Few recent adaptations have generated as much pre-release controversy as Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights — and with the film now in cinemas, the conversation shows no sign of cooling.
At the centre of it is Jacob Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff and the accusation that the film has whitewashed one of classic English literature’s only racially diverse leads.
But for Fennell, it was an extremely personal casting choice. She told the BBC she wanted to make something that captured how the book first made her feel as a teenager: ‘It’s, like, primal, sexual.’
She cast Elordi, she said, because he ‘looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read’.
But has she done the story – and actors of colour – a major disservice in order to fulfill a personal fantasy?
How does Emily Brontë describe Heathcliff’s race in Wuthering Heights?
In Emily Brontë’s novel, Heathcliff is repeatedly marked as racially and socially other. Mr Lockwood calls him a ‘dark-skinned gipsy’.
He arrives at Wuthering Heights as ‘a dirty, ragged, black-haired child’ picked up on the streets of Liverpool. Mrs Earnshaw calls him a ‘gipsy brat’.
Nelly Dean recalls that he spoke ‘some gibberish that nobody could understand’. Later, Mr Linton refers to him as ‘a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway’.
None of these descriptions definitively fix his race, but taken together, they create a character who is unmistakably not presented as straightforwardly white and English.
What do experts say about the issue of Heathcliff’s race?
Dr Jenni Ramone, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Nottingham Trent University, argues that although Heathcliff’s race ‘is not identified absolutely in the novel’, the details ‘suggest that he is probably Black or mixed race’.
She highlights that when Mr Earnshaw finds him in Liverpool, one of Britain’s busiest slave-trading ports in the late eighteenth century, he asks whether the child had ‘an owner’.
In the context of the transatlantic slave trade, that question carries a disturbing weight.
Dr Kadian Pow, Lecturer in Sociology and Black Studies, says there is ‘no singular scholarly consensus on Heathcliff’s racial identity except to agree that he is noted as non-white’.
For her, that ambiguity is deliberate and central to the novel’s power. ‘For a white woman author to specify that Heathcliff’s racial heritage is dubious or ambiguous is integral to the “otherness” of him that Brontë establishes early on,’ she explains.
In that light, casting a white actor is not a neutral choice.
‘With markedly fewer opportunities for people of colour in historical films, replacing an obviously non-white character with an explicitly white one is egregious,’ Pow argues. ‘It matters to global majority audiences, and that should be worth something.’
Andrew Washington, founder of the film site On the Reel, takes a similar view, calling the casting choice ‘egregious’. ‘Every piece of Heathcliff’s conflict is tied in some way to how he looks,’ he says.
Colour-blind casting can be powerful, he notes, particularly when characters are not intrinsically linked to race. But in Wuthering Heights, ‘one of Heathcliff’s defining characteristics is that he is “dark-skinned” with “black hair”.’
Elordi, Washington suggests, is ‘not even a dark-skinned white man’.
The decision feels, to him, ‘disarming and almost disrespectful to Black actors for whom there already aren’t many roles’. For a filmmaker known for provocation, he adds, Fennell ‘too often pulls back what would’ve been her strongest punches and plays, in the end, frustratingly safe’.
What race was Heathcliff in previous film adaptations of Wuthering Heights?
And it’s important to note that it’s not as though a different path was unavailable.
Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation made history by casting James Howson as Heathcliff — the first Black actor to play him on screen.
More recently, Audible’s new original drama Heathcliff cast Daryl McCormack – who is mixed race – in the title role, reimagining the character’s missing years.
McCormack has described Heathcliff as ‘one of the most complex and interesting individuals in literature’ and speaks of giving audiences compassion for this ‘anti-hero’.
And yet, not all scholars see Elordi’s casting as clear-cut whitewashing.
Is there a good argument for a white Heathcliff?
Professor Serena Trowbridge of Birmingham City University points out that the textual clues are ‘ambiguous characteristics’. While there are ‘hints in the text’ that Heathcliff may be Black, Brontë never spells it out.
‘The ambiguity in the text means that the film shouldn’t necessarily be criticised for that,’ she says.
Dr Ella Dzelzainis of Newcastle University agrees that the novel offers ‘multiple, sometimes conflicting descriptions’. Heathcliff ‘could be a gipsy, could be Irish, could be Spanish, could be a fugitive slave from the States’.
What we know for sure, she says, is that he is ‘black-haired and alien (or alienating) in some way’.
That imprecision ‘leaves film makers with a liberating set of options’.
There is also a thorny historical question at play.
If Heathcliff were visibly, unambiguously Black in late eighteenth-century England, could he realistically have accumulated wealth and re-entered rural society as a gentleman without the novel – or subsequently Fennell’s adaptation – confronting the brutal realities of racism head-on?
Some argue that portraying him as fully Black without addressing those structures risks smoothing over how dangerous that world would have been for him.
On the other hand, recent period dramas and shows like Bridgerton have shown that audiences are willing to accept colour-conscious casting that does not explicitly address racism.
The question is whether that approach fits this story — a novel so deeply invested in exclusion, inheritance, and who is permitted to belong.
What is the debate about Jacob Elordi playing Heathcliff really about?
Ultimately, the controversy speaks to a familiar but unresolved tension: how far an adaptation should honour the political implications of its source material, and how far a director’s personal vision should be allowed to reshape it.
Fennell is, of course, entitled to interpret Heathcliff as she sees him because adaptation is an act of imagination and not an academic exercise.
And for some critics and fans, the very ambiguity of the novel, combined with its complicated historical context, gives Fennell legitimate creative latitude. If her Heathcliff reflects the image that first seized her imagination as a reader, then that too is a defensible artistic choice.
But Wuthering Heights is not a racially innocent text, and something is likely lost by interpreting it as one. Its repeated invocations of ‘dark-skinned’, ‘Lascar’, ‘gipsy’ and ‘castaway’ mean that Heathcliff’s identity has always been charged with racial meaning, however ambiguous Brontë left it.
Perhaps, then, the most compelling criticism is that casting a white actor represents a missed opportunity not only to create a rare leading role for an actor of colour, but to add emotional and political depth by placing Heathcliff in the hands of someone with lived experience of social otherness.
That this argument still burns so fiercely is revealing. Heathcliff’s ‘darkness’ was never just a flourish of Gothic atmosphere; it has always been entangled with power, who gets to belong and who is pushed outside. Nearly two centuries on, those tensions remain as unsettled as ever.
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