Florence Pugh is getting candid about setting boundaries through her work.
The 29-year-old starred in the 2019 horror film, “Midsommar,” but revealed that the project was so emotionally taxing that she doesn’t think she could do something like that again.
The role of Dani required Pugh to go to dark places, as her character finds herself trapped by a Swedish cult while traveling with a group after enduring a tragedy in her life.
“How have you learned to look after yourself and your mental wellbeing [while working]?” Josh Smith asked the Oscar nominee during an episode of his “Reign with Josh Smith” podcast.
“Gosh, that’s a good question — I’m still figuring it out,” Pugh replied. “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.”
Sharing her point of view after playing any of her characters, the English actress explained, “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. I think that’s only natural when you’re in someone for so long.”
Pugh said “protecting” herself is something she’s had to “learn how to do” over the years.
“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.”
“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,’” Pugh continued. “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,” she noted, “there’s definitely things that you have to respect about yourself….”
Pugh initially spoke about how draining her time on “Midsommar” was in 2023. The film also starred Will Poulter, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper and Vilhelm Blomgren.
“I’d never played someone that was in that much pain before, and I’d put myself in really s–t situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do,” she said on the “Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster” podcast at the time.
The “We Live in Time” star has also opened up about how exhausting it is to be a woman in Hollywood in general.
“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,” Pugh said in an interview with The Times of London in December. “It is really exhausting for a young woman to just be in this industry, and actually other industries.”
But she loves to challenge the ideas she disagrees with, much like how women in the public eye are expected to look.
“I remember watching this industry and feeling that I wasn’t represented. I remember godawful headlines about how Keira Knightley isn’t thin anymore, or watching women getting torn apart despite being talented and beautiful,” she recounted. “The only thing people want to talk about is some useless crap about how they look. And so I didn’t care to abide by those rules.”
