What Is With... Wuthering Heights’ emotionally intense press tour? 

SINGAPORE – Wuthering Heights the movie has a runtime of two hours and 16 minutes, during which lead actors Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi do a lot of yearning, kissing and licking.

Just in case that was not enough to demonstrate the pair’s unbridled passion for each other, Wuthering Heights the press tour has been packed with a similar kind of high-octave pining too. 

Elordi has spoken of their “mutual obsession” in interviews, which, if you can believe it, is actually one of the milder things to have come out of this media blitz.

Consider also the time he filled Robbie’s room with roses on Valentine’s Day in 2025, which prompted her to think (and tell Vogue magazine): “Oh, he’s probably a very good boyfriend.”

And the matching rings they got, inscribed with one of the book’s most iconic quotes: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” The film, for the uninitiated, is based on the 1847 Emily Bronte novel of the same name.

No wonder Robbie told American ticketing company Fandango that she had become “co-dependent” on Elordi, likening herself to a “kid without their blanket” when he was not watching. 

That is all very well and good, except that Robbie is married – to a producer on the movie, no less – and mother to a one-year-old boy. So, why is she so determined to convince viewers that she is besotted with her co-star?  

With Wuthering Heights – now showing in Singapore cinemas – topping the North American box office, it seems the Tinseltown tradition of “showmance” is still working its charm.

Love sells

A showmance is a relationship between two actors that typically lasts for the duration of the promotional cycle. Though the term was popularised by American reality show Big Brother in 2001, it is by no means a new phenomenon.

In the 1940s, studios were said to stage dates or force actors into sham relationships for promotional purposes. For instance, American actress Elizabeth Taylor reportedly dated college football star Glenn Davis on the advice of Hollywood publicists, while Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were photographed going out together. 

Eight decades on, the rumour mill continues to churn.

In the last three years alone, it has spat out other emotionally ambiguous pairings: Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie (Heated Rivalry, 2025); Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson (The Naked Gun, 2025); Zoe Kravitz and Austin Butler (Caught Stealing, 2025); Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande (Wicked, 2024; Wicked: For Good, 2025); Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell (Anyone But You, 2023).

To industry observers, the rationale is obvious: Who does not love love? 

Dr Bertha Chin, a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore who researches celebrity culture in Hollywood, says: “I think it’s quite clear that during promotions, these actors are asked, or it’s been written into their contract, that they have to play this role, which is synonymous with the characters they’re playing in a film.”

And when the chemistry between co-stars becomes a selling point in and of itself, it makes it easier for studios to market franchises, and even unrelated projects involving the same pairings. 

Erotica app Quinn, for example, hopped swiftly onto the Heated Rivalry bandwagon, roping the hockey romance’s two leads into a project just weeks after the viral series’ premiere in November. It parlayed Williams and Storrie’s on-screen chemistry and off-screen best-friendship into audio gold, this time as feuding fae princes. 

Do these pairings actually sell a project? It certainly seems to have helped in the case of the Williams and Storrie-narrated story Ember & Ice. Each episode has racked up around a million plays. In contrast, other Quinn projects voiced by celebrities rarely exceed 400,000 plays. 

But it could backfire too. On platforms like Reddit, commenters have denounced Robbie and Elordi’s press tour antics as so obnoxious, they no longer want to see the movie.

Either way, nothing gets tongues wagging like the possibility of illicit attraction.

Robbie’s backpedalling – she later told Glamour Magazine UK that the “whole co-dependency thing has been really taken out of context and blown way up” – came after much ink had already been spilt on the press tour. Most op-eds have been bewildered, many exasperated, but all contribute to the buzz surrounding the movie. Any press is good press, as the adage goes. 

A love that looks real

Nowadays, to promote his or her new movie or TV show, your favourite actor might sit down to take a lie detector test, read thirst tweets or suffer through 10 levels of hot wings. Sometimes, he or she gets to nibble on fried chicken instead, though the trade-off is having to flirt with the host. 

Welcome to the modern press tour, optimised for a generation with dwindling attention spans and an insatiable desire for “realness”. Everything is clipped, and the more “unhinged” the actor manages to sound in those 30 seconds, the more likely he or she is to go viral.

The refrain, “please never get media training”, is now the ultimate stamp of approval. 

“Fans are always looking for the authentic face of the celebrity beyond the character they portray,” says Dr Chin. “And I think since the #MeToo movement, this has become all the more important because they want to know that their favourite is not problematic.” 

Giving actors the space to laugh and joke with one another also better showcases their dynamic.

Dr Celia Lam, a researcher of popular culture and dean of Wenzhou-Kean University’s College of Liberal Arts, says: “In the early 2010s, audiences may have needed to scour through multiple junket press interviews to find moments of interaction, or rely on talk-show appearances or magazine interviews.”

Now, however, audiences can easily seek out content specifically related to their preferred dynamic, and the barrage of such videos can warp perceptions of how obsessed these pairs are with each other – platonically or otherwise.

What social media clips lack in length, they make up for in emotional intensity. No movie better encapsulates this than Wicked, the 2024 blockbuster that spawned one of the year’s most-talked-about press tours, punctuated as it was by Grande and Erivo’s frequent crying.

This is how Dr Ian Dixon – an actor, director and associate professor of practice at Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information – explains the rise in emotionally charged content. “Because people have become more cynical, there is more pressure on actors to go, no, this is actually real. There is actually something happening between us.”  

The authenticity paradox

It should be noted though, says Dr Lam, that these light-hearted snippets are “in no way more authentic than an anecdote told for the 100th time during a press interview”. 

The digital natives that make up Hollywood’s primary audience know this, and yet revel in the ambiguity of these displays.

“Their engagement and enjoyment are not restricted to whether the showmance is real or not. They are either finding pleasure in deconstructing the artifice of the media text or simply consuming the presentation of the dynamic as a form of entertainment,” she adds.

At the end of the day, it is hard to resist these parasocial tendencies in the same way it is hard to resist a trashy reality show. The glamour of it all, the tantalising possibility of witnessing in real time the kindling of something real and organic – it is seductive, and it is satiating.

“How can we know something is fake and yet be so convinced by it? There must be something mythological happening behind that,” says Dr Dixon. 

And what could be more mythological than love?