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The Cathy Drama: Why Does Hollywood Get Casting So Wrong?

No, it’s not just because I really wanted that role

Madelaine Lucy Hanson
7 min readSep 29, 2024

Now, I think Margot Robbie is beautiful. Stunningly so, with those glossy white teeth and flawless tanned features. She’s objectively beautiful. She’s also a great actress: I loved her in Barbie, Suicide Squad, and The Wolf of Wall Street. I wish her well and hope to see her in many, many films to come. She is also completely, gobsmackingly wrong to play a neglected orphaned teenager in 1700s Yorkshire who ends up in an abusive relationship with her foster brother. If nothing else, she’s 34. No one has ever, possibly in the history of the world, looked less like a feral girl experiencing heartbreak for the first time from North Yorkshire in 1790. She’s too: Hollywood.

…Cathy is a 22 year old abuse survivor in rural 1700s Yorkshire

You can shout make up, special effects, CGI, and wigs at me until you’re blue in the face: it’s just objectively a bad choice. It just is. If I’m brutal, I think even I’d have a tough time convincing audiences I was still 19 and had slept rough roaming the moors for two or three years, never brushing my teeth or my hair, and being beaten and harassed by my alcoholic brother. And I’m actually English and much younger than Robbie. Yes: it’s called acting. I know. But there are just much, much better casting options out there. I’m pretty sure you’d be able to find a more…

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Madelaine Lucy Hanson
Madelaine Lucy Hanson

Written by Madelaine Lucy Hanson

The girl who still knows everything. Opinions entirely my own. Usually. Enquiries: madelaine@madelainehanson.co.uk

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