Why Margot Robbie’s “Extremely Hairy Armpits” Were Cut From ‘Wuthering Heights’

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• Margot Robbie was meant to have hair armpits in Wuthering Heights.
• Emerald Fennell later cut the scene from the final edit of the movie.
• She explained that originally she wanted the hairy armpits included because women in period dramas are often hairless.

Now that Wuthering Heights is available on streaming, fans are no doubt watching the movie again to salivate over tortured Jacob Elordi, and honestly, I get it! But the movie could have been super different, and almost features Margot Robbie with tons of hair under her armpits—alas, we did not get that version of the film.

Director Emerald Fennell confirmed in an interview with The Guardian that Margot’s “extremely hairy armpits” in her adaptation of the classic novel was cut. “Unfortunately the scene that we see them didn’t make it in there” she added.

Okay cool but why were the pits there in the first place? Well, Emerald wanted to add in a dash of realism to the movie, noting that Cathy having unshaven pits “was so important to me” because she often wondered “where are the razors that these women are using?” when seeing the typical Jane Austen adaptation film. “They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like: ‘What’s going on? It’s completely mad.’”

Instead of seeing Margot with hair armpits, we instead got the scene of Cathy sticking her finger into the mouth of a fish.

Warner Bros.

Emerald explained, “I saw a fish in aspic and I thought: ‘I want to stick my finger in its mouth.’ 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 …’ 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. But poor Margot. I mean she had to do that. There were 12 of them.”

Part of her reasoning is that she wanted to lean into “being embarrassing, being cringe,” which she said is a “really big thing” for her “especially 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, and I feel, for me, I want to get in and go for it, and push it off a cliff.”

Emerald is taking some time off of work, but she plans to come back, and more wicked than ever: “I’m coming up secretly with something so depraved, so profoundly evil, that nobody’s going to make it.”