Emerald Fennell, the director of the 2026 Wuthering Heights adaptation, has a regret that's really getting under her skin - and it involves Margot Robbie's armpits.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Wales on Friday evening, Fennell lamented that a period-accurate scene showing Robbie's character Cathy with "extremely hairy armpits" was shot but didn't make the final cut. The director called it "unfortunate," noting that women in period adaptations are routinely depicted with hairless underarms as if they'd secretly invented the Gillette Fusion ProGlide in 1812.

"It was so important to me," Fennell said, adding that she often wonders "where are the razors that these women are using?" while watching Jane Austen adaptations. "They're all kind of hairless like eels. I'm like: 'What's going on? It's completely mad.'"

The 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 she "couldn't make" the original because "it's so brilliant."

Fennell also addressed the infamous "skin room" - where Cathy's husband Edgar Linton gives her a bedroom with walls resembling her skin. She joked that marketing considered asking Farrow & Ball to make a Cathy's skin themed colour. They also requested Robbie send close-up images of the underside of her wrist to reproduce her veins on the walls.

And then there's 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,'" Fennell explained. "Then I was like, 'Well, I think if you were trapped, and you were extremely sexually frustrated, the first thing you'd do is …'"

They tested various fish options - fish with lipstick on, real fish, fake fish - but settled on a real one. "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."

Fennell is currently 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."