists, and private trainers.

Think Cameron Diaz in Gangs of New York, Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Tom Cruise in Far and Away: all three actors are solely comfy in posh environments within the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. They should not play any character who hasn’t ridden a high-performance motorbike to a seaside in California. As for Robbie herself, in Mary Stuart (2018) performed an aged and jaded Elizabeth I, jealous of the youthful great thing about her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots (Saoirse Ronan). It required a great deal of suspension of disbelief.

However, it’s exactly their appeal that justifies the casting of Robbie and Elordi in Wuthering Heights. When two actors have the recognition and intercourse enchantment that they do, the prospect of seeing them each in the identical movie will, in principle, be an excessive amount of for audiences to withstand. Another small level is that Robbie not solely starred in Barbie, the highest-grossing movie of 2023, he additionally produced it, and he additionally produced Saltburn. If she needs to star in Wuthering Heights, who’s going to cease her? Tom Cruise, once more, isn’t identified for his imposing peak, bulging muscle tissues or blond hair, however he was the A-list producer of the 2 Jack Reacher movies, so when he made the ridiculous resolution to play Lee Child’s large vigilante, nobody was going to say no.

The excellent news is that, no matter Robbie and Elordi could also be, they’re additionally good actors. If anybody could make such problematic casting work, it is them. Finally, we must always understand that issues might at all times be worse. In 1996, there was a Wuthering Heights musical referred to as Heathcliff, starring and co-written by Cliff Richard.

The present opened simply after Richard’s 56th birthday.