“Wuthering Heights” cut scene of Margot Robbie’s ‘extremely hairy armpits,’ director Emerald Fennell says

Key points

• Emerald Fennell said it was “so important” to her to make Margot Robbie’s armpits “extremely hairy” in her Wuthering Heights adaptation.

• However, the scene that exposed the actress’ unshaven pits “didn’t make it” into the final cut of the film.

• Fennell said she’s frequently confused by hairless armpits in period pieces: “Where are the razors that these women are using?”

Emerald Fennell made her Wuthering Heights movie distinctly her own — but not every detail of her vision ended up in the final cut.

The Saltburn director spoke about her recent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel at the Hay Festival in Wales on Friday, revealing that some scenes never made it into the version of the film released in February.

Fennell said she is frequently distracted by female characters adhering to modern grooming standards — like clean-shaven armpits — in period pieces like Jane Austen adaptations. “Where are the razors that these women are using?” she said, The Guardian reported. “They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like, ‘What’s going on? It’s completely mad.'”

Because of this, it was important to her that Margot Robbie’s character Cathy have “extremely hairy armpits” to reflect the norms of the historical era — in this case, the late 1700s. “Unfortunately, the scene that we see them [in] didn’t make it in there,” said the director, who regrets scrapping the actress’ unkempt pits.

Elsewhere at the event, Fennell discussed how she came up with the scene in which Cathy sticks her finger into the mouth of a fish surrounded by savory gelatin. “I saw a fish in aspic and I thought, ‘I want to stick my finger in its mouth,'” she recalled. “And then I was like, ‘Well, I think if you were trapped and you were extremely sexually frustrated, the first thing you’d do is…'”

Fennell said she kept her options open when it came to the appearance of the fish. “We had all of the different fish — we had fish with lipstick on, we had real fish, fake fish. In the end that was a real fish,” she said. “But poor Margot. I mean, she had to do that. There were 12 of them.”

The Promising Young Woman filmmaker also expressed why she thinks “being embarrassing, being cringe” is a “really big” part of her artistic voice. “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,” she said. “And I feel, for me, I want to get in and go for it, and push it off a cliff.”

Fennell, who directed and wrote the screenplay for Wuthering Heights, previously explained the differences between her version and Brontë’s original novel in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, noting that she developed her spin on the story based on her memories from when she read the book as a teenager. “I think the things that I remembered were both real and not real,” Fennell explained. “So there was a certain amount of wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I’d sort of forgotten or consolidated.”

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Fennell said she wanted her take to be both an interpretation of and a response to the book and to “the feeling of it” rather than a completely faithful adaptation, adding that the time constraints of filmmaking forced her to make significant cuts to the story.

“I think, really, I would do a miniseries and encompass the whole thing over 10 hours, and it would be beautiful,” she told EW. “But if you’re making a movie, and you’ve got to be fairly tight, you’ve got to make those kinds of hard decisions.”

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly