“It’s on the page, and what it does is it changes everything."
Wuthering Heights has taken over cinemas but Jacob Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff was criticised by Anita Rani, who argued that the Australian actor is “too white” for the role.
The BBC presenter questioned director Emerald Fennell’s decision to cast Elordi in her reimagining of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel.
Rani said Brontë intended Heathcliff to be a non-white character, although that interpretation remains contested among scholars.
Meanwhile, Fennell has described her adaptation as a personal vision of how she imagined the novel as a teenager.
In an Instagram video, Rani said Britain was at the height of colonial expansion when Brontë wrote her novel.
She said: “This tiny island was getting very rich from doing some very dark things around the world.
“Meanwhile, in West Yorkshire, Emily and her two sisters were almost certainly not sitting around crocheting and dreaming of handsome princes.”
Highlighting the time of the book’s creation, Anita Rani added:
“They were questioning Victorian morality, which is why it’s important that Heathcliff isn’t white.
“It’s on the page, and what it does is it changes everything. Think about it.”
Her comments prompted a swift response online, with supporters and critics weighing in beneath the video.
One fan wrote: “If you have read the book, you know that Heathcliff is not white – it’s explicitly repeated in the book. Emily couldn’t have made it any clearer if she tried.”
Another agreed: “Completely agree with you @itsanitarani – I’ve read the book a couple of times, discussed this in book reviews and watched a couple of documentaries on it.
“An important message gets lost in this adaptation. I love both artists.”
However, others disagreed, with one commenting:
“But all the older version movies have him white as well. I do not recall an uproar about it before.”
Another added: “It’s all performative outrage because of social media.
“No one cared before because there was nothing to gain for virtue signalling.”
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The debate over Heathcliff’s ethnicity is not new. Brontë’s text describes Heathcliff as “dark-skinned” and “gypsy in aspect” with “black eyes”.
But elsewhere in the novel, his face is said to be “white as the wall behind him”.
The character is often compared to a Lasca, a South Asian sailor, and at other points described as “pale” or possibly “Spanish”.
Literary scholars note the novel was written at a time when the term “black” was often used to describe people with dark hair, including those referred to as “black Irish”.
That historical context complicates straightforward racial readings of the character.
Across film history, Heathcliff has most often been portrayed by white actors. Laurence Olivier played the role in the widely celebrated 1939 adaptation.
More recently, a 2011 film broke with that tradition by casting black British actors James Howson and Solomon Glave as the older and younger Heathcliff.
The debate has also reached the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the former home of the three sisters.
The Brontë Society, which operates the museum, suggested in 2025 that Heathcliff may have had “black African descent”.
The society pointed to the character’s discovery as an orphan in Liverpool, then a major port in the transatlantic slave trade, with no identified family or background.
That reading aligns with interpretations that situate Heathcliff within Britain’s imperial history, a context Rani referenced in her comments.
Backlash has also been aimed at Margot Robbie, who plays Catherine Earnshaw, for being older than the original character and not matching Catherine’s dark-haired description.
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