Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell is defending her choice to cast Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff for her upcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel.

“[Jacob Elordi] looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff in the first book that I read,” Fennell, 39, said during a Friday, September 26, panel at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in England, per Variety. “And it was so awful because I so wanted to scream. Not the professional thing to do, obviously.”

Fennell first cast Elordi, 28, in her 2023 critically acclaimed film Saltburn.

“I had been thinking about making [Wuthering Heights], and it seemed to me he had the thing,” she said of their first meeting. “He’s a very surprising actor.”

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