Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has hit cinemas with a loose, polarising adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, acting on the sexual tension between protagonists Heathcliff and Cathy, and featuring some BDSM elements in the bond with Isabella.
Heathcliff star Jacob Elordi has recently defended one of the most controversial scenes in the film, which sees Heathcliff and Isabella (Alison Oliver) engage in some light BDSM back at the Heights, with her on all fours, wearing a collar and barking like a dog.
Digital Spy has touched on why transforming the relationship with Isabella softens Heathcliff’s cruelty to push the romantic hero archetype that’s the primary sell of Fennell’s adaptation, though the scene can also be read as giving back some agency to the victimised character, who in the film agrees to a consensual relationship with this toned-down version of Heathcliff.
For his part, Elordi has explained that some of the novel’s darkest moments – at one point in Brontë’s book, Heathcliff hangs Isabella’s dog – were conflated into the collar scene.
“That was so much fun, that scene. I think that was Emerald kind of taking the killing of the dog and these really dark parts of the novel and putting them into this scene,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
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“I had so much fun because it’s at that point that Isabella and Heathcliff are completely off the deep end. They’re living in a kind of hell, you know?”
Elordi said his character lives in “a self-generated hell” as he tries to get the attention of Cathy (Margot Robbie), who never relents and does not set foot at the Heights despite his best efforts to lure her back.
“It’s the moment that his obsession clicks over into something else – into a rabid desperation – and he loses any semblance of composure. It’s a nice point for the character, I think.”
Instead of Cathy, Nelly (Hong Chau) arrives at the Heights to check on Isabella, who continues her dog shtick and insists she is “home,” winking at the housekeeper.
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“You can see it in his face when it’s Nelly at the door, and it’s not Cathy,” Elordi said. “And it’s not working anymore, and the joke is over, which means it’s real, you know? And they have to face it.”
The cheeky wink, a last-minute addition during filming, signifies Isabella being in on the role-play and having broken free of some of the repressive constraints of gilded cage Thrushcross Grange, where she lived with her warden (brother in the book) Edgar.
“I remember [Fennell] saying something really interesting about like, ‘Because [Isabella’s] actually quite a repressed person, and because she’s been so infantilized, anything that is repressed, when it comes out, it’s messy and unorganized,'” Oliver said of crafting her character.
“And she’s in a very unknown, strange, different place. A lot of that was just playing out the mess of the new place that she’s in.”
Wuthering Heights is in cinemas now.
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Reporter, Digital Spy
Stefania is a freelance writer specialising in TV and movies. After graduating from City University, London, she covered LGBTQ+ news and pursued a career in entertainment journalism, with her work appearing in outlets including Little White Lies, The Skinny, Radio Times and Digital Spy.
Her beats are horror films and period dramas, especially if fronted by queer women. She can argue why Scream is the best slasher in four languages (and a half).