The timeless 1700s tale of passion, hatred and revenge on the Yorkshire moors is gearing up for another Wuthering Heights adaptation with two Australian actors cast in the lead roles.

Barbie actor and producer Margot Robbie, 34, seven months pregnant with her first child, and Saltburn‘s Jacob Elordi, 27, will pair up for the Emily Bronte cult classic early next year.

She will play the “free-spirited, beautiful and spiteful” Catherine Earnshaw, while Elordi gets to play the handsome anti-hero, Liverpool orphan Heathcliff.

Robbie’s production house Luckychap has brought back former Call the Midwife actor Emerald Fennell to write, direct and produce her third feature film for the studio.

She had success with Promising Young Woman, bagging an Oscar for best screenplay, with Robbie collaborating for the first time with Fennell as the on-screen star of the show.

Considered one of the greatest works of fiction ever written in 1847 and Bronte’s only published work, there has been at least 14 adaptations of Wuthering Heights, including William Wyler’s 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, and Robert Fuest’s 1970 movie with Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall.

So what will Robbie, seven years Elordi’s senior, bring to the reboot given Catherine met Heathcliff when she was 15 years old?

“Emerald immerses you into a world so quickly. She’s so masterful at tone and plot,” Robbie told Variety about Fennell’s Saltburn work.

“She gets in your brain and she kind of taps into the most depraved parts of it, so that you’re complicit in the story.

“That’s the water cooler moment – the thing that people are talking about two weeks afterwards.”

Brisbane-born Jacob Elordi reprises one of the most iconic on-screen roles playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Photo: AAP

So what can we expect?

Sophie Alexandra Frazer, a doctoral candidate in English at University of Sydney, wrote on The Conversation that the novel “has maintained its relevance in popular culture”.

Singer Kate Bush’s 1978 hit single, Wuthering Heights, “was representative of the magnetic pull of Bronte’s fierce heroine, Catherine”.

It has been “transformed into various mediums … several Hollywood films, theatre, a ballet and, perhaps most incongruously, a detective novel,” she said.

“Bronte’s name is used to sell everything from food to dry-cleaning products.”

The wuthering-heights.co.uk website’s Paul Thompson says the real story is actually one of “revenge”.

“It follows the life of Heathcliff, a mysterious gypsy-like person, from childhood (about seven years old) to his death in his late thirties,” he said.

“Heathcliff rises in his adopted family and then is reduced to the status of a servant, running away when the young woman he loves [Catherine] decides to marry another.

“He returns later, rich and educated, and sets about gaining his revenge on the two families that he believed ruined his life.”

Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall in the 1970 version. Photo: AAP

Unlikely pairing

Frazer says the film versions tend to “indulge” in the romanticism of it all, with the two lovers swooning on the edge of windswept clifftops.

It’s not about that as much as equal parts doomed passion, families locked in conflict, ghosts knocking at windows and Shakespearean tragedy.

“What is it about their unearthly union, with its overtones of necrophilia and incestuous desire, that so captivates us?” Frazer asked.

“And why does … Bronte privilege this form of explicitly masochistic, irrevocable and unattainable love?”

Will Robbie, whose wide skillset includes playing everything from Barbie and ice-skating queen in I, Tonya, to Wolf of Wall Street and Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey, master Catherine?

Can Elordi, who grew up acting in the theatre and whose CV includes Netflix’s The Kissing Booth (2018), and the hit HBO A24 drama series Euphoria (2019), get close to the brooding, vengeful Heathcliff?

Already, there’s mixed reviews from Bronte fans on social media, including some harsh memes about the Robbie and Elordi pairing and age differences.

“Whoever read Wuthering Heights knows this is so unserious casting,” wrote one, while many thought the announcement was a joke.

And this: “Honestly, they cast the prettiest people for toxic love stories”.