'Wuthering Heights' stars break down that ultra-sexy single-arm curl

Spoiler alert! We're discussing minor plot details about “Wuthering Heights” (in theaters Feb. 13). Stop reading now if you don’t want to know.

Jacob Elordi wants to make you swoon.

The “Euphoria” star goes full hunk in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” playing the strapping Heathcliff opposite Margot Robbie’s repressed Catherine Earnshaw.

In the R-rated movie’s sexiest scene, Catherine is pleasuring herself by a rock on the blustery English moors when Heathcliff wanders up to her. Flustered, an embarrassed Catherine scolds Heathcliff and shoves grass in his mouth as he leans in for a kiss. Undeterred, he grabs her by the front of her corset and lifts her to eye level using only one arm, gazing at her lustfully before dropping her to the ground.

The titillating moment got an audible reaction from women in our theater audience.

“That was Emerald’s direction: ‘Do this so a minimum of two women gasp in every screening,’ ” Elordi joked to USA TODAY.

Fennell had written Heathcliff’s one-handed pickup into the script. Out of the blue one day, she texted Elordi asking if he could "single-arm curl a 50-kilogram dumbbell," which translates to roughly 110 pounds.

“I was like, what?” Elordi recalls. “First of all, I’d never spoken about the gym with her at all. I thought she was asking me a Pilates question. And genuinely, this is how little she knows about the gym: She thought that I would be able to just deadlift a 50-kilogram weight. I’m very thin!”

“I remember in the script, there was a lot of Heathcliff picking her up, putting her in a tree, things like that,” Robbie adds, laughing. “I was like, ‘Well, we’ll just have to figure that one out on set.’ ”

Robbie says she was tempted to take home many of Catherine’s costumes, including the “amazing leather corset” she wears in that sequence.

“Every time I walked onto set, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I want that! I want that!’ ” she recalls. “And then in the end, I didn't steal a single thing. What a waste.”

Fennell, meanwhile, makes dashing use of Elordi’s imposing physique, as the 6-foot-5 actor towers over the 5-foot-6 Robbie in every scene.

The Aussie recently earned a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for playing the sensitive, misunderstood monster in “Frankenstein.” He studied his golden retriever, Layla, to find the Creature’s movements, but took a much simpler approach to Heathcliff.

“The physicality in ‘Frankenstein’ required such a departure that I went as absurd with the movement as I could,” Elordi says. “Whereas for me, the idea of Heathcliff was very much like a straight, stiff edge. So I turned to cinema mostly and went through period films, like Laurence Olivier’s ‘Wuthering Heights.’

“There’s one word I think of when I think of Heathcliff and it’s ‘brooding,’ ” Elordi adds. “So I tried to take that tact and stillness, and let the text inform the character.”