Jacob Elordi Is Already Facing Fan Backlash Over Wuthering Heights, Echoing Rachel Zegler

Jacob Elordi has stepped into Heathcliff — and straight into a storm. Emerald Fennell’s new live-action Wuthering Heights is drawing swift backlash as fans bristle at the casting of Brontë’s brooding antihero.

We are doing the Wuthering Heights casting fight again. Jacob Elordi is set to play Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell's new adaptation, and the internet has already turned it into a referendum on race, fidelity to the book, and who should answer for casting choices. Some of this is thoughtful. A lot of it is the same argument we have every six months with a different title.

Why people are mad

In Emily Bronte's novel, Heathcliff is repeatedly described as dark skinned and called a 'gypsy' by other characters, an outdated label that many modern readers interpret as Romani or, at minimum, not white English. So casting Elordi, who is white, has sparked the usual whitewashing accusations. That heat is landing on both the actor for saying yes and the filmmaker for offering him the part.

The conversation has pulled in past flashpoints too. People are comparing it to Rachel Zegler and the online war around Disney's Snow White. That movie was dragged long before release and, later, bombed at the box office. Different situation, same cycle: a familiar character, a casting choice, and a ton of discourse.

The internet's split-screen reactions

If you have been anywhere near X the past few days, you have seen versions of all of these takes:

• Call it what it is: A white actor playing a character many readers view as a person of color, more specifically Romani, a group that film and TV have historically underrepresented and whitewashed. If you want answers, ask the director and casting director, not the actor trying to work.
• Some would have preferred the part go to a visibly nonwhite actor, with names like Rege-Jean Page getting tossed out as obvious fits.
• On the other side: Heathcliff is not canonically a person of color, he is described with language Victorians used for itinerant or Mediterranean outsiders, and Americans keep retrofitting modern racial categories onto 19th century prose. Also, most film versions have cast white actors as Heathcliff already, with only one loose outlier.
• If Hollywood is comfortable race-swapping in one direction, it should not be a crisis when it happens the other way. People are even pointing to the Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers Romeo and Juliet stage pairing as an example that audiences survive this.
• Meta point: the more useful question is why the creative team made this choice, not whether Elordi can dodge a gotcha on a press line.

Emerald Fennell weighs in

While the debates rage, Emerald Fennell is already out there backing her decision. Speaking at the Bronte Women’s Writing Festival on Friday, Sept. 26 (via BBC News), the 39-year-old filmmaker talked about why this story has her in a chokehold.

'It is completely singular. It is so sexy. It is so horrible. It is so devastating.'

She said the lightbulb went off during Saltburn. Working with Elordi, 28, she decided he looked exactly like the Heathcliff illustration on the first copy of the book she read. She joked she wanted to scream when that realization hit, because, you know, not the most professional move on set. Beyond the look, she says he has that unpredictable, dangerous quality you need for Heathcliff.

'I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it is an emotional response. It is, like, primal, sexual.'

Fennell also says the film is faithful to Bronte while leaning into the book's more provocative instincts. In other words, she is not making a museum piece.

About the Heathcliff debate itself

Here is the inside baseball bit that makes this messy. The novel uses period language that can mean a lot of things depending on who is reading it and how they are translating Victorian shorthand to modern terms. Some scholars and fans see Heathcliff as racially marked and likely Romani. Others read him as an ethnic outsider in a class and culture sense, not strictly about skin color. Both ideas have lived in the text for a long time, which is why every new adaptation ends up relitigating it.

None of that excuses Hollywood's long, ugly history with Romani characters, who often get flattened, exoticized, or erased altogether. That is a real concern people are naming here. At the same time, Fennell's defense is not the usual colorblind PR boilerplate. She is saying she cast for a very specific, old-school image of Heathcliff and the volatility she wants the movie to have. You can like that or hate it, but at least it is an actual rationale.

So, what now

Teaser is out. The arguments are not going anywhere. The only thing we can actually judge is the movie, and whether Elordi delivers a Heathcliff who feels as feral and magnetic as he is on the page. If he does, some of this noise will quiet down. If he does not, this will be the headline that follows it forever.

Wuthering Heights opens February 13, 2026.