'Wuthering Heights' director reveals regret over deleted Margot Robbie scene

Director Emerald Fennell has revealed she regrets cutting a scene from her upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights that featured Margot Robbie’s character with unshaven armpits, a detail she says was meant to challenge long-standing cinematic conventions around female presentation in period dramas.

Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales, Fennell said the moment, which featured Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw, was removed from the final edit despite being “so important” to her vision of authenticity.

“It was unfortunate,” Fennell said, noting that the scene showed Robbie’s character with “extremely hairy” underarms, a deliberate contrast to the typically polished and hairless depiction of women in historical films.

She added that she often questions the realism of such portrayals in traditional period pieces.

“I always think, where are the razors that these women are using?” she said. “They’re all kind of hairless like eels. It’s completely mad.”

Fennell described her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel as a “sister, rather than a twin” to the original text, signalling her intention to reinterpret the story rather than faithfully replicate it.

The filmmaker also reflected on other provocative creative choices in the film, including a now-viral scene in which Catherine places her finger into a dead fish’s mouth. Fennell said the idea stemmed from a surreal image she had seen of fish in aspic.

“I thought: I want to stick my finger in its mouth,” she said. “If you were trapped and extremely sexually frustrated, that’s probably the kind of thing you’d do.”

She revealed that multiple versions of the scene were tested using both real and artificial props. “We had fish with lipstick on, fake fish, real fish in the end, it was a real fish,” she said, adding that Robbie endured multiple takes during filming.

Fennell also commented on her broader approach to filmmaking, saying she wants to resist creative restraint in modern storytelling.

“Especially now, we’re so afraid of being cringe or earnest,” she said. “There’s this deadening ambivalence about everything. I want to push through that.”