When news broke that Emerald Fennell had cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in her adaptation of Wuthering Heights, online debate erupted immediately. For many viewers, the controversy was less about any individual performer than about a familiar pattern: the persistent tension between artistic “interpretation” and the historical phenomenon known as whitewashing.
Whitewashing––the practice of casting white actors in roles written as characters of color or erasing racial identity altogether––has deep roots in the history of film. Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood frequently substituted white actors for nonwhite characters, sometimes through overt techniques such as makeup and prosthetics, and sometimes through subtler narrative changes that quietly removed racial specificity. In contemporary discourse, a related term, “race-bending”, describes altering a character’s race in adaptation. While race-bending can sometimes broaden representation, the distinction between the two practices often lies in the direction of the change and the narrative consequences it produces.
The debate surrounding Fennell’s Wuthering Heights illustrates the complexity of this distinction. In Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Heathcliff’s racial identity is deliberately ambiguous but unmistakably coded as non-white. He is repeatedly described as “dark-skinned” and referred to as a “gypsy,” a term historically used as a slur against Romani people. At other points, he is called a “lascar,” a word associated with Indian sailors in the British Empire. His mysterious arrival in Liverpool, a major port city deeply connected to imperial trade and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, further situates him within a web of racial and colonial associations.
These details are not incidental. Heathcliff’s status as an outsider shapes every stage of the novel’s conflict. His difference––racial, cultural, and class-based––marks him as an object of suspicion and cruelty within the rigid social hierarchy of Victorian England. The hostility he encounters from characters such as Edgar Linton reflects the period’s anxieties about lineage, property, and racial belonging. Remove that dimension, and the novel’s tragedy risks collapsing into something far narrower: a melodramatic love story rather than a critique of the systems that render Heathcliff perpetually alien.
Fennell has defended her approach by emphasizing the interpretive nature of adaptation, noting that she is creating “a version” of the novel rather than a definitive one. In principle, such an argument is reasonable; adaptation has always involved reinterpretation. However, interpretation does not occur in a cultural vacuum. When racial ambiguity consistently resolves itself into whiteness, the pattern raises questions about the unconscious assumptions guiding those choices.
In media landscapes historically dominated by white protagonists, audiences and creators alike may unconsciously imagine characters as white even when the text suggests otherwise. These decisions often reveal an industry logic that treats whiteness as the safest commercial default. Historically marginalized performers are replaced by actors perceived as more marketable, even when the narrative loses a meaningful layer of context in the process.
At the same time, race-bending can also function in the opposite direction. When adaptation reimagines previously white characters as people of color, the result can expand opportunities for representation while reframing familiar stories through new cultural perspectives.
The 2022 television adaptation Interview with the Vampire, based on Anne Rice’s novel of the same name, reimagines its main character––originally written as a white plantation owner––as a Black businessman in early twentieth-century New Orleans. Crucially, the show doesn’t pretend that this change is neutral. Instead, it fundamentally reframes the character’s struggles and the power dynamics within the story.
The controversy surrounding Fennell’s Wuthering Heights therefore touches on an evolving cultural conversation about interpretation, power, and historical memory. Film adaptations do not merely reproduce literature; they translate it for contemporary audiences, carrying forward, or reshaping, the social meanings embedded in the original work. In the case of Wuthering Heights, the debate suggests that the question is not simply whether a filmmaker has the freedom to imagine a story differently, but how those imaginative choices echo within a broader history of representation on screen.