- Margot Robbie was meant to have hair armpits in Wuthering Heights.
- Emerald Fennell later cut the scene from the final edit of the movie.
- She explained that originally she wanted the hairy armpits included because women in period dramas are often hairless.
Now that Wuthering Heights is available on streaming, fans are no doubt watching the movie again to salivate over tortured Jacob Elordi, and honestly, I get it! But the movie could have been super different, and almost featured Margot Robbie with tons of hair under her armpits—alas, we did not get that version of the film.
Director Emerald Fennell confirmed in an interview with The Guardian that Margot’s “extremely hairy armpits” in her adaptation of the classic novel were cut. She continued, “Unfortunately, the scene that we see them in didn’t make it in there.” Okay cool but why were the pits there in the first place? As Emerald noted, Cathy’s unshaven pits “were so important to me” because she frequently wondered, “where are the razors that these women are using?” Emerald wanted the movie to have a touch of realism. when seeing the typical Jane Austen adaptation film. “They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like: ‘What’s going on? It is beyond mad.'” We were shown Cathy inserting her finger into the mouth of a fish rather than Margot’s hairy armpits. Warner Bros.
Emerald explained, “I saw a fish in aspic and I thought: ‘I want to stick my finger in its mouth.’ After that, I thought to myself, “Well, I think if you were trapped and you were extremely sexually frustrated, the first thing you would do is….” We had a variety of fish, including fish with lipstick on them, real fish, and fake fish. In the end, the fish that we had was a real fish. Poor Margot, however. I mean she had to do that. There were 12 of them.”
Part of her reasoning is that she wanted to lean into “being embarrassing, being cringe,” which she said is a “really big thing” for her “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.”
Emerald is taking some time off of work, but she plans to come back, and more wicked than ever: “I’m coming up secretly with something so depraved, so profoundly evil, that nobody’s going to make it.”
