Margot Robbie has come out in defence of Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which she is playing Cathy opposite Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff.

Despite being months away from release, the film has attracted criticism for its casting as well as alterations that Fennell has made to the characters. In an interview with Vogue magazine, Robbie said: “I get it … there’s nothing else to go off at this point until people see the movie.”

Much of the controversy has stemmed from the casting of Elordi as a character described by Brontë as “dark-skinned” and a “lascar” (a colonial term for a South Asian sailor or soldier). In Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of the novel, James Howson became the first black actor to play the role. Robbie said of Elordi: “I saw him play Heathcliff, and he is Heathcliff. I’d say, just wait. Trust me, you’ll be happy.”

She added: “It’s a character that has this lineage of other great actors who’ve played him, from Laurence Olivier to Richard Burton and Ralph Fiennes to Tom Hardy. To be a part of that is special. He’s incredible and I believe in him so much. I honestly think he’s our generation’s Daniel Day-Lewis.”

There has also been some disquiet over Robbie’s casting. In the novel, Cathy is described as dark-haired and is in her late teens; Robbie is in her mid-30s and the early trailer releases show her with blond hair. The film’s casting director Kharmel Cochrane said earlier this year: “There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot. But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”

In the same Vogue interview Robbie outlined her interest in the character: “I both understood her and didn’t, in a way that drew me to her. It’s this puzzle you have to work out.”

Fennell also defended her decision to cast Robbie in the role, saying: “Cathy is a star. She’s wilful, mean, a recreational sadist, a provocateur. She engages in cruelty in a way that is disturbing and fascinating. It was about finding someone who you would forgive in spite of yourself, someone who literally everyone in the world would understand why you love her.”

She added: “It’s difficult to find that supersized star power. Margot comes with big dick energy. That’s what Cathy needs.”

Fennell has built her directing career on constructing outrageous, social media-friendly narratives with strongly provocative elements. While making her mark as an actor, notably as Camilla Shand in the TV series The Crown, Fennell moved into writing and showrunning on the TV series Killing Eve before making her film directing debut with Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan, for which Fennell won the best original screenplay Oscar. She followed this up with Saltburn, which attained notoriety for scenes in which Barry Keoghan’s character Oliver drinks bathwater containing semen and dances naked through the stately home of the title.

Fennell appears to be employing similarly audience-baiting tactics in Wuthering Heights, with reports emerging from an early test screening in August that the film was “aggressively provocative and tonally abrasive”, and includes a scene of a public hanging in which the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution”.

Robbie, who recently starred in and produced the blockbuster Barbie adaptation, also acts as a producer on Wuthering Heights, having been a producer on both of Fennell’s previous feature films. Robbie’s production company LuckyChap, which includes her husband, Tom Ackerley, among its principals, has emerged as an entertainment industry force, with production credits on I, Tonya, Birds of Prey and My Old Ass alongside Barbie and Fennell’s films.

At the Brontë Women’s Writing festival last year, Fennell defended her approach to Wuthering Heights, saying that Brontë’s novel, originally published in 1847, meant a huge amount to her: “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book. I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious. It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private.”

She added: “[It is] an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. There’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it.”

Of the film’s erotic content, Robbie told Vogue: “Everyone’s expecting this to be very, very raunchy. I think people will be surprised. Not to say there aren’t sexual elements and that it’s not provocative – it definitely is provocative – but it’s more romantic than provocative. This is a big epic romance.”

She and Fennell discussed this on the set: “What reads to us as hot or exciting or sexy? And it’s not just a sex position or someone taking their shirt off.” A scene in which Elordi’s Heathcliff shelters Cathy from the rain “almost made me weak at the knees”, Robbie said, adding: “It was the little things that we loved as two women in our 30s, and this movie is primarily for people in our demographic. These epic romances and period pieces aren’t often made by women.”

Robbie said that Fennell’s ambition was to make “this generation’s Titanic” and Fennell told her: “I went to the cinema to watch Romeo & Juliet eight times and I was on the ground crying when I wasn’t allowed to go back for a ninth. I want it to be that.”