The first thing to know about Heathcliff is that he is incredibly messed up. An orphan from Liverpool brought by his new family back to Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors, he becomes the father’s favourite to the detriment of his adoptive siblings, Hindley and Catherine (Cathy). He gets beaten up by Hindley while Cathy falls in love with him. The father dies and Hindley becomes lord of the manor. They boot Heathcliff, Cathy marries someone else, and Heathcliff exacts his revenge over the next 250 pages.
And so to Jacob Elordi. We’ve seen him play Elvis – messed up. The volatile and abusive Nate Jacobs in Euphoria – messed up. The shimmying, dazzlingly posh Felix in Saltburn – not quite as messed up as the freak show that is Oliver (Barry Keoghan), but certainly a little messed up, as everyone who went to boarding school from the age of nine will admit that they are. (They don’t mention this explicitly in the film, but Felix has Years 3-6 at The Dragon School in Oxford written all over him.)
So far, so good. But news that Elordi had been cast as the great hero of Emily Brontë’s novel, in an adaptation by Emerald Fennell, caused outrage. “He’s too young! Too hot! Too Australian!” people clamoured. Most of all, he’s “too white”.
It is impossible to address this last point without revealing a theory about the plot which constitutes a massive spoiler. So, be warned. It is believed by some critics that Heathcliff is the illegitimate son of his “adoptive” father, the result of a liaison with a woman from overseas. But his ethnicity and origin are kept ambiguous. One character describes him as "a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (a Lascar is a dated and pejorative term for a sailor from Southeast Asia, and not a word we’d recommend using now). At other points, he is called a gypsy (ditto). We also know that he is “dark skinned”.
Heathcliff has been played in the past by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy. Who are all, it goes without saying, very white. But that was then and this is now, and the matter of Heathcliff’s race clearly trumps all other points of discussion. Ethnic accuracy is paramount, and Fennell is clearly a monster who should have cast Dev Patel.
Has she even read the book, people asked. The question is: have they? Elordi is of Spanish descent (his father is Basque): do they realise this is one of Heathcliff’s possible origins? And while you could counter-argue that the Victorian inability to tell American, Spanish and Southeast Asian ethnicities apart (as per the quote from the novel above) is appalling – and we should not base our interpretation of character on such racist ideals – isn’t that exactly what puritan readers are suggesting we do? That we stay true, to a fault, to what Emily Brontë wrote?
Elordi is an exceptional actor, capable of unbelievably powerful performances, and far from just a pretty face (read: the hottest man currently roaming the earth).
This is no different to people being up in arms about “miscasting” Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton, Halle Bailey in the live action remake of the Little Mermaid or Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein, which required makeup artists to – how can I put this? – exaggerate his nose. We need to allow artistic licence where reasonable, and casting a hunky Australian whose English accent is on par with Gwyneth Paltrow’s, in an era where makeup artists can age an actor with remarkable verisimilitude, seems reasonable enough. (Although the accent he’ll need to pull off for Heathcliff is quite different from the one he mastered for Felix, it must be said.)
None of this even begins to address the single most important point: that Elordi is an exceptional actor, capable of unbelievably powerful performances, and far from just a pretty face (read: the hottest man currently roaming the earth).
As far as Heathcliff’s otherness is concerned: yes, it is an important part of his character. But the beauty of art – and of a 177-year-old tale of pure fiction – is that the creator (in this case, Fennell) can (and should) be afforded freedom to express that otherness as they see fit. The answer to the Elordi-not-being-a-gypsy conundrum might be found in what former Heathcliff Tom Hardy did with Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. “Bane, quintessentially, is Latinx in origin and I’m not,” Hardy told Wired when the Christopher Nolan film came out in 2012. “So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romani gypsy. The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, and a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer.” He remoulded the movie’s villain to fit an image that he could pull off, and his accent and portrayal garnered plaudits.
The truth is, had Fennell chosen a Southeast Asian actor to play Heathcliff, people would still be up in arms that she hadn't cast one of Roma origin. And vice versa. I think the idea of Margot Robbie as Cathy is just plain silly – not because she’s too old, as some have suggested, but because she’s too Hollywood. Too perfect, too symmetrical, too Bottega. That, and the fact that her production company is behind the film, which suggests the sort of unfair monopoly on par with Google paying Apple $20bn to make them the default search engine on the iPhone.
But as for the outrage over Elordi: this is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. My advice to Fennell: ignore the backlash. And get Kate Bush to do the soundtrack.
