Wuthering Heights: Hollywood's worst casting decisions

The news that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are starring in Emerald Fennell's take on Emily Brontë's romance has caused a storm – no surprise in an age of increased casting scrutiny.

Catherine is a teenager who lives on a farm in England in the late-1700s. Heathcliff is a dark-skinned foundling of around the same age. As the heroine and hero of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, their love story has been imagined by countless readers since the novel was published in 1847, but not many of those readers will have pictured them as the spitting images of Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Jacob Elordi (Elvis Presley in Priscilla). Still, Emerald Fennell is not like the rest of us. The Oscar-winning writer-director of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn is making a film of Wuthering Heights, and she announced earlier this week that her Catherine and Heathcliff would be played by two impossibly good-looking Australians, one aged 34, the other aged 27.

The online response hasn't been wholly positive. Brontë fans on social media called the casting "disappointing", "terrible" and "bizarre", and The Independent's film critic Clarisse Loughrey asked: "Did anyone actually read the book before deciding this">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });