Archives March 2024

If you’ve still yet to fully recover from Saltburn’s bathtub scene, then it’s perhaps best to look away now: Oscar-winning provocateur Emerald Fennell has set her sights on her next project, and her choice is sure to be a divisive one.

On July 12, the director took to X to share an illustration of a ghostly skeleton by artist Katie Buckley. At its heart sits the title Wuthering Heights, and below it the strapline “A film by Emerald Fennell.” Above the image, it reads, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad,” the immortal words Heathcliff utters after the tragic death of Catherine Earnshaw.

Given her last feature, and Promising Young Woman before it, were both about obsession—the former about one student’s infatuation with another, and the latter about a woman’s single-minded determination to avenge the death of her best friend—the decision to adapt Emily Brontë’s seminal tale of doomed love, as well as the accompanying tagline, make perfect sense.

However, it did leave us with a number of questions, too. Will this be a faithful period adaptation, or a modern-day update? How will it compare to the countless other big-screen renderings of this particular story, from Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s 1939 version, to the 1992 film starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 reimagining with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson?

Would it be Barry Keoghan, I wondered, who’d don a waistcoat and scraggly mane to play our brooding Byronic hero? And who could possibly take the part of Cathy? Well, at least on that front, we now have some answers: on September 23, it emerged that it was not the Irish Oscar nominee but—staggeringly—his Saltburn co-star Jacob Elordi who’d be delivering Heathcliff’s impassioned monologues, while Margot Robbie, now the world’s most ubiquitous blonde after Barbie herself, would (presumably) be going brunette to embody his tormented paramour. The latter will also be producing through her company, LuckyChap, after having backed Fennell’s last two films, too.

One morning a few days ago, I received an odd email from someone I’d been writing back and forth with about the US Open: “Could we speak on your cell at 4pm? Something amazing may be possible.” That something, as it turned out, was a chance to hit—one on one—for 30 minutes with two-time US Open champion (and eight-time Grand Slam champion, Olympic gold medalist, Hall of Fame member, and all-around living legend) Andre Agassi the following morning at 7, in Arthur Ashe Stadium, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, a.k.a. the biggest prime-time stage at the Open—followed by breakfast and a chat in the Emirates Suite in Ashe.

Even thinking about it felt ridiculous: Though I’ve been playing tennis for decades, I’m also decades removed from my brief stint competing on the midwestern boys’ junior circuit. These days, I’m a supremely average once-a-week player perpetually on the verge of, you know, getting myself back in fighting form. I absolutely love to find the groove on a big-swing, big-finish crosscourt topspin forehand, I like playing a few sets against friends, but I loathe the notion of putting myself out there for even a local club tournament. Purely going on natural instinct, every fiber of my body told me to say no to this (admittedly mind-boggling) opportunity.

Emotionally, I realized I was going through some kind of inverse of the seven stages of grief, stuck on an odd kind of anger at this once-in-a-lifetime thing landing on my lap. Not one of the many actors I’ve interviewed ever asked me to step in front of the camera and read lines, or leap through a window as part of a big chase scene; zero of the musicians I’ve talked with over the years have asked me to stand in with them at Madison Square Garden and trade guitar solos or take over lead-vocal duties at their sound check—so why this?

Yet here was the offer: Play tennis, with one of the greatest to ever do so, in the largest tennis stadium in the world. I had 90 minutes to make up my mind.

The first thing I did was reach for a box filled with old photographs on a bookshelf in my living room, where I dug up a picture of Andre and me—in 1994—at a pre-Open Nike party at a restaurant near Gramercy Park. I have no idea what we talked about, and in any case I didn’t want to bother him or take up too much of his time, as he was there with Brooke Shields (they’d then been dating for about a year and would be married a few years later), and it seemed obvious that they adored each other’s company. No—I was just over the moon to even be there: a lifelong tennis nerd now, for the first time, around real tennis legends. (Aside from Andre I also met John McEnroe, who had arrived late, wearing a rumpled jean jacket and a scowl on his face, carrying an armful of vinyl records—a.k.a. exactly the Johnny Mac out of central casting that I wanted to see.)