"Reading and books were a huge part of my mum’s life. Both my mum and my step-dad (playwright and screenwriter Beverley Cross) read voraciously,” he smiles. “So it’s always been part of my life. And now more than ever, because our attention spans are so scattered by technology, it’s really important.”

Which explains in part why the 56-year-old, whose roles have included Bond villain Gustav Graves opposite Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day, Mr Rochester in the BBC’s Jane Eyre and, most recently, lawyer Archie Moore in The Split, as well as Poseidon in the Disney+ series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, is so passionate about Give A Book. (Matt Nixson)

   

Inside a cavernous church on the outskirts of London’s Hampstead, an expansive suite of musicians sit in pin-drop silence. Then, as a conductor’s baton is raised, they pick up their violins and cellos and begin to play a grand, sweeping score. In the adjacent recording studio, I sit and watch them through glass, as monitors before me show the scene that this goose-bump-inducing music will eventually accompany: a climactic moment of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Here’s Jacob Elordi’s brooding, muttonchops-sporting Heathcliff and opposite him is the tragically doomed love of his life, Margot Robbie’s blonde and ethereally beautiful Cathy. [...]

The first officially released photo showed Elordi’s finger entering Robbie’s open mouth, along with a few tufts of grass (twisted, earthy eroticism forever a Fennell calling card). Then came a flurry of paparazzi photos from the set, which featured Robbie drifting across the moors in a sumptuous if somewhat off-kilter wedding dress. (Per costume designer Jacqueline Durran, an industry titan – Atonement, Pride & Prejudice – it’s a style that marries Victorian and 1950s fashion, and references both the portraits of Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the wasp-waisted elegance of Charles James.)

The gown raised questions around period authenticity, which were swiftly answered by a deliciously off-the-wall first trailer, a sweaty, sensual, skin-crawling, deliberately fantastical fever dream with glossy red lacquered floors, heaving bosoms and more outlandish, eye-popping costumes, soundtracked by Charli XCX’s “Everything is Romantic”. (The ubiquitous pop star-cum-harbinger of cool is providing original songs for the movie too.)

Add to this a smart, sexy tagline (“Drive me mad”) and the film suddenly became the most talked-about of the year – and it’s not even out yet. When it opens on Valentine’s Day, Robbie says we will all have to, “Buckle up.”

She is a producer too, as she was on Fennell’s last two films. As a result, the actor has been hands-on about every aspect of Wuthering Heights, including its promotional campaign. “The first image anyone sees of a movie is when you actually begin entertaining them,” she tells me, grinning. For that first photo, she says, “I remember someone being like, ‘Do you want a double [to have a finger and some turf stuffed in their mouth]?’ And I was like, ‘How dare you even ask me?’” She lets out a delighted cackle. [...]

Robbie recalls that Elordi was already cast by the time the screenplay landed on her desk. At that point, Robbie had never read the book or watched any of the existing adaptations of Wuthering Heights. That script “absolutely wrecked me”, she remembers. “I didn’t know what was coming. By the end, I was just so full and so destroyed at the same time.”

She was also captivated by Fennell’s Cathy. “I just felt like…” Robbie takes a breath, her fork aloft. “Not like she’s mine, but like I both understood her and didn’t, in a way that drew me to her. It’s this puzzle you have to work out.” She would have produced the film anyway, but decided to throw her hat in the ring to play Cathy too – though she didn’t “want Emerald to feel like she had to say yes”.

Fennell was delighted. “Cathy is a star,” she explains. “She’s wilful, mean, a recreational sadist, a provocateur. She engages in cruelty in a way that is disturbing and fascinating. It was about finding someone who you would forgive in spite of yourself, someone who literally everyone in the world would understand why you love her. It’s difficult to find that supersized star power. Margot comes with big dick energy. That’s what Cathy needs.” The first time she met Robbie, nine years ago, Fennell says, “She smelt so delicious, which is an extremely creepy thing to remember. But she has that fairy dust. And she never, ever lets up. She operates at a higher percentage than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Elordi concurs. “Margot is a force,” he writes to me over email. “And she makes it look easy. Sometimes I think she has Hermione’s Time-Turner – she can raise a baby, shoot a movie, produce four others and still meet for a beer at 5pm.”

Robbie understands the kerfuffle around the film’s casting, to a degree. Of the chatter over this new Cathy being blonde not brunette, she says, “I get it” because “there’s nothing else to go off at this point until people see the movie”. (Fennell also clarifies that her Cathy is older than in the novel, in her mid-20s to early 30s.) On the subject of Elordi’s casting, though, Robbie is quiet and contemplative. “I saw him play Heathcliff,” she says finally. “And he is Heathcliff. I’d say, just wait. Trust me, you’ll be happy. It’s a character that has this lineage of other great actors who’ve played him, from Laurence Olivier to Richard Burton and Ralph Fiennes to Tom Hardy. To be a part of that is special. He’s incredible and I believe in him so much. I honestly think he’s our generation’s Daniel Day-Lewis.”

In the early clips I’ve been permitted to see, Elordi also has a gruff Yorkshire drawl, while Cathy speaks in “classic RP” like the other central characters, in a bid to make Heathcliff feel “othered”. Robbie couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. “I was very excited to have a crack at the Yorkshire accent,” she says.

The run-up to Wuthering Heights was, however, a little bumpy. “I was three months postpartum when we started shooting,” Robbie tells me. “So I was in a very different headspace. I didn’t do my usual routine. It was more haphazard. And I remember saying to Emerald, ‘What if I’m not prepared enough?’ She kept saying, ‘I don’t want you to prepare. I just need you to be in the moment.’ Which was a lovely way of relieving my anxiety. It was about being in my body as opposed to my head.”

That helped with the sex scenes too, which you get a flavour of in the trailer, with sweat-drenched bodies spliced together with images of greasy fingers massaging dough, dripping in egg yolk and poking into the mouth of a fish. Does Wuthering Heights take it there? “It goes there,” Robbie confirms, her eyes glittering mischievously. “Everyone’s expecting this to be very, very raunchy. I think people will be surprised. Not to say there aren’t sexual elements and that it’s not provocative – it definitely is provocative – but it’s more romantic than provocative. This is a big epic romance. It’s just been so long since we’ve had one – maybe The Notebook, also The English Patient. You have to go back decades. It’s that feeling when your chest swells or it’s like someone’s punched you in the guts and the air leaves your body. That’s a signature of Emerald’s. Whether it’s titillating or repulsion, her superpower is eliciting a physical response.”

It’s something Robbie and Fennell often discussed on set, like “‘What reads to us as hot or exciting or sexy?’ And it’s not just a sex position or someone taking their shirt off.” One such scene involved Elordi’s Heathcliff picking Cathy up (“With only one arm!”) and, in another, he shields her face from the rain. “It almost made me weak at the knees,” says Robbie, letting out a dramatic sigh. “It was the little things that we loved as two women in our 30s, and this movie is primarily for people in our demographic. These epic romances and period pieces aren’t often made by women.”

Not everything went to plan. There was occasionally bright sunshine when they needed rain, which one day led to Emerald “writing a whole new scene in 30 minutes, if that, just typed on an iPhone” and set inside a carriage; plus the emotional weight of Cathy’s constant crying. (“Though I worked on a soap for three years,” Robbie says of her Neighbours era, “so it’s a muscle that I’ve built up.”)

The trickiest thing to nail, though, was the tone. On one hand, Robbie says, it’s a “1950s soundstage melodrama” with a heightened aesthetic but also “emotionally grounded” – hence the pairing of Anthony Willis’s classical score, which I heard earlier, with modern music by Charli XCX. When Fennell asked if she’d record a song for the film, “I said, ‘How about a whole album?’” the singer recounts over email. “Her script struck something in me.” With her collaborator, Finn Keane, Charli says that she “started working with live strings and tried to find the most disgusting, violent, nontraditional way for them to play, and blend them into these songs that we were making very much specifically for and about the world of Wuthering Heights.” The results “couldn’t be further away from Brat”.

The best reference point for the film as a whole, Robbie thinks, is Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet. “It’s a literary classic, visually stunning and emotionally resonant. In one of our first conversations about this film, I asked Emerald what her dream outcome was. She said, ‘I want this to be this generation’s Titanic. I went to the cinema to watch Romeo & Juliet eight times and I was on the ground crying when I wasn’t allowed to go back for a ninth. I want it to be that.’” Their hope is that women “go see it with 10 of their female friends”. “And I think it’s going to be an amazing date movie,” Robbie adds. She has been encouraged by the response from early test screenings. “I was surprised by the fact that so few people had actually read the book,” she says of the film’s first audiences. “Quite a few had heard of it, but actually a huge portion hadn’t. So, for many people, this is their introduction to Wuthering Heights, which is exciting.”

As with Barbie, a film much of the industry was sceptical about up until it was released and became an instant cultural touchstone, Robbie is determined to follow her instincts. “Everyone was like, ‘Well, that did well because of course it was going to.’ And I’m like…” She chuckles. “‘This was not the conversation at the time.’ I try to remind myself of that with Wuthering too. You have to just not listen to the noise and trust that the thing you’re putting out is what people will be happy to have.”

In many ways, Wuthering Heights is exactly the kind of film that Robbie wants her production company, LuckyChap, to keep making more of – ones with a female focus or storyteller, which “feel like they have the potential to penetrate culture and a reason to exist”. (Radhika Seth)

   

Lives of the Female Poets is a recent collection of poetry by Clare Pollard, which contains several prose poems about Emily Brontë: 

Lives of the Female Poets

by Clare Pollard

Bloodaxe Books

ISBN: 9781780377476

September 2025

Clare Pollard cocks a snook at Dr Johnson’s all-male Lives of the Poets in chronicling her own life and theirs in her Lives of the Female Poets. These portraits and self portraits offer glimpses into the poet’s own everyday life – from nit-combing and laundry to pollen counts and cocktails, watching school plays to shopping on Rye Lane – all whilst in conversation with female poets through the ages.

Playing with forms from the version to the glosa, these are poems that remix, adapt and channel figures from Enheduanna, the first recorded poet, through to Wanda Coleman. Probing the idea of the ‘Poetess’ over time, there are also poems about writers’ lives – sonnets for Anne Locke, who wrote the first English sonnet sequence; a sestina for Elizabeth Bishop; a series of prose poems about Emily Brontë; and a look at the tragic life of L.E.L.

Whether imagining a ‘three-martini afternoon’ at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, or exploring the ways women writers have been erased from the canon in the book’s long, closing poem, Clare Pollard’s playful sixth collection celebrates and commemorates all those female poets who have come before.

There are three poems about Emily Brontë, as far as we know: On Emily Brontë, Age Six;  The Sex of Emily Brontë, and Emily Brontë and the Critic. On the Rough Trade Books podcast (via Soho Radio), the author discusses that her collection includes biographical poems about female poets. She mentions there's "a poem about Emily Brontë masturbating," which she acknowledges "might be a flashpoint for some people what they think is too much."
She explains that throughout the poem she's constantly questioning "am I allowed to say this? Is this too much?" She adds that "the only person I've experienced of masturbating myself really so, you know, it's obviously a self a self-portrait on some level."
Claire then contextualizes it by saying she was "a very sexually frustrated teenager who like didn't have a proper [relationship] until I was about 20." She believes Emily Brontë had a similar experience, noting she'd watched a film that implied Brontë had a torrid affair and thought "oh really" - clearly skeptical, believing Brontë was more likely sexually frustrated like Claire herself had been.