On a wet Tuesday afternoon I was doom-scrolling on Instagram when I saw a post that made something inside me snap. It was about the casting of Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
Margot Robbie. Big name. Charli XCX soundtrack. Big hype. Jacob Elordi. Hugely predictable.
He and Timothée Chalamet seem to be on rotation for prestige projects. I was about to scroll on when the author added something I didn’t know: Heathcliff, she said, is repeatedly described in Emily Bronte’s book as dark-skinned and racially othered. His race and class drives the plot.
Even then I assumed it could be one of those internet pile-ons where nuance goes to die and directors are denied artistic licence by anyone with a ring light. So I did the only reasonable thing. I bought the book and read it in a day. The internet was right. By page two, I was irritated.
Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned”.
Oh. Here we go.
By page 25 I was fuming, he’s referred to as an “it” (the dogs get more reverence). By page 35 I was spiralling. His origins are speculated to be “Gypsy”, “Lascar”, “castaway”. I read the entire goddamn book and his race and class are central to the story.
This isn’t subtext. It’s on the page. And that’s when the rage really kicked in.
Because whitewashing isn’t radical. It’s routine. I can overlook the fact that this adaptation is being sold as “the greatest love story ever told”, despite actually being about two deeply fucked-up people locked in obsession and revenge.
What I can’t overlook, however, is casting a white actor in a role where both race and class are fundamental to the narrative, especially when there is no shortage of extraordinary actors of colour who could have played Heathcliff with complexity and menace.
When asked about the criticism Fennell said: “I think the thing is everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.”
She says she was simply making the version of Wuthering Heights she imagined when she was a teen, but what that really means is her world was white, she didn’t see race as central to the book, and now, with real power, she’s made that fantasy a reality.
That isn’t artistic vision. It’s unconscious bias with a production budget. I don’t expect a teen to grasp the nuances of race and class. But Fennell isn’t a teen anymore. She’s one of the most powerful people in British film, who can decide who gets to be the romantic lead and who doesn’t.Fennell’s adaption isn’t the first to cast Heathcliff as a white man, but it’s 2026 – surely we have learnt by now? Some of us grew up never seeing ourselves reflected back so this matters.
I don’t buy the familiar industry bullshit that white leads are “safer” because Britain and America are “majority white markets”. These films aren’t just made for one country. They’re marketed internationally and streamed globally. The audience isn’t just middle England or Bible Belt America; it’s Seoul, Lagos and Delhi.
We live in a hyper-connected world where you can watch Korean dramas, blast Nigerian Afrobeats and buy clothes designed in Tokyo with a click of a button. If we can buy into blue alien warriors, Marvel multiverses and teenage wizards we can buy into a Black/South Asian Heathcliff.
In 2024, only 25 per cent of top films featured a lead from an under-represented ethnic group. Decisions like Fennell’s don’t just reflect that imbalance. They reinforce it.
What makes this casting even weirder is that Shazad Latif, a British-Pakistani actor, plays Edgar Linton, who in the book is the poster boy for pale, blue-eyed, inherited English privilege. A “radical” move would have been to swap roles.
When you’re white, these decisions don’t feel like erasure. You see yourself everywhere: the romantic lead, the anti-hero, the tortured genius. When a role that could have gone to an actor of colour goes to another white man, it’s just business as usual.
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Risk-averse casting creates fewer stars of colour, which means the already small pool is even smaller, justifying the next “safe” choice. Rinse. Repeat. And you get a vicious cycle.
Real artistic boldness isn’t defaulting to what feels safe. It’s expanding who gets to be centred. It’s trusting the audience to engage with the world as it actually is.
This film could have been layered, about race, class and belonging. Against a backdrop of rising anti-immigration sentiment, it could have felt urgent and compelling. Instead, it feels basic.
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