“I grew up pretending”: the musical icons Florence Pugh has always dreamed of playing
There are certain big-name actors who have a quite unique skill, which is to be entirely A-list and world famous and yet come across as you could happily sit in a pub with them all afternoon and have a pint and they’d get their round in without complaint, and probably grab some crisps as well.
Paul Rudd seems like that, so does James McAvoy, and Florence Pugh definitely seems like that, who, aside from being outwardly convivial, is also forging one of the finest careers in film of any young actor around at the moment, with a movie CV that rivals anyone over the last ten years.
A quick glance at her résumé reveals horror gems like Ari Aster’s Midsommar, blockbusters like Dune: Part Two and the forthcoming ‘let’s just invite everyone’ megamovie Avengers Doomsday, plus thoughtful, multi-Oscar-winning brilliance with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and moving drama in the form of We Live in Time.
It’s not really that surprising then that she was already Oscar-nominated at the age of 25, given she’s worked under some of the leading directors in Hollywood and across several genres too, while also finding time to appear in music videos for artists like Yungblud, for his ‘love letter to nurses’ single ‘Zombie’, and one for Rachel Chinouriri, 2024’s ‘Never Need Me’.
That link to music also manifests itself in her own side project as a singer, performing on the soundtrack to the film she starred in alongside Harry Styles, Don’t Worry Darling, and writing and performing two songs for 2023’s A Good Person, which she starred in alongside Morgan Freeman. Seeing this, it makes sense that two of the roles she would most like to play happen to be musical legends.
Asked about which famous figures she might want to portray at some point in the future, she answered, “Blondie, just because she’s so cool. [And] I grew up pretending I was Dusty Springfield ’cause she had a really low voice, and I was like, ‘Hey, I have a low voice too’. [So] those two.”
It’s therefore fair to say that Pugh would probably have been pretty pleased to hear that when Blondie’s singer herself, Debbie Harry, was asked who would play her in a biopic of her life, she replied, “If it were somebody like Florence Pugh, I’d be in heaven. I just think she’s a great actor, and she could do anything”.
At the moment however, there are no plans for that to come to fruition, with the actor currently in the midst of working on not just Dune Part 3 but the Avengers movie due in cinemas in December this year and a TV adaptation of East of Eden, the Netflix series based on the novel by John Steinbeck and directed by Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather Elia Kazan helmed the 1955 movie starring James Dean.
Harry, of course, was another female star who had considerable presence in both music and movies, already a huge global name thanks to a string of number one songs and albums before she co-starred with James Woods in David Cronenberg’s seminal sci-fi Videodrome, before appearing in the John Waters musical Hairspray five years later.
Sadly, one film appearance that didn’t happen was a part in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, for which the director asked her if she would play an android in the classic 1982 film. Harry’s record label said she was too busy, and so the role went to Daryl Hannah, something Harry later said was her biggest regret.
