The “Wuthering Heights” press train has fully left the station, with Margot Robbie dropping by Jimmy Kimmel Live! last night in a lacy little black dress. I don’t think I would like this dress in another context, but I rather like it with Margot’s styling of curls and flushed makeup. She looks romantic and gothic, appropriate for an interpretation of Wuthering Heights that is emphasizing romance.

If you have not already, do read Lainey’s writing about the speculation that Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights is a work of “transmigration”, which is an interesting lens to consider Fennell’s adaptation through, especially as she has said she adapted Wuthering Heights not as it is, but as she remembers reading it as a teenager. Is everyone so demented about this book about awful people being awful because it’s taught in high school English?

I’ll be honest, I was looking forward to the “sicko” version of Wuthering Heights, but I guess I’ll have to wait for someone else to tackle that. Fennell doesn’t seem to be going in that direction, though I’m trying not to form hard opinions about the film as I have not seen it yet. Not many people have! Everyone should relax! But Wuthering Heights is one of those books that is incredibly personal to a lot of people, in a way that I don’t think anyone, let alone someone who likes provocation as much as Emerald Fennell, would ever be able to make an adaptation that pleases everyone. Definitely Fennell isn’t pleasing the people who like historically accurate costuming in entertainment. Between Wuthering Heights and Bridgerton, those people are in for a bad few weeks.

In terms of the press tour, though, I am not yet shooketh. I feel like they’re all trying really hard, with Margot Robbie talking about how she became “co-dependent” with Jacob Elordi and calling him “this generation’s Daniel Day-Lewis”—an absolutely WILD thing to say, and I say that as someone unbothered by Elordi’s recent Oscar nomination—to turn this into a meme-factory press tour, but you can’t manufacture memes. Memes happen spontaneously, naturally, in the wild, amongst unhinged fans. You can’t make a meme, the meme makes you.

After Robbie featured in British Vogue, Robbie and Elordi, two Aussies, cover Vogue Australia.

I totally buy that they had fun working together, that they liked their experience with Fennell making this movie, and that kind of positive energy can be felt on screen. They don’t need a meme press tour to sell me on that, except that it feels like the lessons learned from the last couple of years of movie marketing—starting with Robbie’s Barbie press tour—is that memes are good for business. Sure, they are, but so is just plain old-fashioned convincing people you’ve made a good movie. And given that the trailers are setting off people’s “not my Wuthering Heights” radar, maybe that should be the focus of the press tour?

Here is Margot on Kimmel last night:

Margot Robbie at Jimmy Kimmel Live! in LA, January 26, 2026

Photo credits: PGP/ affinitypicture/ Backgrid

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