Jacob Elordi's experience filming Wuthering Heights was not always a bed of roses. In the early days of shooting the film adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel, the actor, who stars as the film's antihero Heathcliff, had to be briefly hospitalized. The makeup artist, Siân Miller, was designing the scars from the whips for Heathcliff's back. She challenged him: "If Daniel Day-Lewis was playing Heathcliff, he would have come in with scars." Jacob shared this with the film's director, Emerald Fennell, in an interview with Esquire published on January 30th. He quipped, "Well, I'm going to go away and maim myself on the weekend to prove to you that I'm Heathcliff!" While the idea of going "method" was a joke, Jacob did end up suffering an injury off-camera.
That night, he went home to a house with a steam shower. As Heathcliff, he was covered in mange and dirt. He thought, "I'm not going to do that again. I'm going to clean my feet properly every night and come in to work fresh the next day." So he went to clean his feet and leaned back, searing his back onto the steam knob. He stood up screaming; it had torn up his back. When he went to work on Monday, he had a second-degree burn.
The incident left Emerald shaken up until she realized that Jacob was, in fact, okay. "I think that was in the first week of shooting," Emerald recalled to Jacob. "I got a text from Josey McNamara, the producer, saying, 'Jacob's in hospital.' Obviously, I thought, 'Oh my God, he's had a car accident,' and then he was like, 'He's burnt his back in the shower.'"
As for if Jacob channeled Daniel Day-Lewis—who is known for going to extremes for his roles—the Euphoria actor quipped, "It was actual Daniel Day-Lewis."
Aside from physical reminders, Jacob also walked away from filming with a strong bond with his costar Margot Robbie, who plays Catherine in the film. In fact, the Barbie star noted that they became deeply "codependent" with each other "quite quickly."
"I remember the first couple of days on set," Margot recalled in a Jan. 14 panel Fandango interview alongside the cast and crew. "He would just be like always in the vicinity of where I was, but in a corner watching. On the third day, I found myself starting to look around to see where he was. I was like, 'Well obviously he's going to be somewhere close by. Where is he right now?'"
She added that when Jacob wasn't around, she felt lost. "Like a kid without their blanket or something," she said. "I was like, 'Where is he?'" For Jacob, the feeling was "mutual," as he put it. "I was enamored by her," he said.
