Emerald Fennell: OK, so number-one question: Jacob, is this your favourite film you’ve ever seen?

Jacob Elordi: Yes, and it’s also my favourite film I’ve been in. [...]

EF: Do you think it was a threat? A warning? Do you think it was one of your giant handbags? There were lots of hauntings when we were making Wuthering Heights. It was back-to-back hauntings, but we kept things from the actors because you’re such sensitive characters.

JE: A frightful bunch.

EF: A fearful, scared, skittish bunch. But we were all haunted constantly. It was really weird because it felt so right. We stayed in lots of beautiful hotels in Yorkshire and in one hotel, me and Linus [Sandgren], the cinematographer, had bedrooms next door to one another. One night, I kept on waking up with someone tapping on my forehead.

JE: It was just me asking for monologues.

EF: “Can I get coverage? Make sure people see how tall I am.” But this thing tapping me on the forehead wanted me to put the television on. It was very insistent. In my mind I was like, “I’m sorry, I can’t put the telly on, I’ve got to be up really early in the morning.” The next day I went down for breakfast and told the crew. Then Linus came down five minutes later and said, “It’s so fucking weird” — I’m not going to do the Swedish accent — “I couldn’t sleep last night because the television kept turning on and off.” This kind of stuff happened all the time, which is to say that I think we were very in touch with the spiritual world while making this film. Did you feel in touch with the spiritual world while making this film, Jacob?

JE: Yeah, something peculiar that happened while we were filming was when Siân [Miller], the make-up artist, was designing the scars from the whips for Heathcliff’s back. She challenged me: “If Daniel Day-Lewis was playing Heathcliff, he would have come in with scars.” I said, “Well I’m going to go

away and maim myself on the weekend to prove to you that I’m Heathcliff!” That night I went home, and the house I was staying in had a steam shower: a brass knob that steam came from out of the wall; I was sitting on the floor of the shower…

EF: You were sitting on the floor?!

JE: The full story is that, when I was doing Frankenstein, I had so much make-up in my fingers and in my feet all the time, and I left it on for the whole shoot because I couldn’t be bothered washing it all off. As Heathcliff, I was covered in mange and dirt, and I thought, “I’m not going to do that again, I’m going to clean my feet properly every night and come in to work fresh the next day.” So I went to clean my feet, and I leant back and my back seared into the steam knob and I stood up screaming; it tore up my back. When I went to work on Monday I had a second-degree burn.

EF: I think that was in the first week of shooting. I got a text from Josey McNamara, the producer, saying, “Jacob’s in hospital.” Obviously I thought, “Oh my god, he’s had a car accident,” and then he was like, “He’s burnt his back in the shower.” I was like, “You know what, Josey? Start with that.” Do

you think it was the spirit of Daniel Day-Lewis?

JE: It was actual Daniel Day-Lewis. In the shower. But I did feel something spiritual when we got to the Moors for the first time, when we stepped out in our costumes on this endless plain. You can see where the book came from when you’re there. You can feel it. [...]

EF: [...] When you said yes to Wuthering Heights had you even read the script? Or did I just text you?

JE: No, I was in Indonesia, and you just WhatsApped me, “Wanna play Heathcliff?” And I wrote back, “Yeah.” And then you said, “Cool, I’ll send you the script.” And that was it.

EF: And that’s how dreams are made. You did send me my favourite ever picture, which was a picture of the script covered in your tears. The most emo thing…

JE: Ha! I was in an Airbnb in Santa Barbara because I took myself away to read the script. I was sitting on the back porch having a coffee and I read the last scene and I just… leaked. I was leaking all over the screenplay and I sent you a picture. I’m pretty sure everyone else in the cast had a similar…

EF: No! Haha. That’s why I love working with you, because you’re really honest about your feelings. And that was the aim of this movie: to make everyone cry so much that they would throw up.

JE: I watched it with Mum last week and we were both looking at each other, and I shouldn’t say this, because it’s me in the movie, but my head was aching. We wanted to stop weeping but couldn’t because it’s relentlessly sad and sensitive and very personal from you.

EF: He’s trying to imply that I have emotions.

JE: I remember we were texting when the film was going somewhere, and when you chose to make the film at Warner Bros and turn down an enormous sum of money — which is no secret, it’s in the press — so that the film could go to cinemas. It’s why, when you say, “Wanna play Heathcliff?” I say “Yes.” [...]

EF: We do need communal experiences. After Covid, everyone wants to go and connect. It’s why Charli [xcx]’s music for this is so amazing. Everyone wants to go dance. One of the first cinema experiences I ever had was watching My Girl and it destroyed my life. It was my birthday and I was five or six. I was like, “Why did you do this to me? You let me see Macaulay Culkin, the boy of my dreams — spoiler alert — get stung to death by a swarm of bees while getting the love of his life’s mood ring.” It’s evil. But from that to Titanic to [Baz Luhrmann’s] Romeo + Juliet to Armageddon, if you please, that experience of going into a packed theatre and all of you fucking crying and feeling sexy and having an experience, it’s about bringing back that feeling. It gives me the ick whenever someone says, “I use ChatGPT.” It’s like, “Grow up, get a pen and write something down. Make something.”

JE: We’ve designed this thing that has tricked young people and made them all addicted to a new form of content and a new form of life and then we blame them for it. But I think they’re going to turn around and want more, because they’re human beings and they have millions of years of evolution and human history and culture; real things are in their DNA. And when they do turn around, it’s everyone’s job to make sure that there’s things there for them to digest. Does that make sense? That’s a terrible way of explaining it, but that’s how I feel about movies now particularly.

EF: It’s also so that they can participate. Wuthering Heights was 600 people, maybe more, constructing stuff from scratch. Their work is real and specific and detailed and that’s the pleasure of it, as long as we can keeping makingstuff.

JE: It’s important to say that it’s important just because.

EF: Just because. But also, crucially, it’s sexy, fun and cool. [...]

JE: But I feel very afraid. The older I get, the more nervous I get, and I was afraid of Wuthering Heights; it was a big movie, and the crew was big and the sets were big.

EF: Yes, and also Margot is the biggest star in the world and you’re playing opposite each other. It’s fucking big. I came to work some days and was like,“Shit, I’m in charge of this.”

JE: I try to make sure I’ve turned every stone and looked in every corner before playing a character, but the truth is you can’t. But the fear comes from: have I looked enough? Have I studied enough? Have I read enough? Because, like you said, there’s 600 people there that have put so much work and effort in, who’ve toiled and waited and not seen their families, and then you need to come in and put a layer onto the cake. There is a pressure that you’re not going to be what people want you to be. There will probably always be an imposter element to acting for me, just because I dreamt about it so intensely that it almost feels like it couldn’t have happened. (Miranda Collinge) 

2026 may have just started, but we’re already thinking about another year. Specifically, the year 1801. Why? Because it’s “Wuthering Heights” winter and we’re flashing back to Emily Brontë’s 19th-century moors! [...]

Brontë’s classic has long been a favorite among readers, and this February the novel is getting a new film adaptation directed by Emerald Fennell, and starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. The movie has catapulted “Wuthering Heights” back into the zeitgeist and reinspired frenzy for Brontë’s moors.

That’s why, in February, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “Wuthering Heights.” We’ll be chatting about it on the Book Review podcast that airs on Feb. 27 and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by Feb. 18, and we may mention your observations in the episode.

Our 1939 feature story went behind the scenes of Samuel Goldwyn’s celebrated film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” and paraphrased Emily’s equally renowned sister, Charlotte, in assessing the allure of the novel: “‘Wuthering Heights’ was hewn in a wild workshop, in the literature of the screen as in literature. And the amazing, the incredible thing is that it has come so well-hewn to its new medium. We must not say that its spirit has survived Hollywood, for that would be misinterpreted; rather that its spirit is enduring, in one medium and another, which proves that Emily Brontë’s strange and twisted novel is a true classic, ageless and imperishable.” Read the full article here.

Our 2012 article about the challenges of adapting “Wuthering Heights”: “With more than a dozen film versions, Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ is something of a cultural touchstone for ill-fated love. The title alone conjures up images of a brooding Heathcliff and a delicate Cathy clinging to each other or suffering alone on the Yorkshire moors. For many fans, the characters are synonymous with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the 1939 movie. And yet, at least when it comes to screen adaptations, the novel may be the most misunderstood book of all time.” Read the full article here. [...]

LitHub’s 2018 article rounding up what famous authors (like Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, and more) have said about “Wuthering Heights.” You can read the full story here. (MJ Franklin)

Also known as domestic suspense or domestic noir, the term generally encompasses psychological thrillers that are set in the home or neighborhood; interrogate familial or community relationships; and, usually, center around female characters. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, with its haunted female narrator and madwoman in the attic, retroactively fits this brief. [...]

Big Little Lies made wealth disparity a crucial ingredient of the new domestic thriller. Like Jane Eyre—a governess who fell for her affluent employer—Woodley’s character, a young single mother, is a broke outsider in an exclusive community. Yet instead of marrying a local bigwig, she recognizes one of them as her son’s rapist father, catalyzing his demise. Storylines like this, in our age of escalating eat-the-rich sentiment, allow viewers to vicariously enjoy beautiful homes and high-maintenance bodies while also fantasizing about (or, for more comfortable audiences, safely exploring fears of) class warfare. (Judy Berman)

   

If “Wuthering Heights” is a romance, it is the kind with more seething than swooning. Sure, its characters caress every hundred pages or so. But mostly it’s a lot of trudging across frosty moors, beating back mysterious illnesses and offloading anger on the next generation.

Yet the book, Emily Brontë’s only novel, is revealing its prickly charms to a new wave of readers.

The occasion is a movie adaptation from the director Emerald Fennell that will arrive in theaters just before Valentine’s Day. In preparation, thousands of people have picked up its source material, a Gothic tale of obsession and resentment published in 1847, the year before its author’s death.

Some are greeting an old friend, or at least an old high school assignment. Others are new to Thrushcross Grange.

“My ego won’t let me go see the movie without reading the book,” said Aadi Miglani, 23, who works in academic publishing in New York and is reading the novel for the first time. (No spoilers, please: She is on Chapter 18.)

Sales of “Wuthering Heights” more than doubled in 2025 compared with the previous year, reaching 180,000 print copies in the United States, according to Circana Bookscan, a publishing industry tracker. Six bookstores reached by phone and email reported a bump in sales after September, when a trailer was released featuring the movie’s stars, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, looking windswept and broody.

“You’re the fourth one we’ve sold today,” Stephanie Valdez, the owner of Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, told a reporter who came in for a copy during her lunch break.

The 179-year-old novel has become the first assignment on the 2026 pop culture syllabus with help from Vogue, which selected it as the first pick for its new book club. It also got a clout boost from the singer Charli XCX, who is releasing a companion album to the film.

During a period of hand-wringing about young people’s reluctance to read books, readers seem to be approaching “Wuthering Heights” as a collective undertaking. They are dissecting the novel in book clubs and group chats, scratching the same itch for group experiences as running clubs and board game nights. Lately, social media is teeming with testimonials from readers who are Brontë-maxxing.

“74 pages into wuthering heights and why did nobody tell me that reading this is like eavesdropping on the most unhinged gossip you’ve ever heard,” went a TikTok summary posted by Toini Ilonummi, 30, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I’m obsessed.”

On an 18-degree Saturday in January, a crowd of bundled-up readers filed into P&T Knitwear, a bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the online book club Belletrist and the romance publisher 831 Stories were hosting a three-hour “read-in” of the book.

About 20 attendees, mostly young women, paged through either crisp new paperbacks or dog-eared editions that they had gotten as students. One marked passages with a lime green highlighter, while another kept her place with a bookmark decorated with pictures of the actor Pedro Pascal.

Emma Keithley, who was curled up on a red cushion with her Penguin Classics edition, remembered “slogging through” the novel as a teenager and finding it darker than she expected. As part of a high school icebreaker, she had been asked what book she would bring with her to a deserted island.

“I was like, ‘Wuthering Heights,’ to try and sound smart,” said Ms. Keithley, 27, a wholesale manager who lives in Brooklyn. She cringed. “It still keeps me up at night that I told someone that’s my deserted island book.”

Her roommate, Fatima Calderon, a 27-year-old graphic designer, asked if it would still be her choice.

“I’m going to read it again,” Ms. Keithley said. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

Andrew Morin, 23, an economic consultant, was 25 pages into the book on his Kindle. He said he had been working through 19th-century novels by Henry James and Jane Austen as part of a bid to claw back his attention span in a world of snappy, short-form video content.

When another reader mentioned her curiosity about Ms. Fennell’s take on the story, he laughed. “I didn’t know there was a movie,” he said.

Film adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” tend to compress its multigenerational tale into a more straightforward two-person love story, said Deborah Denenholz Morse, an English professor at the College of William and Mary. Brontë scholars are already in a lather about “erotic excess” in the trailer for Ms. Fennell’s version, she said. (It includes gasping, licking and the suggestive kneading of dough.)

“I can’t tell you all the graduate students who have written to me saying: ‘Professor Morse, have you seen this adaptation? It’s going to wreck “Wuthering Heights”!’” she said.

The movie’s steamy rollout seems intended to appeal to readers of contemporary romance, a category that has exploded in popularity in recent years. When Fernanda Castro read “Wuthering Heights” this month for her romance book club, she was not exactly swept off her feet by its central duo, Catherine and Heathcliff.

“Reading it as a 28-year-old, I realized how toxic their relationship is,” said Ms. Castro, a consultant in Austin, Texas, who first read the book as a teenager.

She was also struck by its depiction of class and race. She said she was skeptical about the new movie, which drew backlash last year with the casting of Mr. Elordi, a white actor, as Heathcliff, a character described as “dark-skinned” in the novel. “Without the racism that Heathcliff experiences, there is no book: That is the central conflict, and driver to the plot, in my opinion,” she said.

Even so, she added, “I already have tickets.”

Professor Morse is also no fan of Mr. Elordi’s casting: “That’s a problem because it elides an entire strand of the novel,” she said. But despite some doubts about the new movie, she said she supported anything that drew new readers to the most poetic of the Brontë sisters’ novels.

“Wuthering Heights,” she said, “is a novel of struggle, and part of the struggle is to see what that’s romantic can actually survive.”

At the bookstore in Manhattan, several readers said they hardly cared if the film was a triumph. Mostly, they were happy that it had brought them back to the experience of reading in a group — without any threat of grades or papers.

“Nobody assigns you classics in adult life,” said Molly Doyle Young, 30, who works in product marketing. Nearby, another guest wondered what to read after “Wuthering Heights.” Several heads snapped in her direction.

“‘Jane Eyre’!” one person said.

“‘Jane Eyre’ is good.”

“You should read ‘Jane Eyre.’” (Callie Holtermann)

Like many members of this book club (I’ll wager), I have a notebook somewhere in which I copied lines from Wuthering Heights as a teen. Admittedly, it was a much more analog era, when people used pen and paper rather than the Notes app. I can almost summon the color of the ink on the page—but what I’ve never forgotten was the line itself: “He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee.”

For years, I’ve carried this line around in my mental notebook as an evocation of the most effervescent love a person could conjure: a union of joyous opposites! Except, maybe not.

When I got to the line this time (my third reading, I think), it was Cathy junior (not the original Catherine, as I’d thought) who uttered it to describe a feud with her cousin, the peevish, charismaless Linton, over what would constitute a perfect day. “I said his heaven would be only half alive, and he said mine would be drunk,” she continues. “I said I should fall asleep in his, and he said he could not breathe in mine, and he began to grow very snappish.” Opposites attract and all that, but this is not the material of magnetism.

How could I have misrecalled something so fundamental? The language of Wuthering Heights is so dense but so melodic, so complicated but rewarding, and it’s struck me, on this most recent rereading, that there is a certain degree of enchantment that takes place when one first makes one’s way through its seductive thicket. Did I lose the thread in that forest? Or did I just, after putting it down that first time, close my mind to what came after the doomed love of Catherine and Heathcliff and remember the novel only for those star-crossed lovers? They are particularly appealing to a moody teen.

Now, on my third reading, about two decades later, I’m not sure this is a love story at all—no matter how firmly etched those two lunatics are in the pantheon of devoted lovers. Entire generations who (like me) first read Wuthering Heights in high school may be holding on not only to lines and passages they slightly (or entirely) misremember, but also to an image of iconic love that is…more than a little messed up?

No matter how much the famous lines resound, it’s hard to argue that Catherine and Heathcliff are the paragon of romance. In the very same scene that sees Catherine declare, of Heathcliff, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” she vows to marry another “because he is handsome, and pleasant to be with,” and because he will make her rich—lovely!

The bond between Heathcliff and Catherine is less pure than born of a sense of persecution, an us-versus-them embattledness: The two soul mates versus Catherine’s virulent brother Hindley; the two wild creatures of the moors, peering through the windows of Thrushcross Grange at the insipidly civilized Lintons. “I left her,” Heathcliff says, recounting the story of how Catherine first comes, accidentally, to spend time at the Grange, “kindling a spark of spirit in the vacant blue eyes of the Lintons—a dim reflection from her own enchanting face—I saw they were full of stupid admiration.” Years later, Catherine's love for Heathcliff seems most activated when she senses the drift of Heathcliff’s attention—and it is his unfaithfulness that prompts her to most explicitly disdain the man she has married instead. “Your veins are full of ice-water,” she says to her even-keeled husband, Edgar, “but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.” And there is no small element of torture involved in Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship, almost as if the pleasure and joy that they bring each other can only be appreciated when they’re deprived of it. How strange—or maybe not—that I’ve never heard passages of Wuthering Heights quoted during wedding vows.

What are the purest examples of love in this book? Reading as a married mother, decades separated from my own roiling teenage loves, I’m struck that the most believable examples of love in Wuthering Heights are much quieter and more parental or filial: Edgar for his daughter Cathy, and hers for him; Nelly for the “little lamb” Hareton, whom she raises as her own before she is banished from the Heights. Isabella’s love for her hard-to-love son Linton happens mostly offscreen, but seems to have some genuine affection behind it, as well—it’s almost the only thing Linton speaks of favorably. (Set aside, for a moment, examples of the opposite: Hindley’s virulent and inexplicable hatred of his son Hareton; Heathcliff’s careless and manipulative use of his own son for revenge.)

Yes, I’m aware that no one reads this novel and comes away from it feeling like it’s a story about the beauty of parental love. But—and this is undoubtedly a function of where I am in my own life—these were the scenes that pressed most pointedly on my heart, this time around. “Catherine’s despair was as silent as her father’s joy,” Brontë writes of the daughter attending her father on his deathbed, withholding her own suffering so that he may have a peaceful passage. Catherine and Heathcliff’s antics didn’t affect me this time—it was that line that got me.

Like all great works of literature, Wuthering Heights rewards rereading. You may encounter a beloved and familiar line that reveals itself completely foreign; you may re-arrange your entire concept of the book. (Chloe Schama)

“The thing is that it’s my favorite book in the world,” the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet. “Like many people who love this book, I’m kind of fanatical about it, so I knew right from the get-go I couldn’t ever hope to make anything that could even encompass the greatness of this book. All I could do was make a movie that made me feel the way the book made me feel, and therefore it just felt right to say it’s Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.”

One of the most talked-about changes comes with Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff, who is described as dark-skinned in the book. Of the decision to cast a white actor in the role, Fennell explained, “I think the thing is everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it. I don’t know, I think I was focusing on the pseudo-masochistic elements of it.”

“The great thing about this movie is that it could be made every year and it would still be so moving and so interesting,” she continued. “There are so many different takes. I think every year we should have a new one.”

Elordi said himself of the changes to the iconic story, “There are inverted commas for a reason. This is Emerald’s vision and these are the images that came to her head at 14 years old; somebody else’s interpretation of a great piece of art is what I’m interested in — new images, fresh images, original thoughts.”

The film also marks Robbie and Fennell’s first time working together as actress and director, after Robbie produced Fennell’s last two projects, Saltburn and Promising Young Woman. Robbie and her LuckyChap team once again produce this one, as the star noted it was the longtime plan to release the film on Galentine’s Day.

“I was like if it was me, I’d want to go with all of my girlfriends on a Friday night — I want to have cocktails and maybe dress up a little bit, and then I’d want to go with my husband or whoever on Valentine’s the next night. So it felt like the perfect weekend for it,” Robbie said, as Elordi echoed, “It’s a day for love and it’s when everyone in the world is thinking about love; this movie, if it’s about anything, is about love.”

Charli xcx, fresh off her buzzy Sundance debut, also walked the carpet, as she explained that Fennell sent her the screenplay “at the end of 2024; I was in London in December, it was like getting dark at 4 p.m., it was freezing cold, I already felt like I was in the zone with it. She wanted me to just do one song and as soon as I read the screenplay I was kind of like, ‘I want to do a whole album, is that OK?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah sure, go for it.’ So it was a very easy flowing process.” (Kirsten Chuba)

Attendees shared their initial reactions on social media after the screening — official full reviews of the film will drop Monday, Feb. 9 — confirming the anticipated adaptation is emotional, stylish and steamy.

This version of Wuthering Heights "is a scorching hot and twisted tale," Jazz Tangcay, senior artisans editor at Variety, wrote on X. "Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s chemistry and sexual tension is a whole other level of HOT!"

"Only Emerald could take a classic, turn it on its head, make you fall completely in lust, and then utterly destroy your soul," added Tangcay. "An exquisite spectacle of craftsmanship that left me salivating over the costumes, cinematography and production design. Obsessively in love with it." (...)

The movie is "utter perfection," wrote journalist Maude Garrett: "It’s not only visually impeccable with vibrancy and breathtaking shots, but this movie is the epitome of YEARNING. It will make you feel absolutely EVERYTHING during and afterwards. I loved everything about this film."

Pop culture influencer Francis Dominic wrote on Instagram that Robbie, 35, and Elordi, 28, are "living rent free in my head," adding that pair are "absolutely ELECTRIC on screen. I could not keep my eyes off of them. I was in an insane chokehold."

At the same time, Dominic noted, "I could’ve used more pining and intimacy but still, I had so much fun and thought all of it was so brilliant." (Benjamin VanHoose)

My day began on horseback. Under the Hollywood sign, I mounted my steed and inhaled the crisp air, trying—earnestly—to picture myself inside Emily Brontë’s gothic universe. For a fleeting moment, Los Angeles’s Griffith Park morphed into the Yorkshire Moors and I was Heathcliff galloping towards ruin. By nightfall, I would be attending the global world premiere of Wuthering Heights, the novel once again reimagined for the big screen.

The movie will be released, somewhat perversely, on Valentine’s Day weekend—and if Fennell’s last film, Saltburn, offered any foreshadowing, it’s that restraint is not really her thing. Written in the 1840s, Wuthering Heights has lived many cinematic lives: a 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier was followed by adaptations in 1970, 1992, and 2011. This latest iteration feels less like a revival and more like a provocation: sharper, darker, and far more feral.

I invited my friend and fellow Vogue writer Tish Weinstock to join me. (She’s also the author of How to Be a Goth, making her the perfect plus one for the night in question.) Tish arrived at my house in a black Fendi gown by Karl Lagerfeld, while I wore my mother’s Chanel dress from the same era, as well as a Christian Lacroix black velvet ribbon with a broken-heart charm around my neck. It felt fitting, if perhaps a little too on the nose.

We arrived at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in our black finery. Warner Bros. had shut down the Walk of Fame entirely, rolling out a sprawling red carpet that felt both lavish and chaotic, with hoards of screaming fans clamoring to get closer. Attending a Hollywood premiere in Hollywood—the cattle-call choreography of velvet ropes, handlers, and hurried gestures—when you are not involved in the film is uniquely humbling. I whispered to Tish that I might leave the event hating myself, but we kept walking.

From behind a velvet rope guarded closely by a man with some sort of powerful credentials, we caught glimpses of the cast. Margot Robbie appeared in a sculptural, corseted Schiaparelli gown, looking absolutely luminous. Jacob Elordi was harder to spot—even at 6’5”—though his presence somewhere was unmistakable. You could hear of him before you saw him, his name being screamed out constantly by the crowd.

Inside the Chinese Theatre, that shrine to old-school movie royalty, gowns shimmered under the lights. The dress code for the evening was “Old Hollywood Glam,” with a deck of James Bond-type references and Oscars-appropriate silhouettes sent out to premiere guests ahead of time.

We awkwardly clambered over people to reach our seats. In the rows, I spotted Cara Delevingne, Jeremy Scott, Petra Collins, and Phoebe Tonkin with her husband Bernie LaGrange. A woman next to me in her early 30s was practically vibrating with anticipation—and when the cast appeared briefly to introduce the film, she leaned forward and bellowed across the cavernous room: “I LOVE YOU, JACOB ELORDI.” As the lights dimmed, the applause was quickly swallowed by total silence. And for two hours and 15 minutes, everyone was transfixed.

There is something unhinged about watching an explicitly sexual film in a room full of strangers. When Elordi’s Heathcliff first puts his fingers into Robbie’s mouth, the woman next to me audibly gasped before letting out a small moan. She shifted in her seat like she was trying to make what was clearly a very personal experience socially acceptable, failing spectacularly.

I won’t spoil the plot, but Fennell takes bold liberties with the material, reshaping Brontë’s story for a 21st-century audience without softening its cruelty. The surreal-leaning sets and costumes do not care for historical accuracy either. (Please peep Heathcliff’s fuck-boy gold hoop earring when you watch.) Tumblr users circa 2010 would simply have gone crazy for these stills, if you ask me.

When the credits rolled, the room was thick with emotion. I looked over at Tish, who, like me, had tears in her eyes. We urgently made a beeline for the powder room, where women in ballgowns swapped notes of heartbreak and devastation. One declared she wanted to go home and cry. Another, her mascara running, confessed she needed to calm her anxiousness with a cigarette.

Back outside on Hollywood Boulevard, the post-picture post-mortem was split predictably amongst the genders. Men in tuxedos insisted they had known exactly what would happen, making it clear they had read the book, while others confidently predicted the film’s impending commercial success. As someone who has also read the novel, I admittedly did not know what would happen. And yet, I loved it. I might even see it again.

We wandered over to the after-party, drifting past guests we’d run into at the premiere, until I was abruptly stopped at the door. “No press. You can’t come in,” a woman with a headset announced directly into my face.

I decided that discretion—and dignity—were underrated virtues, and cut my losses. I walked home in my Chanel dress, thinking about the catalogue of unrequited and unfinished loves waiting for me. All I wanted was to collapse into bed, cry a little more, and let my cat curl up beside me—a modern-day antidote to an evening of gothic excess. (Eileen Kelly)

"No different to all the other scenes that we do. The movie kind of demands a lot of all of us," Robbie, 35, tells PEOPLE on the red carpet at Wuthering Heights' Wednesday, Jan. 28 premiere in Los Angeles. "My character essentially cries in every single scene, but no, it was a joy. I loved playing a character who kind of swings from one wild emotion to the other in an instant." [...]

When Fennell, 40, spoke with PEOPLE on the red carpet at the premiere, she said that the most important aspect of filming steamy movie moments is "always about safety and trust and love" for her, her cast and crew. 

"And so it's always just about making sure everyone feels super comfortable and we all are, really. We trust each other and so we try to kind of make it funny and laugh everything off," she says. "But love scenes are just the same as any other scene, really. And so we just approach it from an emotional point of view." (Tommy McArdle and Scott Huver)

Oliver, 28, who plays Isabella Linton, explained that she was familiar with the original novel, but was drawn to Fennell’s take on the book.

“With a book that dense and that complex, I think anyone who's wanting to adapt it, you kind of have to zoom in and focus on the bits of it that you want to examine,” Oliver, who made her feature film debut in Fennell's 2023 movie Saltburn, explained. “I think Emerald has such a specific vision and point of view … Because I knew her before, I just was like, ‘Oh, this is so brilliant, the way she's deciding to do this.’ I just love what she's done.”

Chau, who plays Nelly Dean, said she never envisioned herself working on “a period movie based on a classic British novel that people hold so dear,” and has purposefully not read Brontë’s book.

“I want some distance from the movie and this whole experience and to be able to experience the book as its own thing,” the actress, 46, said. (Carly Tagen-Dye and Scott Huver)  

The Wuthering Heights x Last Crumb box features a dozen large and luxurious cookies in six flavors that fit the themes of the film’s steamy romance (...)

The decadence mixed with disorder actually fits the theme of Wuthering Heights perfectly. If I were to give the actual cookies in the box a rating out of 5, I would probably give it a 3.5. The collection’s good, but IMO, nothing can top the Guinness batch from December.

However, the theming of this collection is a perfect 5 out of 5. Even the choice of a cherry-filled black forest cake and red velvet cookie are spot-on to match Margot Robbie’s scarlet costumes in the film and the crimson-colored hallways of Thrushcross Grange. (Rachel Chapman)

   

We already have some first reactions after the premiere of the film in L.A.

Fall in love again and again with Emerald Fennell’s imagining of #WutheringHeights. From its gorgeous set design & costumes, striking cinematography, & bombastic music by Charli XCX, the film leans into the passion + obsession of Catherine & Heathcliff’s torrid love story.

Ada Enechi from Seasonedbf and Channel 4:

Embargo up? This is not the #WutheringHeights you read in school, and you’re either going to love it or hate it…and I loved it. Potentially my favourite performance from Jacob Elordi, definitely makes the top 3 for Margot but what made me stand up to attention was the score and cinematography - breathtaking. It’s passionate, it’s daring and explores a version of the classic that deserves our attention.

@filmsbyJuan:

#WutheringHeights is the first hit movie of 2026. Emerald Fennell turned this classic into a completely twisted, sexual, soul-destroying story. Robbie and Elordi's chemistry is on another level. The costumes, cinematography, and production design are absolutely breathtaking.

 And some other very enthusiastic comments. Nothing surprising, it always happens in premieres.

And Charli XCX has also released the tracklist of her Wuthering Heights companion album: