Who’s Missing From White Women’s Hollywood?

With all the press surrounding Jacob Elordi in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, one question lingers: how does it feel, as a white man, to take on a role canonically understood to be a person of color? It’s the main conversation among audiences, yet the press skirts around it. This isn’t the first time Fennell has been criticized for erasure. In Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023), she was accused of tokenizing or sidelining characters of color. Now, with Wuthering Heights, she takes Heathcliff — one of literature’s most racially ambiguous figures — and makes him definitively white.

A Pattern of Whiteness in Hollywood

Across Fennell’s films, the pattern is clear. Each project narrows the world of representation: urban settings in Promising Young Woman, aristocratic estates in Saltburn, and now a period adaptation where people of color vanish altogether. Whether intentional or subconscious, it looks like a way of evading responsibility while still chasing prestige.

Fennell is not alone. Sofia Coppola has long been accused of erasing characters of color. In her 2017 remake of The Beguiled, Coppola removed Mattie, the enslaved Black woman from the original story. Even in The Bling Ring (2013), she cast white actors to play real-life Asian American and Latina roles, effectively whitewashing a true crime story.

Why Representation Matters

The defense of “writing what you know” only goes so far. Fennell and Coppola are hailed as daring auteurs, but their imagination collapses when race enters the picture. Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women) and Olivia Wilde face similar critiques: their cinematic worlds are overwhelmingly white.

When white women directors erase people of color, they define whose lives are worth depicting. These choices reinforce exclusion, block opportunities for nonwhite actors and crew, and distort cultural memory. Leaving people of color out of Wuthering Heights, The Beguiled, or The Bling Ring rewrites history into a whiter, more palatable version.

The Backlash Paradox

But here’s the paradox: when directors try to diversify casting, they often face backlash. Leslie Headland’s The Acolyte (Star Wars) featured actors of color, and the response was vicious. Racist campaigns and review-bombing led to its cancellation after one season. Catherine Hardwicke, director of Twilight, revealed that author Stephenie Meyer blocked her attempts to cast more actors of color, relenting only to make the villain Black.

So where does this leave us? White women directors face criticism if they exclude people of color, but when they try, they’re punished by audiences or blocked by gatekeepers. The result is a feedback loop: stick to white stories, because risk-taking in diversity carries a cost.

Until Hollywood changes the economics and audience reception of inclusivity, the question at the heart of this debate will remain the same: who’s missing from White Women’s Hollywood?