The “Wuthering Heights” press tour just keeps getting weirder.
In a new interview with the “Today” show, Margot Robbie, who stars in the film alongside Jacob Elordi, revealed that director Emerald Fennell placed shrines in each of their dressing rooms to help punctuate the tortured romance at the heart of the movie.
An adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name, “Wuthering Heights” casts Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw, one side of a passionate, obsessive and ultimately destructive love story. Elordi plays her other half, Heathcliff.
“At the studio, we both had a dressing room. Emerald went into our dressing rooms and made a shrine of each other in our dressing rooms,” Robbie told “Today.”
“It was so unhinged and so hilarious. And she put, like, locks of hair and pictures of us, candles and made a full shrine,” the actress continued. “Mine was a Jacob shrine. He had a Margot shrine. It was so funny.”
Elordi, whose casting sparked some backlash given the novel’s original description of Heathcliff’s race, said he also found Fennell’s stunt amusing, calling the move “funny” and “fantastic.”
Previous adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” have also cast white actors, including Tom Hardy and Ralph Fiennes, as Heathcliff. One exception is a 2011 film from Andrea Arnold, which cast a Black actor, James Howson, in the role. At the time, The Guardian reported he would be the first Black actor to play the character on film.
Fennell is no stranger to controversy. She made her directorial debut in 2020 with “Promising Young Woman,” which received five Oscar nominations, including best picture, and won best original screenplay. But her follow-up, “Saltburn,” was more divisive, and some viewers reacted negatively to its shocking and provocative sexually explicit content. The film, which starred Elordi opposite Barry Keoghan, was shut out at the Oscars, earning zero nominations.
Contributing: Brendan Morrow, USA TODAY
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