By Danielle Broadway and Rollo Ross
LOS ANGELES, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Actor Margot Robbie says her romance film “Wuthering Heights” sinks into a love dark enough to wound, describing her Cathy and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff as doomed lovers whose dynamic makes the brooding new adaptation both “sadomasochistic and desperately sweet.”
“I think they’re just a couple who are destined to be doomed,” the “Barbie” actor told Reuters in an interview.
Warner Bros Pictures will roll out British director Emerald Fennell’s film globally in theaters on February 11 to coincide with Valentine’s Day week. The film revisits one of literature’s most enduring and reinterpreted love stories.
Since Emily Brontë published the book “Wuthering Heights” in 1847, its convoluted tale of Cathy and Heathcliff — bound by childhood devotion yet divided by class, privilege and their own self‑sabotaging impulses — has inspired generations of filmmakers, playwrights, musicians and directors.
Robbie and Elordi are both Australians.
“It is ironic that we’re Queenslanders playing two very iconic, you know, English characters but here we are,” Robbie said, referring to Australia’s northeastern state.
The story begins with Cathy’s father deciding to adopt Heathcliff into their household when both are children. While the two are infatuated with each other, they are divided by both class and privilege.
Fennell aims to capture the same sensuousness she has brought to her previous productions, including numerous shots of intimate touch in the film.
“We had a wonderful little gremlin present with us all the time,” Elordi said in an interview.
“It was Emerald Fennell in a raincoat in the bushes near where we’d be doing a scene and she’d be like, ‘Now stroke her hair, now pull her leg up, yes, yes, yes, yes, now, kiss her on the neck if you’re comfortable with that.'”
Fennell, the director of “Saltburn,” also starring Elordi, said in an interview that she sought to depict the nuances of Cathy and Heathcliff, including their imperfections as people and how they often sabotage each other.
“All of the people that I love have things about them that are terrible and I have things about me that are terrible. And I think that’s all part of what makes love so extraordinary is that we forgive and we accept,” Fennell said.
(Reporting by Danielle Broadway and Rollo Ross; Editing by Howard Goller)
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