'It's me, I'm Cathy': Robbie asked for Wuthering Heights lead role

Emerald Fennell has revealed that Margot Robbie asked if she could play the lead role in the adaptation of Wuthering Heights before she had approached the actor to do so.

- Sinéad Campbell

Robbie, whose production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, produced the film, asked if she could play Cathy after reading the script. “I sent it to them to produce, and Margot luckily asked if she might play Cathy,” said Fennell in conversation at the BFI Southbank in London.

“I was very nervous to ask her, because I think we have a different relationship, and I didn’t want to put her on the spot,” Fennell said. “I was like: ‘Do I go for it?’ No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t, because she’s braver than me. She asked me.”

However, the decision to cast Robbie in the role of Cathy has led to much scepticism and scrutiny before the film’s release, specifically for its departure from the original 1847 novel by Emily Brontë.

Robbie, 35, plays Catherine Earnshaw, who is written to be in her late teens in the original novel. The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has also been criticised. In the book, the character is described by Brontë to be of “Gypsy” and “lascar” (south Asian) descent, which accounts for the prejudice against him in the book.