Emerald Fennell isn’t mucking about with Wuthering Heights. “Inspired by the greatest love story of all time,” roars the trailer for her new film, blasting us with sodden shirts and brutally tight corsets, bloody sunsets and Versailles-worthy interiors. Margot Robbie’s Cathy strides across a moor in a windswept wedding dress and Jacob Elordi’s ripped Heathcliff licks a wall and growls, “Kiss me and let us both be damned.”
Damn Emily Brontë too because in the hands of Fennell, the writer-director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, this is period drama at its most transgressive and maximalist. As well as ravishing Aussies in the lead roles, we get eye-popping cinematography by Linus Sandgren (La La Land and Dune: Part Three), songs courtesy of the hyperpop princess Charli XCX and the young Heathcliff played by Owen Cooper from Adolescence. An early publicity image for the £60 million film, out on February 13, showed Elordi’s finger in Robbie’s open mouth, and the pair ramped up the steaminess in a photoshoot for Australian Vogue. During the making of the film he apparently filled her hotel room with roses.
Robbie and Elordi ramp up the passion in Wuthering Heights
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Timid this ain’t, and it all starts with Fennell. Richard E Grant, whom the director cast as a haughty aristo in Saltburn, salutes her “fearless, jet-black sense of humour and baroque aesthetic”. Wuthering Heights, he says, is another “story of an outsider wreaking havoc on a hermetically sealed world — class, sexual obsession, doomed romance. I anticipate that her vision will be the polar opposite of polite.”
“I like a physical response… and there’s nothing more physical than Wuthering Heights,” Fennell said on the Ruthie’s Table podcast this week. Brontë’s doomed and, yes, kinky romance is “extremely sexy… It makes you cry, it makes you recoil… It makes you question yourself.” Adapting it has been no moorland picnic. “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book,” she told the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival last year. “There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism [in it]. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published in 1847]. But it’s been a kind of masochistic exercise working on it because I love it so much, and it can’t love me back.”
If anyone can pull it off it’s Fennell, 40, whose career has been powered by audaciousness, imagination and the marble-chiselled self-belief of the posh. The woman with a name like a Farrow & Ball paint shade started as an actress but moved with impressive briskness from playing Nurse Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife and an Emmy-nominated turn as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown to directing darkly glamorous, divisive movies. “In our culture now we get the brakes being put on creatively… We’re afraid of embarrassment,” she told Ruthie’s Table. “I don’t mind being embarrassing.”
First came Promising Young Woman (2020), a blend of feminist black comedy and revenge thriller starring Carey Mulligan as a waitress who entrapped and punished male predators. The film, which Fennell shot in 23 days while heavily pregnant with her first child, earned her three Oscar nominations, including the first best director nod in history for a British woman, and she won for best original screenplay. Not bad for a directorial debut.
• Emerald Fennell on directing her first film, Promising Young Woman
After that she turned up the outrageousness further in Saltburn (2023), a twisted mash-up of Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr Ripley with extra smut in which Barry Keoghan’s lower-class interloper Oliver Quick became obsessed with his fellow Oxford undergrad, the blithe toff Felix (Jacob Elordi). Oliver danced naked through a mansion to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor, drank Felix’s semen-laced bathwater and humped his love object’s burial mound, while Evelyn Waugh spun in his grave. That last scene, Fennell has said, was “sort of inspired” by Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s grave, twice.
She was an “incredible” director on Saltburn, Grant says. “Her jolly-hockey-sticks voice beguiles you into thinking that you’re in for a St Trinian’s escapade, but her dark sensibility skewers that with her unflinching examination of class and sexual obsession. After winning an Oscar, mothering two children under the age of five, leading a crew of 150 and a large cast, she wore her authority very lightly.”
Fennell winning her Oscar for best original screenplay in 2021
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Grant has known Fennell for more than 20 years — a friend of her parents, he first met her in the Nineties at their home in London. “She was 13, already writing stories,” he says, and there was plenty of grist for that mill. Her father, Theo Fennell, is a jewellery designer known as the King of Bling and clients including Madonna, the Beckhams and Elton John, who, legend has it, spent £200,000 on one visit to his shop. Her mother, Louise, is the author of comedy novels about the fast set including Dead Rich and Fame Game, and her younger sister, Coco, is a fashion designer.
Born in London, Fennell boarded at the co-ed Marlborough College in Wiltshire, where the fees are £16,463 a term, teachers are called “beaks” and pupils have the use of a beagle lodge for hunting. The Princess of Wales was a few years above her, the comedian Jack Whitehall a few years below and Sting’s daughter Mickey Sumner, who is now an actress, was in the same boarding house. Other Old Marlburians include Samantha Cameron, the musicians Chris de Burgh, Nick Drake and Fred Again, and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Fennell with her parents, Theo and Louise Fennell, and her sister Coco
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• I’m a Brontë expert. Wuthering Heights has always been a sexy shocker
Class pervades Fennell’s work, as you might expect from someone whose 18th birthday party was featured in Tatler. She once said of her role as Parker Bowles in The Crown: “I’m basically playing a chain-smoking posho standing in a corner making cutting remarks. So it’s not a stretch.” Talking about class in The Sunday Times, she said, “We as a country can’t stop picking that scab,” and she has acknowledged that “a lot of the confidence and ambition that I have comes from an immense place of privilege.”
A lot of her storylines too. She read English at Greyfriars, the Catholic friary that was at the time a private hall of the University of Oxford, indulging a “Brideshead fetish” by striding about in Thirties-style men’s trousers and braces. Affected play-acting like that fed directly into Saltburn, she has said. “So much of everything I make is me trying to come to terms with what an embarrassing person I am.”
Barry Keoghan in Saltburn
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Saltburn was set in the decadent Noughties of Fennell’s own Oxford years, but some of its themes were straight out of today’s social-media age. “We are all in a permanent state of wanting and desire, and of watching other people. The internet has given us access to things we didn’t know we wanted. For me, it’s interior design and properties,” Fennell told the website A Rabbit’s Foot. “Our relationship with this stuff makes us feel kind of ashamed. And that shame makes us hate the things that we want.” As Oliver comes to hate Felix in Saltburn.
Neither that film nor Promising Young Woman was subtle, but both were smart, funny and slap-in-the-face provocative. “When I think of all of the film-makers that I love — and all of the things I love: music, books, everything — none of it is subtle,” Fennell told the NME. “Kubrick is not subtle. Hitchcock is not subtle. Britney is not subtle, but my god can [her song] Everytime kick you in the c***.”
It hasn’t been an entirely smooth upward curve. In 2019 she was the showrunner on the second season of Killing Eve, which, while far from awful, lacked the zing of the first season, which was masterminded by her friend Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The pair have known each other since appearing in the period film Albert Nobbs (2011) and Waller-Bridge has praised Fennell as a “badass” with a “Trojan” work ethic.
Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights
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Other than Killing Eve, there haven’t been many disappointments. Cinderella, the Andrew Lloyd-Webber stage musical for which Fennell wrote the book, in which the heroine is beauty-shamed and Prince Charming comes out as gay, was well received in the West End, although its Broadway transfer, retitled Bad Cinderella, was widely panned. Fennell has also written several young-adult novels, including Shiverton Hall and Monsters, whose creepiness has drawn comparisons with Iain Banks and Neil Gaiman.
Film, though, is her main event and there she owes a debt to her star Robbie — Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were produced by LuckyChap, a company the Australian actress co-founded that specialises in female-focused projects. Wuthering Heights is the first time Fennell has directed her de facto boss, and some have cocked eyebrows at Robbie, 35, playing a character who is a teenager in the book. Fennell shrugged that off, describing Robbie as “the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything. I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind.”
She has also drawn flak for casting Elordi as Heathcliff, who is described by Brontë as “dark-skinned”. That was also smoothly batted away. “You can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” Fennell told The Hollywood Reporter. ““There are so many different takes. I think every year we should have a new one.” She cast Elordi after seeing him on the set of Saltburn one day. “He “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”.
Robbie and Fennell on the set of Wuthering Heights
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Fennell and Robbie make a rum pair — the Marlborough-schooled toff from Hammersmith and the Neighbours-schooled megastar from Queensland. They are linked, though, by a creative fearlessness and roots in the UK. Fennell lives in west London with her husband, Chris Vernon, an advertising executive, and their two young children, while Robbie is married to a Brit, Tom Ackerley, a partner in LuckyChap.
And they are both actresses, of course. Fennell’s poise and vowels were made for period dramas and that’s where her early film roles came: Albert Nobbs, Anna Karenina, The Danish Girl. Her breakthrough, though, was in 2013 in Call the Midwife, for which she dyed her blonde hair red. Pippa Harris, an executive producer of the series, remembers her as “fiercely intelligent, funny and a little bit eccentric. Because she speaks with such a deep, mellifluous voice I think people expected her to be rather prim and strait-laced, which of course is very far from the truth.”
In Call the Midwife, 2017
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One day on set the cast and crew were talking about their passions away from work and Fennell said she had been writing novels. “If I’m honest, my heart sank a little,” Harris admits. “However, when I then read one of her Shiverton Hall kids’ books I was bowled over. I just knew that someone with such an ability to conjure up characters, worlds and stories wasn’t going to be content for long just acting other people’s words.”
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“As a former actor, she perfectly understands that creating a collaborative, communal atmosphere is the way to get the very best from everyone,” Grant says. “She is open to ideas, whilst being very exacting and disciplined, yet always on the edge of laughter. Barry Keoghan f***ing Jacob Elordi’s grave is the perfect example of her willingness to go with an actor’s instinct.”
Robbie and Elordi, like Keoghan, have also been known to take risks — see Saltburn and Barbie for evidence. What awaits us from their Cathy and Heathcliff? With Fennell at the helm, it’s unlikely to be vanilla.
Wuthering Heights is in cinemas from Feb 13