Everything to Know About Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights

For her third feature film, Emerald Fennell will once again tell a story of class, gender, and violence, this time putting her stylized spin on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The Gothic romance, a masterpiece of 19th-century literature, has been translated to the screen before, including a recent 2011 version with Skins star Kaya Scodelario as heroine Catherine Earnshaw. But Fennell isn’t known for making traditionalist films, and her take on Wuthering Heights will be “inspired by” rather than a faithful adaptation of the classic 1847 novel.

"I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it's an emotional response to something,” the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman director told the BBC in September. “It's, like, primal, sexual.” If the film’s first trailer is any indication, she’s certainly done just that. Read on for everything we know about Wuthering Heights so far:

Who is in the Wuthering Heights cast?

Margot Robbie will play Catherine Earnshaw, one-half of the tragic couple at the center of the story. Robbie and Fennell worked together on Barbie (Fennell had a brief part as Midge, if you missed it). Robbie is also producing Wuthering Heights through her company, LuckyChap.

Catherine’s unrequited lover, the troubled Heathcliff, will be played by fellow Aussie Jacob Elordi. This marks the second time Elordi will play the object of intense obsession in a Fennell film, following 2023’s Saltburn (it’s also his second Gothic romance in as many years, after starring as The Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein).

There has been some criticism over Elordi’s casting, given that Heathcliff is ambiguously described in Brontë’s book as being “dark-skinned.” Of her decision to cast him as her lead, Fennell told the BBC that Elordi “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read,” adding, “I had been thinking about making [Wuthering Heights], and it seemed to me he had the thing... he’s a very surprising actor.”

The cast is rounded out by Adolescence breakout Owen Cooper as young Heathcliff, Hong Chau as Nelly Dean, Alison Oliver as Isabella Linton (and Vy Nguyen as her younger counterpart), Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, and Martin Clunes as Mr. Earnshaw.

Is there a trailer?

The first full Wuthering Heights trailer was released on November 13. True to the storyline of a tortured, forbidden love between Heathcliff and Catherine, the clip includes several scenes of longing, sighing, and passionate embraces between the doomed pair in the misty English countryside.

How is Charli xcx involved?

The pop singer—who has made her own foray into acting recently with roles in films like the upcoming The Moment—provided the music for Wuthering Heights, creating an entirely new album of original songs for the film. The first release from the soundtrack, “House,” features The Velvet Underground’s John Cale reciting an original poem over an eerie cello accompaniment and a post-industrial beat.

“This collection of songs is an album, and sure, my name’s on the credits, but is it a Charli xcx album? I don’t even know. Nor do I really care to find out,” Charli recently wrote in an essay on Substack. “All I know is that it’s a celebration of my freedom as an artist right now and that I feel passionate about what I’ve created and how it’s been created...When I listen to this music, in ways it takes me back to my first album, True Romance. There’s something nostalgic about it, something cyclical, like I’m re-embracing the gothic and my earlier touch points. I’m writing through the lens of the screenplay I read and only occasionally checking in with my own internal narratives. Most likely it’s not something I will tour. I’d just like the songs to live as songs, within and adjacent to the film.”

When is the release date?

Wuthering Heights will be in theaters on February 13, 2026, just in time for Valentine’s (or maybe more fittingly, Galentine’s) Day.