The iconic movie villain Florence Pugh will defend to the death: “He’s a great guy”
When Ari Aster’s second feature Midsommar emerged in cinemas back in 2019, viewers were quick to praise the performance of Florence Pugh who played the grieving Dani, taken under the wing of a Swedish cult that crowns her the May Queen. Her role was intense, requiring her to tap into a character harboring much trauma and pain, and as a result of her virtuosity, the actor rose to widespread prominence.
That same year, she also appeared in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, playing the youngest sister Amy alongside a star-studded cast which included Timothee Chalamet, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep, and Laura Dern. Pugh’s place in Hollywood was firmly cemented when she earned a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nomination at the Oscars for her part, leading her to a much bigger role – Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Since then, she has appeared in everything from Don’t Worry Darling and Oppenheimer to Dune: Part Two and We Live in Time, but there is a specific kind of role that Pugh would like to take on at some point in the future that relates to her favourite movie villain.
Pugh isn’t best known for playing villains, although she has played a few morally ambiguous characters in her time. In fact, her breakthrough role in the 2016 indie movie Lady Macbeth saw her play an unhappily married young woman living in the 1800s who turns to murder after falling for a man working on the land nearby. The role is arguably one of Pugh’s best, although it remains criminally underrated. Balancing the character’s plight as a young woman who has been forced into a marriage with a much older (and horrible) man alongside her darker, more venomous streak, the actor did a fantastic job of showing her propensity for challenging characters.
Thus, she would love to take on a villainous role in a The Silence of the Lambs spin-off, citing Hannibal Lecter as her favourite antagonist of all time. Talking to Radio Times, the actor once said, “Give me some more confused, dazed women who are locked up in mental homes on an island somewhere. I’d love a Hannibal Lecter. The Silence of the Lambs is my favourite book, favourite film. He’s a great guy.”
Played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film directed by Jonathan Demme, Hannibal Lecter is the terrifying cannibal who Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, a trainee FBI agent, visits in prison to learn about the mind of a murderer. He is charming and highly intelligent, but also frankly horrifying, and Hopkins rightly won an Oscar for his performance in the role.
Pugh has even concocted an idea for a film starring herself as Lecter’s child, explaining, “I could be his daughter. Who is also completely insane and happens to enjoy eating flesh off people’s faces. ‘Daddy!’ Gross. Let’s make it happen!”
Perhaps Pugh should try and make her idea happen, because if her performances in Lady Macbeth and Midsommar have taught us anything, it’s that the actor is terrific in dark and horrific roles.
