The roles Florence Pugh doesn’t want to play anymore: “I can’t do that again”
Florence Pugh had one of the most impressive filmmaking streaks known to humankind in 2019, with Midsommar, Little Women and Fighting with My Family all being released in quick succession of each other.
As a result, she has been described as one of the most exciting performers of her generation, with renowned directors scrambling for the chance to work with her, with Denis Villeneuve jumping at the opportunity to cast her in his recent Dune adaptation as Princess Irulan. With a captivating and deeply sensitive acting style, Pugh’s presence adds a multi-dimensional and considered layer to each film she stars in, although the actor has expressed how her performance in one film was particularly hard to recover from.
Ari Aster is renowned within the horror community for cult classic films such as Midsommar, Hereditary and Beau is Afraid, creating a uniquely disturbing and other-worldly style that has helped reshape a modern approach to the genre. The director began by making short films, eventually building to more fleshed-out versions of his alarming stories, often exploring the mother-son relationship and warped manifestations of love.
However, his debut feature is perhaps the most explosive from his filmography, unfortunately starring Florence Pugh, with the actor sharing the slightly traumatising experience of taking on the character.
Midsommar follows a young woman who travels to Sweden with her friends for a summer festival, which slowly turns into a nightmarish experience as she is invited to participate in their strange rituals. The role is incredibly demanding of Pugh, with her character dealing with her own grief over her family dying while also being terrorised in this remote setting, becoming the focal point of the festival’s unsettling traditions.
While her performance is exceptional, Pugh later shared how challenging the production was and the strain on her emotional health, saying, “I definitely felt like I abused myself in the places that I got myself to go. The nature of figuring these things out is you need to go, ‘Alright, well, I can’t do that again because 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. But, yeah, there’s definitely things that you have to respect about yourself.”
Her character finds herself in increasingly hostile situations, with the people around her slowly becoming absorbed by the violent rituals of the festival and finding herself completely isolated from normality. Pugh expanded on the emotional burden of portraying this, saying, “Each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do. I was putting things in my head that were getting worse and more bleak. I think by the end I probably, most definitely abused my own self in order to get that performance.”
It is easy to see how this role would be haunting and hard to shake, with other actors describing the lingering effect of starring in psychological horrors and how hard it can be to walk away from. Pugh has maintained that she doesn’t regret the film and is proud of her performance despite the enormous strain it placed on her mental well-being.
