Florence Pugh has delivered some of the best performances of the last decade, from Lady Macbeth to Little Women, but it seems some of them have taken a heavy toll on her.
“There have been some roles where I’ve given too much and I’ve been broken for a long while afterwards,” she said during a recent interview on the Reign with Josh Smith podcast.
Pugh particularly points at her stunning performance in Midsommar, where she played a grief-stricken woman who joins her toxic boyfriend on a trip to a Swedish midsummer festival that turns into a blood bath. Directed by Ari Aster, the 2019 horror film is considered one of the actor’s best works. “I definitely felt like I abused myself in the places that I got myself to go,” she revealed.
“The nature of figuring these things out is you need to go, ‘Alright, well, I can’t do that again because that was too much,’ but then I look at that performance and I’m really proud of what I did, and I’m proud of what came out of me. I don’t regret it. But, yeah, there’s definitely things that you have to respect about yourself,” she explained.
This is not the first time that Pugh opens up about how hard it was to play this particular character.
Speaking to The Sunday Times last month, she shared a few of the techniques she used during the production to find the right mood. She “imagined family members in coffins, going to an open casket funeral for my siblings”, and was often “hyperventilating”.
After filming was over, Pugh struggled to let go of the character. “When I did it, I was so wrapped up in her. I’d never played someone that was in that much pain before and I would put myself in really shit situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do but I would just be imagining the worst things,” she said during an interview on the Off Menu podcast in 2023 (via The Independent).
“I remember looking [out the plane] and feeling immense guilt because I felt like I’d left her in that field in that [emotional] state. It’s so weird. I’ve never had that before. … Obviously, that’s probably a psychological thing where I felt immense guilt of what I’d put myself through but I definitely felt like I’d left her there in that field to be abused… almost like I’d created this person and then I just left her there to go and do another movie.”
Florence Pugh is now back on the big screen with We Live in Time, a romantic drama also starring Andrew Garfield, and will be reprising her role as Yelena Belova in the MCU’s Thunderbolts*.
For more, check out our guide to upcoming movies that should be on your radar and our picks of the best movies of 2024.
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