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.
Beside me on the squishy sofa is the real Robbie, her eyes glued to the screen and her mouth open slightly in anticipation. When Elordi’s face cuts to that of Owen Cooper, the Emmy-winning teenage star of Adolescence, who plays young Heathcliff, tears begin streaming down her face. “Sorry,” she whispers in my ear in her soft, melodic Aussie accent, before laughing and shaking her head. “Every time!”
It’s a sight that will surprise those caught up in the endless discourse that has swirled around this project from the moment that Fennell, the director of Promising Young Woman (she won an Oscar for its screenplay) and Saltburn (certainly one of the noisiest, most feverishly discussed films of the 2020s), announced that she’d be reviving Emily Brontë’s beloved, windswept gothic romance. The casting of Elordi, the Australian Euphoria breakout at the centre of the auteur’s last romp, as the “dark-skinned” Byronic hero, proved controversial. So did the appointment of the 35-year-old, sun-kissed, Gold Coast-raised powerhouse – Barbie herself! – as the tempestuous lead who, in the novel, is but a teenager. (Alison Oliver also stars, though there is diverse casting elsewhere in the film, with Hong Chau and Shazad Latif in supporting roles, but more on this topic later.)
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.
Of course the assumption reigns that Robbie is all Aussie informality (all that overplayed lore about her one-time Clapham house share when she lived in London in her early 20s, with trips to the infamously grotty local hotspot Infernos, and marrying British assistant director Tom Ackerley, whom she met on the set of 2014’s Suite Française). But it’s true: in person Robbie really does subvert the reserved, rarefied demeanour of the Hollywood personality type. She is unusually down to earth, or at least as much so as a three-time Oscar nominee can be – always bang on time, happy to text me from her own phone number, someone who cuts a supremely casual figure as she waits for me on a quiet north London street, dressed in a black Reformation jumper with a black Celine corset top underneath, a bright yellow floral Dôen slip skirt and ballet flats from The Row, with her slouchy black leather Phoebe Philo bag slung on one shoulder. When she pulls me in for a hug, I’m surprised at how petite she is, though her beachy, undone radiance and pale blue eyes feel intensely familiar.
She is also sillier than most people realise. Her friend, the American musician Mette, who describes Robbie as “a certified ride or die”, later tells me about a countryside weekend away when she saw Robbie doing a dance routine to “WAP” for an audience of cows. Actor and fellow Australian Samara Weaving, also in their girl gang, recalls a time when her dog did a small poo on the floor of Robbie’s house. “Margot thought it was an olive and picked it up with her bare hands and put it back in the bowl. Then she realised and burst into a laughing fit.” Her favourite thing about Robbie is that, “One night she’s stunning on the red carpet and the next we’re in sweats on the couch, seeing if we can pass a tube sock from her foot to mine without using our hands.”
There’s a grit, too, which was on full display the day before, on the set of her Vogue shoot. Over the course of 12 hours on the misty South Downs (standing in for Brontë’s West Yorkshire), Robbie was game for everything, occasionally changing in the back of a van as it trundled up a hill and, at one point, scaling a steep, rocky quarry in a billowing, pristine white McQueen gown, her nails digging into the dirt. Later, even after darkness fell and she was soaked to the bone by a rain machine, twirling in glittering Simone Rocha, nothing could dampen her enthusiasm. “I could tell everyone was a little bit tired,” she says. “But I always want to do it. I’ll scale a wall, climb a hill, roll around. I’m like, ‘What do you need me to do?’”
The next day, after our stint in the recording studio, Robbie suggests we grab lunch at – wait for it – the local Ottolenghi, given she’s a regular at the one near her flat. As I attempt to process the surreality of squiring her to what surely must be the restaurant chain equivalent of base camp for her fandom, we stroll over to the Hampstead branch and get the last table in a bustling dining room, squeezed in next to tourists and elderly couples. A few heads turn but no one approaches and Robbie looks totally at ease as she chooses salads for us to share – roasted carrots with feta, aubergine, lemony cabbage and the juicy lamb koftas – plus a glass of Riesling. She likes most wine – Champagne, white or red, “just not orange” – and has a habit of over-ordering. (She’s heartbroken when later we learn that the leek pastries we had our eyes on have just sold out.)
This new Wuthering Heights was conceived three years ago. At the time, Fennell was shooting Saltburn and thinking about what would be next. But then, she saw Elordi in costume as Saltburn’s rakish Felix Catton, complete with noughties sideburns. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s the Heathcliff on the cover of the book that I’ve had since I was a teenager,’” Fennell tells me a few days later over the phone from the editing suite. She became obsessed with the idea of a fresh retelling, one that captured the visceral experience of reading the novel for the first time aged 14, and how “it kind of got inside me”.
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”. Projects in the pipeline include two directorial efforts from Olivia Wilde, new TV shows from Maid’s Molly Smith Metzler and My Old Ass’s Megan Park, and a movie from Rich Peppiatt, the Irish director behind the film Kneecap. (“I love Kneecap,” says Robbie of the 2024 movie. She saw the namesake band at Glastonbury last summer, too. “It was wild. The crowd was just mental.”)
She doesn’t think she’ll ever stop acting – next year, production begins on the 1960s Europe-set Ocean’s Eleven prequel she’s starring in with Bradley Cooper – but she’s also keen to direct. “That’s kind of where my focus is shifting to. I’ve wanted to direct for 10 years. I haven’t rushed into it, but I feel like it’s getting closer to that time when I’m ready to dive into that.” She’s just not yet sure what that project will be.
On weekends, Robbie hangs with the girls. There’s a group of her childhood friends in Australia, a gang of assistant directors who make up her London circle and in LA, actors including Phoebe Tonkin, Jessica McNamee and Nesta Cooper, as well as mates who work in advertising and PR. There was a recent girls’ trip to Miami, but mostly they drink rosé, host parties with mandatory themed costumes, often for no particular reason, and do karaoke until 2am (Robbie’s go-to is Cher’s “Believe”). In London, she loves doing “touristy shit”, including the Jack the Ripper and Ghost, Ghouls and Gallows walking tours. Next week in LA, they’re going to a pole dancing class.
When I catch up with Robbie on Zoom several days after that lesson, sitting in her light-filled office with a printed blue sofa and giant abstract canvases behind her, she’s still sore from it. Dressed in a monochrome Chanel tank and black Bec & Bridge trousers, with her shiny hair twisted casually into a low bun, she’s barefaced and in a slightly more serious and reflexive mood.
The only topic that remains off limits is her marriage to Ackerley, who is also her producing partner, and their son. As mentioned, the couple met on the set of the Second World War drama Suite Française, on which the Brit was third assistant director. They were London housemates before they got together and then cofounded LuckyChap. “I was the ultimate single gal,” Robbie told American Vogue back in 2016. “The idea of relationships made me want to vomit. And then this crept up on me.”
They wed in 2016, in a small, private ceremony in Australia’s Byron Bay, before relocating to LA. Robbie gave birth to their first child in October 2024. While promoting A Big Bold Beautiful Journey earlier this year, she told Entertainment Tonight that motherhood was “the best” and in one video interview with Access Hollywood can be seen laughing as her son cries out in the background. “I’m so sorry, by the way, for how loud my baby is,” she says.
But a change of heart has descended, and she won’t say more today. “I’m trying to keep that side of things private and protect him,” she tells me of her one-year-old, who I glimpsed on her phone lock screen back at the studio, smiling sweetly from inside a toy car. “Earlier in my career, I’d speak more freely in interviews. I’ve just been burnt so many times, when people have taken what I’ve said out of context. And I read stuff all the time where people put me in quotation marks saying things I’ve never said. I remember the first time, 10 years ago, seeing that in a newspaper and I could not get my head around it. I was like, ‘They just made it up?’ There was no way for me to change or control it. I just had to accept that.” Now, she’s taking the reins. “When you shift from your 20s to your 30s and beyond, you think, ‘I am going to do things differently. Here are my new boundaries.’”
There’s a gap between the private and public Margot when it comes to fashion too. At home, you’ll find her in oversized trousers, boxy jackets and comfy lingerie from Australian brands such as Beare Park and Kat The Label, and LA-based Entire Studios, which was founded by New Zealanders Sebastian Hunt and Dylan Richards Diaz. Much of Robbie’s wardrobe is from the latter brand and on the first day of rehearsals for Wuthering Heights, she and Elordi found themselves wearing identical unisex wide-legged tracksuit pants and zip-up hoodies from the label. It turns out, “We have so many of the same things,” she says.
On duty, she loves Magda Butrym, Dilara Findikoglu, Alaïa and, of course, Chanel, given her seven years as an ambassador. Just two days after seeing Matthieu Blazy’s debut collection in Paris, she was on the Vogue shoot, swaddled in his fresh-off-the-catwalk feathers. The French house also lent dazzling, maximalist vintage jewellery to the Wuthering Heights production, items that were then sewn into Robbie’s hair and ballgowns.
On screen, Durran promises a head-spinning fashion fantasia. Cathy alone wears about 50 looks and the costumer’s moodboards featured everything from Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara and Romy Schneider in Sissi to Lina Lamont’s Marie Antoinette get-up from Singin’ in the Rain, seductive 1990s Thierry Mugler, camp 1950s calendar girls, Elizabethan portraiture, Dolce & Gabbana’s gilded ornamentation and White Christmas’s Vera-Ellen shimmying to “Mandy”. On the Vogue set, Robbie gravitated to pieces – puff-sleeved Vaquera, sculptural Margiela, ruffled Schiaparelli, giant Givenchy earrings – that have the same extravagant, renegade spirit.
Naturally, as with Barbie, there’s much red-carpet method dressing to come, courtesy of Robbie’s stylist Andrew Mukamal, who visited the Wuthering Heights set, absorbed Durran and Fennell’s countless references and collected vintage copies of Wuthering Heights from eBay for inspiration. Expect custom designer pieces alongside showstoppers pulled from the runway. “It’s good timing too,” says Robbie, flashing me a cheeky smile. “The couture shows are in January. So we can see what comes out of that.”
Mukamal also needs to find her an outfit for another special occasion. Robbie’s friends, she tells me, are throwing her a Cathy-themed “bachelorette” party to mark the film’s release. We’re back at lunch and Robbie is looking slightly apprehensive. “I have no idea what we’re going to do. I’m normally the planner in our group, but they’re like, ‘We’ve got this.’ I said, ‘Just tell me where to be and what to wear.’”
As she packs up her leftovers and slides on her rectangular Ray-Bans, ready to return to the studio, I picture all the possibilities: a hairy-chested stripper dressed as Heathcliff, a steamy bread-making class, fishy canapés, and matching corsets and hoop skirts. Godspeed.
Cover look: embroidered satin corset dress, Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood. Hair: Bryce Scarlett. Make-up: Pati Dubroff. Nails: Ama Quashie. Tailor: Della George. Set design: Max Bellhouse. Production: Holmes Production. Digital artwork: Magnus Bergqvist. With thanks to Firle Place, East Sussex.