Who gets to represent ‘Britishness’ on screen, and what happens when one of its most regionally grounded stories is stripped of its roots? The cast of Wuthering Heights has generated controversy since it was announced, but now, after the fever has died, I believe it is worth asking what, precisely, feels so problematic about it. This is not to raise the question of whether a director has the right to interpret a text freely, of course they do, rather, the issue is whether this particular interpretation of the characters misunderstands the very elements that give the novel its force: class, race, and regional identity, and not only what has been branded as a love story.

Director Emerald Fennell defended herself about the cast controversy saying that she was inspired by the version she "remembered reading as a 14 year old”. As an argument, this seems physically impossible; truth be told, a creative can choose to show their vision however they want, and this is not what I am trying to discuss here. However, there are two crucial things in the story of Wuthering Heights, the fact that Heathcliff is not white and the immense presence of the Yorkshire accent and dialect, at times written in vernacular English but also present in the sentence structure and words used. If the servants speak differently from the masters, there is a dialectical element that cannot be ignored in the novel. 

Why is this important? You might argue that this is nothing new. Cinema has a long history of actors portraying identities that are not their own. Hasn’t this always happened? Have we not had white people portray people of colour? Hasn’t Antonio Banderas played a Mexican around a thousand times? Yes, but that does not make it neutral or okay. In a contemporary context, where questions of representation are more visible and contested than ever, such choices carry weight. More importantly, in Wuthering Heights, identity is not decorative; it is structural and the root of the problem. To ignore that is not a bold reinterpretation; it is, at best, a superficial reading, but also a conscious choice to eliminate the objective of the text. The idiosyncrasy of these characters is at the heart of the problem of this novel. It would be like deciding Frankenstein’s monster is just a beloved blonde, beautiful kid born out of a happy marriage between Victor and his lover. Well, yes, that is a story, but it is not the story that we want to talk about when we talk about Frankenstein. 

Brontë establishes Heathcliff’s differences immediately in her novel; he is introduced as “a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman” (Brontë, 3). The contradiction is already there: he is both inside and outside, familiar and foreign. When he arrives at the Earnshaw household as a child, this tension is heightened by the narrative Nelly tells us. He is described as a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk… yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand” (Brontë, 39). His otherness is not only visual, but linguistic: he cannot be understood, and therefore cannot belong.

This is why questions of casting and accent are not superficial. Heathcliff’s trajectory in the novel is not just about acquiring wealth or status; it is about navigating, and never fully overcoming, the boundaries of class and identity. His speech, like his behaviour, shifts over time. He becomes more ‘gentlemanly’, more legible to those around him. Replacing this progression with a neutral, standardised English accent would erase a key dimension of his transformation. It is also important to have this distinction because, when it comes to behaviour, he and Catherine are not massively different: she is rude and spoiled from the beginning, whereas he is vengeful and violent in a way that makes them perfect companions, at the beginning, but their limitation is his race and class.

This is where the casting becomes difficult to defend. With Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the leading roles, the film leans heavily on star power, but at the expense of narrative coherence. It is not simply that they do not ‘look right’, though that matters in a story so concerned with physical and social difference, but that their presence disrupts the internal logic of the world Brontë creates. Age, too, becomes an issue: Catherine and Heathcliff’s emotional trajectory depends on their youth, their volatility, and their shared formative experiences. When this balance is lost, so is much of the story’s intensity.

Let us, for a moment, take the opposing view. Adaptations do not need to be faithful to their source material. Historical accuracy is often bent or discarded altogether, and creative reinterpretation can open new and interesting perspectives. This is true; however, there is a difference between reimagining a text and misreading it. What this adaptation suggests is not a deliberate departure but a failure to engage with the novel’s central tensions. The result is a version of Wuthering Heights that retains the story’s outline while hollowing out its core.

This becomes even clearer when considering the role of Yorkshire and its characters, with their dialectical particularities, as I have already mentioned. Yorkshire is not merely a picturesque backdrop; it is an active force within the novel. The moors, the weather, and the isolation shape the characters’ emotional lives and intensify the novel’s gothic atmosphere. As Brontë writes through Nelly’s voice, another actor speaking with a neutral accent during the movie, “A high wind blustered round the house, and roared in the chimney: it sounded wild and stormy”. (Brontë, 45). The environment does not simply reflect the characters’ inner turmoil; it generates it. Yorkshire is, in this sense, another character in the novel, from the language and the mirroring of the emotions, but it becomes a prompt and just a setting in the movie adaptation.

Equally important are the so-called minor characters, particularly the servants and narrators through whom the story is mediated. We do not access Catherine and Heathcliff directly; we encounter them through voices embedded in the social fabric of Wuthering Heights; for example, in Nelly, who introduces their whole childhood, the Yorkshire accent is not even hinted at. These voices carry distinct dialects, perspectives, and limitations. When accents become inconsistent or disappear altogether, something essential is lost: realism and the layered structure of the narrative itself.

Ultimately, what this adaptation reveals is more than a questionable casting decision; it is a broader issue of cultural representation, because a story so deeply rooted in class, race, and regional identity is stripped of those elements, what remains feels curiously empty. The arc from exclusion to power loses its meaning if the markers of that exclusion are no longer visible. Heathcliff’s pain becomes abstract; Catherine’s choices lose any social weight.

Perhaps the most telling thought is this: if this film were presented under a different title, it might be easier to accept. But as an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, it struggles to justify itself. Without the tensions that define the novel - without Yorkshire, without dialect, without the sharp realities of class and race - the story becomes something else entirely. And in becoming something else, it loses the very power that has made it endure. The quotation marks are not enough, the reading the director did as a kid was misleading, and as an excuse it lies flat. This adaptation tells the viewer that particularities do not matter, that the story of race and class does not matter, and as a result, we are fed entertainment without much value, a juvenile story that does not do justice to the genius of Emily Brontë, but that looks great on Instagram reels.