“I Want To Work With Emerald Again. I Want To Work With Margot Again – All Of Them”: Wuthering Heights’ Shazad Latif On His Hollywood Arrival

From sneaking into cinemas on Holloway Road to starring in one of the year’s most dissected films, Shazad Latif’s journey came full circle this February when he met audiences as Edgar Linton. Back in his native North London, the actor’s reflecting on the whirlwind and why questions about who gets to be part of the story still matter.

Where do you find a leading man from one of the year’s biggest films? In the case of Shazad Latif – weeks following the theatrical release of the zeitgeist-swallowing Wuthering Heights – it’s at home. When we speak, the 37-year-old appears relaxed, framed by a wall of books stacked behind him in loose rows across several shelves. For the past few months, the press tour of Emerald Fennell’s third feature has taken the actor everywhere. London, Los Angeles, Paris, airports, premieres, hotel rooms, and interview suites – the familiar carousel of international engagements that follows a major studio release. Today, however, the pace has slowed slightly. “I’m in London at the moment,” he exhales, smiling. “Yeah, yeah – back home.”

For someone at the heart of a global film launch of this enormity, Latif seems strikingly grounded. He laughs easily, speaks quickly and carries himself with the faint amusement of someone still adjusting to the scale of what’s happening around him. The past few months have been something of a whirlwind, yes, but it’s perhaps to be expected that his story soon returns to somewhere much closer to home. North London is, after all, where everything began. It was there that he first encountered the very story that would eventually inspire his latest film. Through a small cabinet filled with a handful of VHS tapes in his grandmother’s house, he discovered some of Hollywood’s classic titles: Singin’ in the Rain, El Cid, Now, Voyager starring Bette Davis, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and epics like Ben-Hur. And then, of course, there was the 1939 re-telling of Emily Brontë’s gothic classic, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. 

The memory of his grandmother’s house, decorated with photographs of old movie stars, their black-and-white portraits lining the walls, still makes him laugh. She might struggle to recall everyday details, “she’s got terrible memory,” he jokes, “but she remembers films and actors. That’s what she holds onto.” Hearing him list the same titles and names with such ease, one suspects it could be a family thing.

Despite its February arrival, Fennell’s adaptation of Brontë’s only novel has already secured its place as one of the most examined cinematic contributions of the year, helped by the fact that Latif plays Edgar Linton opposite two of Hollywood’s most in-demand names – Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie. Long before film premieres and international press tours, however, there was simply a council flat and a young boy who spent most of his time watching films. Latif, of mixed English, Scottish and Pakistani heritage, was born in London in 1988 and raised by working-class parents. His dad arrived in England as a child, and by Shazad’s childhood was working as a black cab driver in the capital, his mother cleaning offices and houses. There were no industry connections or obvious pathways into acting and certainly no expectation that someone from his background might end up on a red carpet. 

What the household did have, however, was cinema. Growing up, films were indulged in after school, late at night, on weekends, sometimes together as a family and sometimes with friends. “That’s all I did,” Latif recalls, “I played football and watched movies. That was our childhood.” The idea of Latif telling the stories himself found its way in when, in primary school, his class staged a production of Romeo and Juliet. At just eight years old, putting on a costume and performing revealed an unexpected but exciting sense of freedom. Did he know then that it would lead him to starring in massive professional productions? “Yeah, I think I had a vision,” he reflects. Standing by the window in his bedroom, Latif would whisper prayers to the universe. “Please, please, please make me an actor,” he recalls saying. His wish was much more than simple ambition, “We were very poor,” he says. “I was just trying to find a way out, and it was something that I loved.”

As he grew older, the ambition gradually solidified. During a gap year at 18, he joined Young Actors Theatre in Angel – a North London training programme that helps young performers access auditions. Actors such as Daniel Kaluuya had passed through the corridors. Eventually, Latif enrolled at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, one of Britain’s most respected drama institutions.

While visiting his ex-girlfriend in Bilbao, aged 18, an email arrived in his inbox. It was an audition notice for a film called Slumdog Millionaire. His first reaction was dismissive. “I was like, ‘What the hell is this? It’s terrible,” he says, now laughing at his miscalculation. Still, curiosity got the better of him, and he decided to audition anyway. The final three came down to Riz Ahmed, Dev Patel and Latif – eight Oscars later, for its chosen star, Patel, the rest was history. 

However, soon afterwards, another opportunity emerged for Latif, this time for the BBC espionage drama Spooks, where he would win the part of Tariq Masood, a technician and data analyst. “I had to do it for survival, which I think gives you an extra drive.” Landing the role became his first significant professional break. He chose to leave Bristol Old Vic early and commit fully to the job, in the name of financial stability. “I didn’t have another way to make money.” His family had struggled for years, and the security offered by acting carried enormous weight. “My mum was living off of my £68 a week on the dole,” he recalls. “When I got that first job on Spooks, that was the first proper money we’d ever had coming in.”

Over the following decade, he built a steady but robust career across television and film. Appearances in series such as Penny Dreadful and Star Trek: Discovery showed his ability to segue between genres, and 2022 brought a lead turn opposite Lily James and Emma Thompson in charming British rom-com What’s Love Got to Do with It? However, the opportunity to stand at the heart of a big-screen moment that truly commanded global attention evaded him. Until Wuthering Heights. 

By the day he would meet Oscar-winning filmmaker Fennell for an audition, she had, handily, already seen his work in What’s Love Got to Do with It? That day, the casting director happened to run late. “I was quite lucky, so we got to have a little chat just with Emerald, which rarely happens for that long. I had a good 20-minute chat about the part, and I think we just got on there and then went in, and it went well.”

In Fennell’s adaptation, Latif’s Edgar Linton is a polished aristocrat who becomes Elordi’s Heathcliff’s rival in the story’s volatile love triangle. “It’s kind of nice for a bit to pretend that you’re married to Margot Robbie,” he jokes. Elsewhere, the mere scale of the production was enough to make the experience surreal. The film was shot on 35mm and backed by Warner Bros Pictures. For him, growing up watching the Hollywood canon on VHS tapes, it felt like a full-circle moment. And then there was simply the personnel involved. “I want to work with Emerald again. I want to work with Margot again, with Alison [Oliver] again. All of them.” He tells me that Fennell’s scripts arrive fully formed, giving actors the freedom to explore rather than struggle to build their characters from scratch. Within days, the cast had settled into a rhythm where experimentation felt natural, and Latif found himself genuinely excited to come to work each morning. 

When I ask Latif whether he has anything in common with Edgar, he pauses before answering. “I think there’s a sensitivity,” he says. “I can be quite sensitive. The openness to his emotions is quite similar.” The question inevitably leads to the discussion that has followed Wuthering Heights online since the cast was announced. In Brontë’s original novel, Heathcliff is described as dark-skinned and racially ambiguous, an outsider whose appearance and unknown origins contribute to the social barriers between him and Cathy. In Fennell’s new adaptation, however, the role is played by white Australian actor Elordi, prompting debate online about the film’s casting, as fans and critics alike questioned why Heathcliff wasn’t portrayed by a person of colour. 

Latif approaches the conversation carefully, balancing gratitude for the opportunity he has been given with awareness of the industry he works in. He speaks warmly about Fennell’s trust but acknowledges that representation often moves unevenly. In a 2010s interview, he discussed struggling to find people who looked like him in the media he consumed as a child. Does he think things are markedly different following the reckoning on diversity the industry experienced in 2020? “Sometimes there’s an illusion of change,” he says. “Sometimes there really isn’t. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.” For him, the deeper issue lies in who controls the levers. “As long as the studios are fully white-owned, as long as most shows are 99 per cent white-made, then we don’t stand a chance,” he says. “As a person of colour, you have to do a lot more work, and there are a lot more obstacles.”

At the same time, Latif avoids framing the issue as a conflict between actors. “It’s not about taking anyone’s jobs,” he says. “It’s about getting a level playing field.” Change can feel slow, “like walking through mud sometimes,” but moments and opportunities like Wuthering Heights still matter. “You just keep going,” he says. “Keep trying to be positive. Don’t let [it] get you down.” He adds that he hopes his involvement in such projects might help others coming after him. “I’d be very grateful, and I know that I might be opening doors for other fellow brown actors.”

Despite Wuthering Heights’ scale, Latif remains measured about what the gig could represent from a personal career perspective. Major studio films arrive unpredictably and rarely. Rather than treating the project as a turning point, Latif seems determined simply to enjoy its unravelment. Regarding some of the less-than-charitable critical responses to the film, he shrugs slightly. “There’s probably more things in the world we should be worrying about than criticising movies,” he says. “We should be criticising governments instead, probably.”

But he’s not leaving future planning fully out of the equation. “Running a big company like Margot does is very impressive because that’s a big task,” he reflects. He has been working on scriptwriting, but he jokes, “I also want to not be too stressed in life, so we’ll see.” He mentions wanting to work with the greats, “all the Gretas [Gerwig]” and actors like Benicio del Toro, whom he’s recently met. But most importantly, he endeavours to simply “keep working at a good level and keep telling stories.”

As teenagers, Latif and his friends occasionally sneaked into screenings at the Odeon Holloway cinema, slipping through side doors and hopping between films. He laughs about it now, though admits he feels a little guilty for the ticket evasion.“I probably shouldn’t say that,” he says, grinning. “But we loved it. We just wanted to watch movies.” For a kid from North London who spent his childhood devouring as many films as he could get away with, seeing himself on screen at his local cinema, these days, is still incomprehensible. “That’s all I ever wanted to do,” he says. “Just be in films.” 

Wuthering Heights is available Digitally at home on participating digital platforms now