“Wuthering Heights,” starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, releases Friday on Valentine’s Day Eve. An adaptation of the novel of the same name, the film follows the tragic love story between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, featuring a soundtrack by Charli xcx.
The Daily Texan sat down with Robbie and Elordi at a college roundtable to discuss the film before its release.
The Daily Texan: A pervasive force in the film is love, but more significantly so, regret. What is something that you learned from your character’s mistakes and regrets that you’ll carry with you?
Jacob Elordi: When I watched the film, the overwhelming feeling I had was regret … from all the characters, moments missed, and then regretting it for the rest of your life, or overhearing or mishearing.
Margot Robbie: Oh, God. I mean, think before you talk would be a great lesson for anyone, but Cathy needs to learn that more than anyone … I love playing a character who affects the circumstances, as opposed to a character who has things happen to them. They’re the agency of their own fates in this story, and it’s so much more interesting to play that. As far as what I would take with me, God, I don’t know.
JE: The passion and the honesty of the way that they love each other and all the mess that it is, and the commitment to the endurance of it (is) … an unskeptical enduring love. That’s what I’ve definitely taken with me, the idea of being passionate, and that’s not corny or to be frowned upon or put into a box. It’s a real thing, you know.
VALLEY Magazine (Penn State): How did your performances evolve in response to one another on set, and were there moments where the other’s choice surprised or reshaped your own?
MR: There is only so much prep I can ever do before I start working with the other actors because the way they play it is going to change. I needed to see who (Elordi) is and how he’s acting towards me before I knew how I was going to give it back, so thank you for wording it like that. That’s exactly how I feel. Everything Jacob did completely informed my performance, and if I do anything good in this movie, it’s because he brought it that way, and then I could deliver it back.
JE: And likewise, and that’s not just actors kind of gassing each other up. It is the nature of those parts. Even the way that she would perform in other scenes, I would watch scenes of her and Edgar (Shazad Latif), I’d be at work watching them, and the way that she would behave, the way that she keeps him informed — it’s a constant conversation, these dueling parts, and they exist because of each other.
The Daily Free Press (Boston University): Jacob, you’ve recently starred in “Frankenstein,” which is another film adaptation of a classic 19th century novel. What is it like preparing to play characters that have existed on paper for 200 years and have already been adapted into other forms?
JE: That’s the best part of it. There’s so much material. You have the original text, and then you have the different publications throughout the years that kind of changed with the edit as the times changed. … You have this wider net that you can cast over the work, and it’s all inspiration, and you can draw from all of it like a little magpie. I find myself going around collecting the shiny things and then bringing them back to my nest and then putting it together.
