Margot Robbie’s skin influenced ‘Wuthering Heights’ set design

Emerald Fennell, who has directed the upcoming film “Wuthering Heights”, revealed that one of the sets featured in the movie was decorated with wallpaper inspired by pictures of actress Margot Robbie’s skin.

Robbie plays Cathy opposite Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in a new big-screen reimagining of Emily Bronte’s classic tale. Fennell shared that the wallpaper seen onscreen in Cathy’s bedroom was created using silk printed with images of her leading lady’s “veins and freckles”.

During a screening of the film at the BFI Southbank in London, Fennell said: “We asked her to send us all her veins and her freckles, and then we printed it on silk and stuffed it and put latex over it so that it could sweat.

“At first glance, you don’t see any of it, it’s just a beautiful pink room. It’s like a visual example of what it feels like to be made a wife, to be made an object of beauty, to be a collector’s item.”

He also explained another unusual move she made to encourage her actors to get into character, saying that she created “shrines” and placed them in the stars’ bedrooms, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

She said: “I was like: ‘I’m going to go through the internet, I’m going to find their best photos and then I’m going to make shrines in their bedrooms for each other’.

“So when Jacob went into his room, he had an insane shrine to worship not just Cathy, but Margot Robbie and then she had the same thing. There’s nothing more humanising than somebody’s first press photo.”

During the talk, Fennell confessed Robbie approached her and asked to play Cathy after the director sent a script to the actress’s production company.

She said: “I sent it to them to produce, and Margot luckily asked if she might play Cathy. I was very nervous to ask her, because I think we have a different relationship, and I didn’t want to put her on the spot. I was like: ‘Do I go for it?’ No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t, because she’s braver than me. She asked me.”

Margot Elise Robbie was born in Dalby, Queensland, on 2 July 1990. Her father, Doug Robbie, was a former farm-owner and sugarcane tycoon, while her mother, Sarie Kessler, was a physiotherapist. Through her father, she is of Scottish descent. Margot is the third of four children: she has two older siblings, a sister and brother, and a younger brother. When she was five years old, her father, whom she has described as “awful”, separated from the family and she moved to her mother’s hometown of the Gold Coast. Robbie recalled that she and her siblings “didn’t make life easy” for their single mother, remembering that they often fought and that her mother had to be a “very strong woman to hold things together”. The family spent most of her childhood on her grandparents’ Currumbin Valley farm in the Gold Coast hinterland.

Agencies