If you thought Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” was a polarizing, sweat-drenched provocation, wait until you hear how Margot Robbie’s inner circle handled the first look at Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë. While the rest of the world has to wait until February 13 to see Robbie and Jacob Elordi trade brooding glances on the moors, the actress recently sat down with Jimmy Kimmel on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to reveal that a private screening of the film turned into what she calls the most unhinged experience of her life.
Robbie, who produces “Wuthering Heights” through LuckyChap, told Kimmel she’s “seen the film a lot of times,” but last week was the first time she watched it with anything resembling an audience. That audience just happened to be her friends, who decided—without irony—to throw a bachelorette party for her “Wuthering Heights” character, Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw. Robbie said she assumed it was a bit until her friends started chanting, “Cathy’s back, Cathy’s back,” and she found herself asking, “Wait, are we really going to have a fake bachelorette for an imaginary character?” The answer, apparently, was “Yes, absolutely.”
The party came with a moodboard, a private room at LA’s Bird Streets club, and a dress code Robbie summed up with the kind of precision only a close friend group can enforce: “Victorian slutty. Do with that what you will.” Robbie wore white corsets and lace; everyone else showed up in black lace, corsets, and veils—“like mob wives,” as she put it. She also noted that, thanks to “girl code,” she can’t share everything that went down, but she can confirm the energy was entirely off the rails once the screening began.
“I thought, I’ll screen it for the girls, and they’ll love it,” Robbie said. Instead, “it was the most unhinged experience of my life. To put it into context [it was] like 20 women, frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs, a couple of drinks in before the movie even started. We were screaming so much missing most of the movie. It wasn’t really watching a movie—it was like call-and-response, with constant commentary and screaming throughout, and sobbing at parts as well.”
Then Jacob Elordi appeared onscreen, and the room basically detonated. Robbie said the scream level was so intense she thought it “registered on the Richter scale,” and she joked, “If he walked in right now, I think they would eat him,” adding, “so it was safer that he wasn’t there.” Robbie’s broader takeaway: “There was nothing appropriate about this night at all—particularly not the commentary throughout the film.”
Because of course it didn’t stop there. Robbie said they turned the screening into a drinking game: everyone drew a word from a hat and had to drink whenever it was said. One friend drew “Cathy,” which was instantly catastrophic because, Robbie explained, Elordi says it “like a thousand times” in the film—“every three minutes” it’s “Cathy, Cathy, Cathy.” Robbie’s punchline: her friend Phoebe got “Cathy-ed.”
If Robbie’s first audience experience is any indication, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” isn’t arriving as a quiet, prestige-lit adaptation you politely absorb. It’s coming as a full-body crowd movie—one that might play very differently depending on whether you’re in a tasteful theater seat, or in a corset-and-veil private room with 20 drunk friends ready to howl at the screen.
