Emerald Fennell has confessed it was “unfortunate” that a scene displaying star Margot Robbie’s “extremely hairy” armpits was cut from the final edit of the film, Wuthering Heights.
The star’s racy re-imagining of the Emily Bronte novel starred Margot as the titular heroine Cathy, and documented her doomed romance with the brooding farmhand Heathcliff, portrayed 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 one particular scene showed Margot’s character displaying her unshaven armpits, admitting it was in contrast to many period films where women are often shown with clean-shaven underarms.
Unfortunately, she said the scene “that we see them didn’t make it in there,” despite displaying them being “so important to her,” as she often wondered “where are the razors that these women are using,” when watching similar films.
Emerald further mentioned, “They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like: ‘What’s going on? It’s completely mad.’”
Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales on Friday, Emerald described her Wuthering Heights adaptation as a “sister, rather than a twin” of the original book.
She also discussed the viral scene where Cathy sticks her finger into a dead fish’s mouth, saying, “I saw a fish in aspic and I thought: ‘I want to stick my finger in its mouth.’”
She continued, “And then I was like, ‘Well, I think if you were trapped, and you were extremely sexually frustrated, the first thing you’d do is…’”
“We had all of the 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 12 of them,” Emerald revealed.
“Especially now in our culture, we are so phobic and terrified of being cringe, or being earnest, and so we’ve got this deadening ambivalence about everything, and I feel, for me, I want to get in and go for it, and push it off a cliff,” she expressed.
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie played Heathcliff and Catherine respectively, in Emerald Fennell’s sensual, stripped-back take on Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name, Wuthering Heights.
