Florence Pugh Reveals Why She ‘Can’t Do’ Roles Like ‘Midsommar’ Again
Florence Pugh has never been afraid to go to extremes for films, whether it’s shaving her head for “We Live in Time” or going nude in her Oscar-nominated role in “Oppenheimer.” But the actress says she would never go as far as she did in Aria Aster’s 2019 horror film, “Midsommar. “
“There have been some roles where I’ve given too much and I’ve been broken for a long while afterwards. Like when I did ‘Midsommar,’ I definitely felt like I abused myself in the places that I got myself to go,” Pugh said, speaking on the most recent episode of the “Reign with Josh Smith” podcast.
“I don’t think I’d be able to do this without going there all the way and putting myself in all of those characters that I’ve played. There’s always a piece of me,” the actress said on a recent episode of the Reign with Josh Smith podcast.
“I mean, the nature of figuring these things out is you need to go, ‘Alright, well, I can’t do that again ’cause 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,” she said of the film, in which she plays a woman recovering from a tragedy when her visit to a Swedish summer festival takes a violent, dark turn.
“There’s always a moment at the end of filming where I, like, protect and defend those characters until the very end, even if they’ve done god-awful things,” explained Pugh. “I think that’s only natural when you’re in someone for so long.”
The actress, who was also Oscar-nominated for her role as Amy in 2019’s “Little Women,” added she’s since learned to draw more firm boundaries: “There’s definitely things that you have to respect about yourself,” she said.
She previously talked about the ardors of her “Midsommar” role to podcasters Ed Gamble and James Acaster. “I’d never played someone that was in that much pain before, and I’d put myself in really s— situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do. Each day, the content would be getting more weird and harder to do. I was putting things in my head that were just getting worse and more bleak,” she said at the time.
In December, the actress, who is 29, admitted that being a woman in Hollywood is “exhausting.”
“There are fine lines women have to stay within, otherwise they are called a diva, demanding, problematic. And I don’t want to fit into stereotypes made by others,” she told The Times of London. “It is really exhausting for a young woman to just be in this industry.”
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