Tom Hardy played Heathcliff with a floppy hair-do and a quick temper, like Marco Pierre White after a bad day at the chopping board. What convinced more were the blank eyes, the disguise of a man who has learnt the hard way to hide his feelings.
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Tom Hardy, who has ploughed a nice line in derangement through Oliver Twist, Bronson and Stuart: A Life Backwards, plays Heathcliff as a feral Alan Davies, with full, blubbery lips that can still elongate into a snarl. He grants him no redeeming features besides a sexual energy generated, notes the older Cathy, by hate not love. As her, Charlotte Riley is a match for his loopiness, tipsily seeing their romance as the continuation of a childhood game that can co-exist with a respectable marriage to Edgar Linton. She believes she has dreamt up Heathcliff. Equally romantically, he believes he is a product of his Gypsy bloodline rather than the abuse that we see him suffer during a childhood, in which he is treated as the wild animal he duly becomes.
- from two reviews of Wuthering Heights in The Times. I can’t quite get over the ‘blubbery lips’ comment…
