The Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell said it was “unfortunate” that a scene showing Margot Robbie’s hairy armpits did not make the final cut, because women in period adaptations are often shown with clean-shaven underarms.

Robbie’s character, Cathy, had “extremely hairy armpits” in the 2026 adaptation of the novel, but “unfortunately the scene that we see them didn’t make it in there”, said the director.

Cathy having unshaven pits “was so important to me”, she said, adding that she often wonders “where are the razors that these women are using?” when watching Jane Austen adaptations.

“They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like: ‘What’s going on? It’s completely mad.’”

Fennell spoke to an audience at Hay festival in Wales on Friday evening. Her sexed-up adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic novel, starring Robbie alongside Jacob Elordi, was released on Valentine’s Day this year.

Fennell described it as a “sister, not a twin” of the book, saying that she “couldn’t make” the original. “It’s so brilliant,” she added.

Asked about the infamous “skin room” – Cathy’s husband, Edgar Linton, gives her bedroom a bespoke design with walls that resemble her skin – Fennell joked that in marketing meetings the team considered asking Farrow & Ball to make a Cathy’s skin themed colour.

They also asked Robbie to send close-up images of the underside of her wrist in order to reproduce her veins on the walls.

Fennell also spoke about the much-discussed “fish scene”, in which Cathy sticks her finger into a dead fish’s mouth.

“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.”

On her directorial approach, Fennell said that “being embarrassing, being cringe” 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.”

Fennell said she is taking time off from film-making to make jigsaw puzzles, see her family, disconnect from the internet and read Sarah J Maas novels.

“And I’m coming up secretly with something so depraved, so profoundly evil, that nobody’s going to make it.”