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Even though it isn’t released for another fortnight, you may already have formed strong opinions about Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Perhaps you hold the position that the novel is a text so sacred that any adaptation whatsoever is equivalent to sacrilege. Or maybe you are excited to see what a noted iconoclast such as Fennell will do with something as fusty as a 179-year-old book.
Either way, it is likely that your key takeaway from the Wuthering Heights press tour so far is that it’s getting a bit much. It has now been revealed that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have matching rings decorated with two hugging skeletons and the phrase “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”.
Maybe if that was the extent of it, this would be fine. But it has come at the thin end of a campaign during which Elordi and Robbie have both tried really, really hard to make everyone think they are besotted lovers and not professional colleagues with a product to sell.
There was the interview in January in which Robbie revealed that, during filming, Elordi would always make sure he was closely watching her on set, even when he was not required, and that even his occasional absence would result in her feeling “lost, like a kid without their blanket or something.” Or the time when Elordi claimed they had a “mutual obsession”. Or when Robbie revealed that Elordi filled her room with roses on Valentine’s day, prompting her to think “Oh, he’s probably a very good boyfriend”.
It all sounds highly romantic and very sexy … at least until you remember that Margot Robbie is married to Tom Ackerley, with whom she has a child who was four months old at the time of the Valentine’s Day roses, that she and Ackerley are co-producers of Wuthering Heights, and that this campaign is probably the product of a high-level discussion between them and the Warner Bros publicity department during which everybody agreed on the precise degree to which Robbie would pretend to be gooey-eyed about her co-star.
It’s all getting a bit Wicked, isn’t it? That had a press cycle so overcooked that, in order to enjoy the film, you had to divorce yourself from the image of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo clinging to each other during every interview and sobbing like they’d just watched their childhood houses burn down.
Is this approach becoming the norm? Is this how stupid we’ve become? Obviously film campaigns have had to change with the times, because the old way of magazine profiles and formal sit-down interviews has given way to nebulous social media buzz. But to watch Robbie and Elordi go moony-eyed over each other – knowing full well they’ll drop the artifice like a stone when they each get something new to promote – is to realise that something has gone badly wrong.
Do we really need to form parasocial relationships with the people we see in films, tailored specifically to the tone of the project, in order to enjoy them? Wasn’t there a time when we just innately understood that an actor’s performance began with the opening credits and ended when the lights went up?
It makes you worry for the future. For instance, Greta Gerwig’s new Narnia film is due to be released this year, and Emma Mackey is playing the witch. Does this mean that, a few months before its release, Mackey will start pretending that her family are virulently anti-Christmas? Is she going to do TikToks in which she growls at children? Will she do a press junket next to a real life lion that she will be contractually obliged to slag off at every opportunity?
The hope has to be that all these shenanigans will help Wuthering Heights cross over and become a Barbie-style phenomenon. But it’s coming at the expense of our brain cells. We’re all adults here. We should be able to tell the difference between an actor and the character they play, or else we’re surely doomed.
Hopefully this is the high watermark of the Wuthering Heights campaign, with any luck this element of the promotion will recede, and the final fortnight will be about the film itself and not the extent to which the leads are willing to pretend to be in love. That is, unless Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi want to adopt a child before its release, and agree to raise it to adulthood. That really would be a level of commitment we could all get behind.
