The failure that launched Florence Pugh’s career: “Maybe I’ve got the wrong industry”
In Hollywood, no two careers are launched in the same way. For instance, some careers are shot into the stratosphere with a breakout role that appears out of nowhere, while others are ten-year overnight sensations. Fascinatingly, though, sometimes careers aren’t sparked by a breakout role at all. In these cases, a role that the public never sees can wind up being key to a star’s ascendance. Florence Pugh’s supposed big break is a testament to this because it never saw the light of day, and that helped her find her true path.
When Pugh nabbed her first television role as a pregnant teenager in The Falling, she was still in sixth form at school. The 17-year-old impressed her director, Carol Morley, so much that they stayed in touch after the project. Fortunately, this meant Morley was around to give Pugh advice on her next big part, which seemed poised to be the young star’s ticket to the Hollywood big time, but turned out to be a poisoned chalice.
You see, at only 19, Pugh was cast as the lead in a Fox television pilot called Studio City, a glossy drama about a pop star making her way in the music industry. Unfortunately, though, the pilot’s shoot was a very unhappy time for Pugh, who was pushed by executives almost from the day and hour she was cast to alter her looks. They wanted her to conform to a stereotypically glamorous Hollywood image, and she knew from day one that it made her deeply uncomfortable.
“All the things that they were trying to change about me,” Pugh told The Telegraph, “whether it was my weight, my look, the shape of my face, the shape of my eyebrows – that was so not what I wanted to do, or the industry I wanted to work in.”
Pugh told Morley about her horrible experience on Studio City, and the director recognised that the relentless obsession over her looks had traumatised the young actor. She empathised with her, telling her that her experience wasn’t acceptable, and reinforced the idea that it didn’t have to be that way. In truth, though, Pugh had been exposed at a very young age to the worst superficial impulses of Hollywood, and it had a detrimental effect on her mental health.
“I was not built for that,” Pugh told the BBC’s This Cultural Life. “After I did that American series, I remember coming back home, and I didn’t feel good in myself at all. I thought, ‘If this is the top of the game, getting a lead in a big series, and I’m not happy, then maybe I’ve got the wrong industry.'”
The following period was excruciating for Pugh, who had to wait to hear if the series had been picked up as a series by Fox. When she finally found out that it hadn’t, though, and that the pilot episode was going back into the Fox vault to never be seen by human eyes, she had an interesting reaction.
For most young actors, this would have been a catastrophe, but for Pugh, it felt like she’d been shown everything about the industry that she wanted no part of, and a huge wave of relief swept over her when she realised she wouldn’t be forced to make the series. “In a bittersweet way, I’m so grateful,” she admitted when asked about Studio City being a false start.
How did Studio City’s failure launch Pugh’s true Hollywood career, though? Well, only two weeks after she found out the pilot had been memory-holed, she landed the lead role in Lady Macbeth. That period drama was so well-received that it put her on Hollywood’s radar in a big way, and soon, she was starring in films like The Commuter, Outlaw King, and Fighting with My Family.
