Wuthering Heights is inseparable from its landscape – but northern actors seldom get the lead role, instead are pigeonholed as stereotypical or supporting characters. This Bradford-born actor objects
E
merald Fennell’s casting choices for her new version of Wuthering Heights have already been much scrutinised. As well as the apparent “whitewashing” of Heathcliff by casting Jacob Elordi in the part, there’s the fact 35-year-old Margot Robbie is playing a woman 20 years her junior.
Plus, of course, they’re both Australian, not British – and certainly not from Yorkshire. Fennell has offered a defence of her casting choices as a “personal fantasy” – but amid all the scoff and chatter surrounding the film and its myriad deviations from the book, the erasure of regional authenticity risks going under-discussed.
Wuthering Heights, one of the world’s most revered novels, is inseparable from the capricious landscape of the Yorkshire moors. Yet screen adaptations have consistently neglected the local identity of its central character. Across every major adaptation, from Merle Oberon in 1939 to Kaya Scodelario in 2011, not one Cathy has been portrayed by a Yorkshirewoman, let alone an actor from Bradford, the cultural heartland of the novel’s setting and the city in which it was written.
