“You made a sex tape?!”

Susannah turned to her husband, Ron, mouth agape. He looked down, his cheeks reddening.

“It was right after college. I was experimenting,” he mumbled, twisting in his seat. “No big deal.”

As a couples therapist, I am always looking for how to mend the frayed edges of a relationship, but Susannah and Ron were different: they had come to my office to end their marriage.

I practice what I call breakup therapy — a short-term treatment I developed for couples who want to end their relationships without bitterness.

The premise is counterintuitive: instead of looking forward toward separate futures, we look backward at the relationship itself. It’s structured to look at the beginning, middle and end of their time together with exercises that focus on both their gratitude as well as their resentment.

The work culminates with the couple crafting a shared narrative about their union and literally writing it down – a story of what worked and ultimately what did not. Then, I ask them to sign it. In this way, they resolve the many unanswered, and often unasked, questions that can trap couples in recriminations and keep them from moving on.

The idea was born from my own bitter divorce. After my split, I was plagued by questions that repeated on an endless loop in my brain: “What was I thinking?”; “Why didn’t I see that red flag?”; “What is wrong with me – I’m a therapist and I should have seen what was happening.”

Then, one day, my therapist asked me a different question: who was I when I decided to marry? Suddenly, my internal feedback loop stopped.

“You’re asking me who I was, not why I married him?” I said, skeptically.

“Yes, I am,” she answered. “Marriages can be as much about identity as they are about a union. What were you trying to solve — or avoid — by marrying him?”

The question unlocked something for me. I’d been full of anger at myself, but I hadn’t really taken responsibility for my own actions. With her help, I crafted a story that I could hold onto about what function the marriage had served for me. Truly owning my choices helped me have more compassion for myself and less anger. The most startling realisation? When I had created a story that hung together, the nagging questions ended for good.

I have seen this same process unfold for many couples. But often, in the course of these sessions, new things surface.

“Susannah?” I said, surprised to hear the hurt in her voice. “This feels like a big deal for you. Why is that?”

Ron and Susannah had not been the most willing subjects for breakup therapy. During our first session, Ron blurted out: “You’re like a medical examiner doing autopsies on dead relationships! Your scalpel hurts. I don’t think you know what it feels like to be humiliated.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” I answered softly. “I have a teenager.”

“This feels stupid,” he said on another occasion. “She’s done, I accept that. What is there to say? This feels like horseshit.”

“See what I’m working with here?” Susannah said, throwing up her hands and shifting away from Ron on the couch. “I knew he wouldn’t take this seriously.”

“No, he’s right,” I said. “If it’s really true that you fully accept and understand her decision, Ron, then this is horseshit. But is that true?”

His silence was all the answer I needed.

Over the next few sessions, we went over how they’d fallen in love (“It just made sense, we fit”); the birth of their three children (“The unit held us together”); the unraveling of their connection (“We were ships in the night for as long as I can remember, but then one day I woke up and just wanted more from life”).

We mapped the patterns their marriage had fallen into over the course of three houses, two cross-country moves and their children’s exodus from home. It was a saga spanning decades.

Then, in our fourth session, Ron mentioned the sex tape.

“Something about this is landing hard on you,” I said to Susannah, her mouth still ajar. “Why?”

“Yeah, why?” Ron echoed.

Susannah paused and looked out the window.

“It’s that you … you tried something that – I don’t know – was out there … bold and different.”

A tear welled in a corner of her eye.

“It’s not you. You’re not brave! Or, at least you haven’t been with me, not in all these years together.”

Then she began to cry. Ron and I looked at one another.

“Susannah?” Instantly, I regretted breaking the silence.

“All this time, I decided you just couldn’t try new things,” she managed after a while. “I gave up.”

Ron put up his palms. “What is happening?” he said, exasperated.

“But if you can do that …” she continued. “What was it? Did I just not ask? Did I build my life around a lie?” She looked lost. “Was it that you never really loved me enough?”

She turned back to Ron and banged her fist on the couch.

“I did ask! I asked you to look at porn together when we stopped having sex, to take classes with me, to go on that whale-watching tour. … You just ignored me!”

This time, I held my tongue.

“Is that a thing?” she went on, turning to me. “That you can reach the end of a relationship and not even have known what was possible?”

“I made that tape 30 years ago,” Ron blurted out. “She’s upset over something I did when I was a totally different person!”

This was the impasse that I had expected, that arrives in most of my breakup therapy work – the moment when two people realise that as well as they think they know each other, there are things they don’t know or have lost track of. It’s my job to help them hold that bitter realisation. Then it’s my job to help them arrive at forgiveness or some kind of reconciliation – if not with each other, then with what happened to them.

“It was 30 years ago, Ron,” I said. “But you aren’t a different person. You’re the same person, and she’s wondering why you couldn’t have been that with her.”

I turned to Susannah and said, “You have a right to be hurt, but were you truly honest with him? Did you give him the space and the safety and the encouragement to be that person? Do you think you both can forgive each other for what you weren’t?”

It was three weeks before they appeared again in my office, having canceled two sessions in between appointments.

“I was stirred and moved by what happened here last time,” Susannah began. “When we left, I thought: Maybe there’s enough left between us?”

Ron’s eyes were downcast.

“But I realised I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t open up that part of me with him anymore. I want … I need this divorce.”

I nodded. “Ron? How do you feel?”

“I can see where we are … I’m not fighting it.” His voice broke. “I’m just really sad.”

Often it requires some kind of shock to break through the built-up layers of anger, resentment and disappointment in a couple in order to illuminate the cracks in their relationship – something true that has been avoided or left unsaid. In this case, it was the surprise of an ancient transgressive act that lay bare how little they knew each other and how misaligned they’d become.

Susannah moved closer to Ron on the couch and laced her fingers with his.

“You guys seem calmer – closer. Tell me what you are feeling,” I said.

I knew something about that calm after the storm. After my own divorce, we had maintained an uneasy truce for years, until one long car ride after dropping our daughter at camp. As we rode in silence, I suddenly remembered my therapist’s question: Who was I when I decided to get married? For the next two hours, we talked over that question and everything else, and together realised how lonely we had been — two Israelis who, instead of understanding why we had both chosen to leave, had clung to each other and to a shared language. Before long, we were laughing as we had not laughed since the early days of our marriage.

“So, where do we go from here?” Ron asked me in their last session.

“Well, in my experience, when a marriage ends, a different relationship can sometimes be created,” I said. “That’s up to you guys. All endings are sad, but not all endings have to leave you broken. There’s an opportunity here to get to know each other in a different way. And …” I leaned forward to make eye contact with each of them “… to know yourselves better.”

After they left, I sat quietly in my chair for a while. I allowed myself to remember that moment in my therapist’s office when I realised that I had been using my marriage to escape a question I had been avoiding and what a relief it had been to finally face it.

When a sex tape from decades ago unlocks two people’s grief, it’s not so much about the end of the road as it is about the roads never taken – the versions of a marriage they never tried. It is a sad moment, but also a generative one.

They’d come to me to bury their marriage. What they found instead was a way to know each other – maybe for the first time in years – even as they said goodbye.

Note: Names and some details have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals appearing in this essay.

Sarah Gundle, Psy.D., is a psychologist in private practice and an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center. She is currently writing a book about breakups. You can find her on Instagram @dear_dr_sarah.

Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.

What a soggy year it’s been so far. January alone saw three named storms – Gerotti, Ingrid, and Chandra – batter our shores, bringing with them snow, rain, and wind.

February has certainly not been drier. Reading, for instance, saw the longest continuous rainfall (25 consecutive days) that the town’s university’s Atmospheric Observatory has ever observed.

Aberdeen, meanwhile, has seen no rainfall for two weeks straight. Multiple yellow rain warnings are in place across the UK today (Friday, 6 February), too.

Which begs the question: why is the rain so relentless, and when oh when will it end?

Recently, the UK (and much of Europe) has been affected by an unusually southerly jet stream. This drives areas of low pressure north-east up to the UK, and is partly caused by a large range of temperatures across the Atlantic Ocean right now.

Low pressure weather fronts are associated with rain, wind, and unsettled conditions.

But there’s also a stubborn area of high pressure which is staying in place across north-east Europe, which helps to keep the jet affecting our weather in its southerly position. It also means areas of low pressure move more slowly.

That, the Met Office said, has resulted in a “conveyor belt of low‑pressure systems bringing frequent rain, strong winds, and, at times, wintry hazards”.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like the barrage of rain will stay with us for a while.

According to the Met Office’s operational meteorologist, Dan Stroud, “Unfortunately, there’s no end in sight… we’ve got a big area of high pressure way out to the far north and east of the country, and that’s stopping areas of low pressure from moving through.

“Until that area of high pressure sort of shifts out of the way, we’re not really going to see much of a change in the forecast.”

Southwestern regions of the UK are especially likely to face very high rainfall this week.

And while next week (starting 8 Feb) shows “tentative signs of a subtle shift” and northern parts of the UK are expected to become a little drier thanks to shifts in the blocking area of high pressure, that bad weather “conveyor belt” is expected to continue into the month.

This is because the jet stream’s return to its current position is predicted to encourage more soggy southern conditions.

In fact, the Met Office’s long-range forecast says that even as far away as 6 March, “low pressure systems will probably dominate” the UK.

Have you ever caught a nasty cold from being outside in chilly weather with wet hair? Spoiler alert: You actually didn’t ― no matter what your grandparents, great aunt and parents say.

The pervasive myth is something that older generations have told people for decades, but going outside with wet hair in the winter simply is not a possible way to catch a cold, according to doctors.

“There’s no evidence or literature to suggest that,” said Dr. Swapnil Patel, the vice chair of the department of medicine at Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center and K. Hovnanian Children’s Hospital in New Jersey.

Going out with wet hair on a wintry day does decrease your body temperature, making you feel colder, but you won’t actually end up sick as a result, said Dr. Parul Goyal, an associate professor of clinical medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. (This is also true for going out without a jacket, she said.)

If you do notice that you suddenly have the sniffles after spending time outdoors in the winter ― with or without wet hair ― there is a reason for that. “Cold temperature, it can affect how your blood vessels constrict and dilate. So, cold [temperature] usually causes something called vasoconstriction, which tightens up your blood vessels,” Patel said.

When your blood vessels loosen, like in a warm shower or steam bath, your sinuses open up and you feel better, which is why hot showers are often comforting to people who have a cold, Patel said. But that works in the opposite way with cold temperatures. Cold air or chilly weather tightens you up, Patel explained.

If you have a cold but are asymptomatic, the frigid weather may force your blood vessels to react and bring those symptoms out — but the cold weather (or wet hair) isn’t the reason for the infection, he added.

While heading outside on a winter day with wet hair isn’t going to be the reason for your cold, there are other behaviours that actually make you come down with an upper respiratory virus.

You may get sick if you are exposed to a virus or exposed to bodily fluids that are infected with a virus. “Usually it’s contact with nasal fluids ― somebody sneezes, leaves their nasal droplet somewhere, you touch that same surface,” Patel said.

If you touch your dirty hands to your eyes or mouth, you can also end up with a cold.

Washing your hands with warm water and soap is an important way to keep yourself from getting sick with a cold or another virus such as COVID-19, the flu or norovirus.

“You can use more drastic measures, like masks and things like that, especially if you’re around people that are sick,” Patel said.

Goyal added that it’s a good idea to stay away from sick people when possible.

It’s also helpful for people who are sick to stay home and away from others and if they need to go out to wear a mask to prevent the transmission of droplets.

“We also recommend people get regular exercise so that our immune system is strong enough [and] we can fight off the viruses,” Goyal said. Getting enough sleep and eating a nutritious diet can also help keep your immune system in good shape to fight off any winter illnesses.

It’s also a good idea not to smoke, which can make you more susceptible to colds, Patel said. Staying up-to-date on vaccines can reduce the rate of transmission and severity of certain illnesses, too. For example, if you get the flu shot, you’re more likely to have milder symptoms than someone who didn’t get their vaccine, he said.

While you may not be able to totally avoid the occasional cold, the reason for your sickness is a virus spread to you by a loved one or from a dirty surface — not from wet hair on a chilly day.

Childhood trauma can have profound and lasting effects on our well-being.

Speaking to HuffPost UK, BACP-accredited integrative counsellor Nikki Howes said, “Research shows that when adversity occurs during childhood, it can shape the development of emotional regulation and threat-detection systems, leading to stress responses in adulthood that feel automatic and difficult to control”.

Other studies suggest that childhood trauma can keep people in a state of chronic stress, years after the direct threat from their youth has gone away.

BACP-accredited counsellor and author of Become The Parent You Needed, LJ Jones, added: “When difficult experiences happen early… the body and mind adapt in ways that once helped us survive; but those same patterns can later limit how safe, connected, or confident we feel as adults, and impair our mental wellness”.

Studies on adverse childhood experience (ACE) scores suggest that a childhood high in traumatic events could affect your mental and even physical health in adulthood.

But, Howes said, “I think ACE scores have often been communicated in ways that unintentionally make trauma feel inescapable.”

Here, the experts shared how to begin healing from childhood trauma, at any age.

Although both experts noted that childhood trauma has a real impact on people’s adult lives, they also agreed that healing is possible at any age.

“Healing from childhood trauma as an adult is possible at any age because the brain and body can still learn new ways to regulate and process experiences,” Howes told us.

And, Jones said, though there is “no timeline to healing”, and while healing from trauma isn’t “linear”, “Healing from childhood trauma is possible at any age because the nervous system remains changeable throughout our lives.

“Childhood trauma can feel like a life sentence because it shapes how our nervous system learns to respond to the world… [but] high ACE scores don’t mean someone is broken or doomed.”

Though different events and experiences can trigger old wounds, she added, “the key is to have enough tools to know how to take care of ourselves”.

“Healing isn’t about erasing the past,” Jones said, “but about owning our unique stories and helping people understand that their responses make sense and that new ways of relating to themselves and others are possible at any stage of life”.

“Trauma-informed approaches like EMDR, brainspotting, somatic therapy, and relational work help process distressing memories and build internal resources, but the trauma itself isn’t erased – we live with it differently, so it no longer drives automatic reactions and allows safety, choice, and resilience in the present.”

Jones shared that self-awareness can be a great start. Noticing “unhealthy patterns or self-sabotaging behaviours” can be a good clue as to how trauma might be showing up in our lives: “gently building new experiences of safety, regulation, and connection” can help, she said.

The pair also recommended therapy.

This can “offer a space where people feel seen and understood without judgement, sometimes for the first time,” Jones said.

“Through this process, individuals often recognise blind spots, learn to regulate overwhelming emotions, develop self-compassion, and rewrite deeply held beliefs formed in childhood, such as ‘I’m not enough’ or ‘I’m not safe.’”

The counsellor added that support, compassion, and care are key. And she highlighted “self-acceptance and empowerment within this process as they are often crucial elements which are stripped from those who suffered childhood adversities.

“Working on individual growth and celebrating small wins can help to eliminate feeling stagnant and tired of the ramifications of childhood trauma.”

• Mind, open Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm on 0300 123 3393.
• Samaritans offers a listening service which is open 24 hours a day, on 116 123 (UK and ROI – this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill).
• CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) offer a helpline open 5pm-midnight, 365 days a year, on 0800 58 58 58, and a webchat service.
• The Mix is a free support service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email help@themix.org.uk
• Rethink Mental Illness offers practical help through its advice line which can be reached on 0808 801 0525 (Monday to Friday 10am-4pm). More info can be found on rethink.org.

Following rave reviews upon its release in the US towards the end of last year, which saw fans and critics celebrating its unpredictable twists, turns and deeply uncomfortable revelations, Twinless has finally made its way to UK cinemas.

At the centre of the film is the extremely impressive multi-hyphenate James Sweeney, on triple duty as the movie’s writer, director and star, alongside Dylan O’Brien in what could become a career-defining performance as a young man struggling with the aftermath of his twin brother’s death.

The film centres around Dennis and Roman, two people who strike up an immediate – and, indeed, completely codependent – friendship after meeting by chance at a bereavement group for twins who have lost their siblings.

However, as we quickly learn, things are never quite as they seem, and while Twinless is ultimately a dark comedy, it also manages to put you through a rollercoaster of emotions and twists that no one could have seen coming.

Ahead of the film’s UK release, we spoke to James about the long journey to get Twinless onto our screens, how he came to work with Dylan O’Brien, the film’s alternative ending that was pulled at the eleventh hour and how he really feels about those leaked sex scenes (and be warned, there are some spoilers ahead)…

What I wasn’t expecting about Twinless was how much it was going to remind me of those classic unhinged thrillers from the 90s – Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Single White Female – which I feel like are films that I could really imagine Dennis loving…?

You know what’s so funny, of those three, I’ve only seen Fatal Attraction. Single White Female is a reference that’s come up a lot for this film, and somehow, it’s escaped me.

I do love a stalker girl film, though, whether it’s Swimfan or Wicker Park. But I wouldn’t say those were overt influences.

What was the original idea for Twinless – did you want to make a film about twins, or unlikely friendships, or grief, or deception…?

I’d say the core of the story – the characters and the plot and thematics – was there from the inception. It was initially just the twin bereavement support group that was the initial kernel of the idea.

I started writing this in 2015, and I think it was more of an instinctual writing process. The biggest shift throughout the years was the structure of the film. It wasn’t always told non-chronologically, that was something that happened when I did a major rewrite in 2019, off the heels of my first film, just because you learn so much from doing a first go-around.

Dennis says early on in the film that he’s always been fascinated with twins – is that something that you can relate to?

As a child who grew up in what I believe was a generation of twin idolisation – between the Olsens, Sister Sister and The Parent Trap – there was something very fantastical, if not a bit ephemeral, about this idea of somebody who shares your face and you can share your life with, your thoughts, your clothes.

I was a military brat so I hopped around growing up, and I think there was something very appealing about that fantasy to me.

That sounds like what Dennis says in the film…?

And that is where the parallels end…

This film was greenlit immediately before the Hollywood strikes of 2023. How much was the film impacted by these delays?

We got to make exactly the film we wanted to make. It was just impeded by [the strikes].

I started working with David Permut, my producer, in 2019, and I met Dylan in 2020. It just took so long to get the financing. The deal that we had struck with Paramount, we started negotiating it a year before, in 2023, and then it just took so long to get it across the finish line.

Then, the official document signing was two weeks before the strike. That sucked [because] we were in purgatory for six months. We didn’t know what the state of the industry would be [when the strikes ended] – a lot of projects that were greenlit [around that time] fell apart, so I was just living in constant fear that this dream of mine was going to slip through my fingers. Again! Because it wasn’t the first time – Twinless had almost happened earlier, and then fell apart. This was – by far, it seemed like, the surest thing in terms of iterations of momentum, but it was terrible.

Also, my first film was released in theatres on 28 February 2020, two weeks before every theatre shut down in the United States. So, I felt like, “of course, this is my luck and timing”. So, now I’m like, “what will happen next time I make a movie?”. I feel like I’m owed a little karma.

With the film being so much about twins, and about twin bereavement, what was the research process like?

I was a research psych minor, and there are a lot of studies done on twins, so I am interested in twin psychology, and always have been. That’s part of what attracted me to this story to begin with.

But you know, being a twin, everyone has their own relationship with their twin, so I was trying to represent a [range] of [ideas] and trying to avoid tropes. So, I was talking to twin friends, reading books about twin psychology.

One takeaway, I guess, is that child rearing for the parents really affects twin relationships, because so much of twin identity is based on how much do you see yourself as an individual versus being ‘one of two’, and that really can be dependent on how much the parents encourage or discourage individuality between the two, and how much your social circle mirrors that.

Something else that I found really interesting was, especially with identical twins, there can be a very innate ease of intimacy because it’s something you’re born with. And that can put a different weight on how you approach intimacy in all relationships, and I think we see that permeate through Roman’s life and what he’s yearning for in the absence of his brother.

Have you had much feedback from actual twins?

I have! The fun thing about this film has been people who self-identify as twins and come up to me – a lot of times it’ll happen during the Q&A itself, or they’ll approach me after. I’ve had all the spectrum of reactions and it’s been… no offence to the singletons, but the twin vote is the one that means a lot to me.

When you were writing the character of Roman, what kind of actor were you envisaging, especially knowing it was someone who would also have to play Rocky, who such a completely different character?

Really, what I was looking for was somebody with a lot of versatility, and I don’t just mean in terms of physical or vocal, I also meant tonal. And that felt like such a hard thing to find.

It’s funny, I used to work in casting as my day job, and I really do believe that’s 98% of directing, and I just feel so lucky that the script landed in Dylan’s inbox and that he read it. I wasn’t 100% convinced – not that I didn’t have great admiration for him as an actor – but so much of casting is whether or not you can see it, and I initially had an easier time seeing him as Rocky than Roman.

But then meeting him was really what convinced me. He just was so clear in how he saw the character and how he expressed that to me. And that just gave me so much confidence as a filmmaker.

Did you have to give him much direction in playing a character like Rocky, who is very believably queer, without it feeling like a caricature?

You know, it was a delicate dance at first. It’s so funny now to see reactions of people being so blasé [about Dylan playing Rocky] and even about the voice that he puts on. I thought it was maybe going to be a bit more treading water a bit.

I was trying to push him in that direction without saying it fully outright. Really, all I had to do was give him permission, and then keep pushing him in that direction, but that’s all him. He’s just such a rare actor who has such a good ear for people’s voices, he does great impressions [of] people you wouldn’t think that anybody could do an impression of.

He can do it because he’s so observant and really good at capturing the essence of somebody, and I think that’s really the core of who he is as an actor, and why it doesn’t feel like he’s doing “a bit” [as Rocky] is because I think he finds a real emotional truth to the way that he accesses voice and character.

While we’re talking about Rocky, something I’m interested in is the reaction to the sex scenes, which leaked a little while before the film came out. How did you find the reaction to those, because on one hand people can be quite reductive when it comes to sex scenes – and in particular gay sex scenes. But on the other hand, they’re also really well-done scenes…

It’s a mixed bag. It’s hard because when you do a low-budget independent film, all you want is a moment that shines a light on the film. But you also want to protect the film, and you want it to be seen a certain way. And that piracy leak, it just kind of…

We didn’t know at the time how it would affect [the film’s release]… because we didn’t have distribution yet, we didn’t have the plan, we didn’t have a release date, and yeah, it just got out of our hands. And that felt really demoralising and violating.

And unfortunately, it’s still [what] a lot of people [associate with the film]. They’ve seen [the leaked scenes] and not seen the whole film, and think that they know what the film’s going to be about. Also, for me, that scene exists in a certain context. And so, it’s a lot of feelings.

Dylan kind of has encouraged me, “just stop talking about it, we’re just drawing more attention to it”, but I don’t know… I’m still wrestling with it. I do think the beauty of film is the multiple lives that it has, and I don’t know that that clip is going to be what outlasts the legacy of the film. But it wasn’t how personally I wanted it to be introduced to the world. The internet, you can’t control ’em, they’re just little children.

How far into the shoot were those scenes filmed? And did you use an intimacy coordinator?

The funny thing is, one of the first things Dylan advocated for when we met in 2020 was that he wanted to have time between [shooting his two characters’ scenes], and treat them separately, which I thought was a great idea.

At the time, I wasn’t sure we could afford this, so we really had to bend some things to make it happen, but I think it really paid off in dividends.

So, because we were waiting to see when the strikes resolved, we weren’t sure if we were going to shoot Roman first, or Rocky first. And the way it resolved, we shot Rocky right before the holidays, then used the holiday break for Dylan to put on some weight and do a visible transformation into Roman.

Rocky’s only in two and a half days of filming, so day one was the car cash, day two was the sex scene, so we started off hot and heavy – and, in retrospect, built a lot of trust really early on, and it gave us, I think, really great momentum going into the rest of principal photography.

And yes, we had two intimacy coordinators, one for that scene, and one for the other intimate scene [later in the film].

There is also another very different intimate scene later on between Dennis and Roman, involving a foot massage. How did shooting that differ to the scenes with Rocky?

We did not have a toe intimacy coordinator. It’s funny, I don’t think we ever even discussed that. We were doing a lot that day – it was a big shoot day and that was sort of the easier part of the day! The part that was really taking more brainspace [for me] was the confession. That was the most challenging thing for me in terms of compartmentalisation and juggling of my multiple responsibilities as director and performer.

There were other emotional scenes – obviously the other hotel room scene, but that one was more involved with me just reacting to his performance. And I had an easier time with that. I was also sort of rewriting the confession the day of, because I felt like I [hadn’t] quite [nailed it]… that was just a tricky one for me. And we shot the hotel room scenes back to back, because of the location.

Something I loved about Twinless is that it plays with how far you can stretch your empathy for someone, and how much you feel like you can forgive. Was that a fun concept to play with?

Oh… fun? I mean, empathy as a storyteller is my peak interest in how I approach my work. I find I’m often empathetic towards flawed characters and… I don’t know, I think that’s the beauty of film is that you get to live in the perspective of somebody you might not ever spend time with, or want to spend time with, in real life.

Throughout the years of trying to get this film made, I was aware of how people were receiving my character, which wasn’t always the most positive. If anything, I’d say the reception to the film – while not unanimous – has been less polarising than maybe we anticipated. It’s been really interesting to hear people be like “Dennis – evil” and not able to forgive him at all. And then I’ve heard other people say like, “you just can’t hate him no matter what he does!”. And I’m really getting the full spectrum of reactions. But I guess that is, to me, the fun part of it.

You’re really not sure how people are going to react, and I do think it is very much a mirror to people’s own relationship to forgiveness, and also the parts of themselves that they see reflected in Dennis, whether or not they want to admit that.

What about you, where do you fall on that spectrum?

I mean, I played with him, I’m biased. I do really care for Dennis, and I think he’s still a work in progress – which is also how I feel about myself.

I also loved the ending, as a writer how hard was that to land on?

There was a different ending in the screenplay. I’d say the two scenes that both Dylan and I had discussed rewriting the most were the under-the-covers scene with Rocky, which establishes the emotional stakes of the film, and the final scene in the diner. I always felt that could be where the film needed to end, and that’s what revealed itself to be the case when we were in post.

Also, I think we intentionally scheduled the diner to be one of the final days of filming, because we thought just the process of making this film might inform how we feel going into that. And it did, and I’m really glad we gave ourselves that gift. Speaking for myself and Dylan, we’re both really happy where we landed with the ending.

So, the original ending in the screenplay would have continued past that point…?

Yeah, there was a different scene. I think maybe one day I’ll reveal it, but [for now] I kind of just want the film to exist as it is.

Finally, how do you follow something like Twinless that you spent so many years working on?

I kind of want to keep making films that I want to see. I have a lot of ideas, so I feel very fortunate to be in a position where people are excited to see what I do next.

And I don’t think it will be like Twinless. I’m trying not to think about what people are expecting or not expecting from me, and just focus on telling a story that feels meaningful to me.

Twinless is in cinemas now.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s decision to cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in her new adaptation of Wuthering Heights movie has proven controversial since it was first announced.

Some have accused the director of “whitewashing” the character, who is alternately speculated to have Romani, Spanish, Indian, and American heritage in the original book.

In the novel, Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned”, and whatever his actual ethnicity may be, his background is constantly discussed in the novel.

Responding to the backlash, Fennell recently shared that she picked Elordi for the role because “he looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”, adding in another interview: “You can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it”.

After the controversy, I read the book to see for myself how race appeared in the novel, and was struck by just how often it was brought up. So, I asked nineteenth-century literature professor, Dr Josephine McDonagh, for her thoughts on the casting controversy.

But Dr McDonagh thinks this is unlikely.

“The novel is highly invested in racial differences, and the text makes clear that the possibilities of human darkness for Brontë far exceed the commonplace idea that Brontë just meant a variation of whiteness,” she told HuffPost UK (it should also be noted that the Roma can be considered their own ethnic group).

“Race is a huge preoccupation in the novel (and all the Brontës’ novels, for that matter),” she added.

Even as girls, the professor pointed out, the Brontë sisters played games based on an imagined world set in West Africa.

“In their imaginations, they divided up the continent between the four of them, and had their own colonies, with some native people in them. It’s really not right to claim that they weren’t thinking about race in quite sophisticated ways.”

This does not, however, mean that we definitely know what Heathcliff’s race was “meant” to be. His perceived racial identity shifts often in the novel: he’s othered along racial lines, but that “otherness” isn’t ever strictly given one name.

So, Dr McDonagh told us this in the novel, his race is “undecidable”.

Is he definitely non-white? “Maybe, maybe not. That’s the way novels work! But the suggestion is definitely there.”

Of course, movie adaptations don’t have to be faithful to the source material, and Fennell has said she deliberately put the title of her film in quotation marks on the poster and promo materials because she “couldn’t ever hope to make anything that could even encompass the greatness of this book”.

For her part, the professor told us: “I don’t think that the new movie should have cast Heathcliff as Black, but I do think it would be a loss if it doesn’t negotiate the question of race in some way.

“Especially these days, when race is discussed so frequently and so explicitly.”

She added that, personally, she’s not the biggest fan of what she’s seen from the movie’s trailer. The literature professor added that she thinks Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film adaptation of the novel, which cast James Howson as Heathcliff in one of the rare cases a Black actor has portrayed the character on screen, is “terrific – when I first saw it, the casting was a surprise, and it was really impressive”.

Incidentally, months before the new Wuthering Heights cast and director were announced, Vulture described the 2011 flick as “the horny, twisted romance Saltburn [another Fennell project] wishes it was”.

“I think it unlikely that the new adaptation will dislodge Arnold’s movie,” Professor McDonagh continued.