Emerald Fennell has admitted it was “unfortunate” that a scene showing star Margot Robbie’s “extremely hairy” armpits was cut from the film’s final edit. Wuthering Heights.
The spirited retelling of the star of Emily Bronte’s novel starred Margot as the titular heroine Cathy, and documented her doomed romance with brooding farmhand Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi.
Emerald’s take on the story made many changes to the original plot, but she has now revealed that there was one historically accurate element she wanted to include.
She revealed that in one scene, Margot’s character showed her unshaved armpits, admitting that this was in contrast to many period films where women are often shown with clean-shaven armpits.
Sadly, she said the scene “where we see they didn’t make it there” despite showing they were “so important to her”, often wondering “where are the razors these women use” when watching similar films.
Emerald went on to say, “They’re all kind of hairless, like eels. I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on? It’s completely crazy.'”
Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales on Friday, Emerald described her Wuthering Heights adaptation as a “sister, rather than twin” of the original book.
She also discussed the viral scene where Cathy puts her finger in the mouth of a dead fish, saying, “I saw a fish in aspic and I thought, ‘I want to stick my finger in its mouth.'”
She continued, “And then I thought, ‘Well, I guess if you were trapped and you were extremely sexually frustrated, the first thing you would do is…'”
“We had all different fish, we had fish with lipstick on, we had real fish, fake fish, in the end that was a real fish. But poor Margot. I mean, she had to do that. There were twelve of them,” Emerald revealed.
“Especially now in our culture, we’re so phobic and terrified of cringing or being serious, and so we have this deadly ambivalence about everything, and I feel like I want to get in there and go for it, and push it off a cliff,” she said.
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie played Heathcliff and Catherine respectively in Emerald Fennell’s sensual, stripped-down version of Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name. Wuthering Heights.
