When Florence Pugh was trampled by livestock on set: “I was face down in the mud”
Hollywood is painted as one of the most glamorous industries, where millionaires and billionaires get to interact with one another, attend lavish parties and ceremonies, and stars win awards and become forever immortalised in incredible pieces of art.
Yet, there are many challenges that come with acting, whether that be embodying a complex character or navigating climates and settings you’re not used to. Shooting in extreme heat, cold or even underwater can become incredibly dangerous; take Isla Fisher, for example, who nearly drowned when filming a stunt in Now You See Me, with her panic being mistaken for acting until it was almost too late.
While Florence Pugh has never experienced anything as frightening as Fisher did while on set, she has definitely found herself in her fair share of unique situations that she perhaps wouldn’t have gotten herself into if not for her job. A prime example of this was the scene in Midsommar where she had to scream and cry with a group of women, with the actor writing on Instagram, “I knew I would never be so open and so raw and so exhausted like I was that day ever again. I can hope at least.”
While Pugh thought the shoot was intense and emotionally draining, she found it incredibly rewarding, revealing that she “found a true sisterhood.” However, perhaps the most unfortunate situation the actor has experienced came when shooting The Wonder, directed by Sebastián Lelio.
The film, released in 2022, saw Pugh play a nurse named Elizabeth who travels to Ireland to observe a young girl who refuses to eat. Set in the 1800s, Pugh proved her brilliance as a star of period dramas with the role, which earned her widespread praise. However, while filming the movie in Ireland, she found herself subjected to the unpredictability of the rural world when she was attacked by sheep.
Appearing on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the actor explained, “Whenever you’d work with the animals on the mountains, they were also like, ‘Why are we on a mountain? It’s really windy and cold.’ And there was one take we were walking with a horse, and the horse just turned around sideways and was like, ‘Nope. Not walking anymore.’ And I had a sheep run into me, and I face-planted in mud. Like, full-on mud.”
She added, “I had a very simple scene where I had to walk across, just walk across the road like that, just walk, but with really intense facial expressions going on. And as I was walking past this sheep, the sheep wouldn’t move out of the way. So I like, gently patted the bum and that sheep went ‘Rrr!’ And then another sheep next to it went like, ‘Rrr!’ and then that sheep ran into me. I flipped over the sheep and went straight down into cowpat. It was like full-on mud. It was great.”
Even Hollywood stars aren’t exempt from embarrassing themselves, and Pugh’s tragic story of getting covered in cowpat is proof that acting is far from the glamorous lifestyle that it’s often made out to be.
