Back to Black

On a recent summer evening, the 23-year-old actress Florence Pugh stood in front of a packed cinema in Brooklyn, New York, in a floral maxi-dress and a pair of shiny black work boots.

She wore her long blonde hair in loose waves, so that it casually tangled with the pile of gold necklaces around her collarbone. The effect was one of insouciance, a kind of grungy, tousled glamour. It was not until Pugh opened her mouth that it became clear she was nervous.

She was at the Alamo Drafthouse Theatre to introduce one of the first public screenings of Midsommar, the horror film from Hereditary director Ari Aster about a pagan death cult in Sweden.

If you’re yet to see it, the film stars Pugh as a depressive young woman who loses her entire family (in a manner so horrifying that the images may stalk your nightmares for months) and then agrees to accompany her emotionally distant boyfriend and a gaggle of his buddies on a trip to rural Scandinavia.

They travel to the remote hometown of their affable Swedish friend Pelle, who invites them to participate in a sacred nine-day ritual celebrating the summer solstice.

But it soon becomes clear that Pelle is not who he seems, and that the community is hiding sinister secrets. The film steers quickly from bucolic frolicking into abject terror – at the outset you’re expecting arcadian fantasy and at the end you’re feeling queasy and disoriented by a smorgasbord of blood, agony and grizzly-bear intestines.

Pugh, having seen the film for the first time the previous day, seemed a bit shellshocked as she spoke to the crowd. She told the audience to brace themselves for what they were about to see. “Good luck!” she chirped, in her husky Oxfordshire accent, before giving an encouraging little wave and clomping out of the theatre.

Sitting with Pugh in Manhattan’s Crosby Street Hotel, I understand why she was so anxious for people to see Midsommar. It’s not just that the film is scary – though you will need nerves of steel to get through it – but that it marked risky new terrain for Pugh. Never before has she been so raw in a role. In the first few minutes on screen, she churns through a kaleidoscope of feeling: from worry, to guilt, to neediness, to searing loss, to numbness, all with a bare face and dirty hair. It is a lot for one actor to carry.

“I feel like the horror lies more in watching people’s pain, rather than gore or jump scares or anything like that,” says Pugh. “Dealing with grief and trauma is scary, because no one really knows what vocabulary you should use. And so to watch characters break down, for me, was the hardest thing to do.”

She has the ideal face for conveying extreme emotion: wide and guileless, like a blank canvas stretched across a frame. She does more with the flick of an eyebrow, or the curl of a lip, than some actors are able to do with their entire bodies.

What’s more impressive is that Pugh never had any formal acting training – she landed her first film, The Calling, Carol Morley’s drama about an English girls’ academy in the Sixties, right out of secondary school. Pugh grew up in Oxford where her father is a restaurateur and her mother a former dancer. She got the theatrical bug early, via school plays, and can still recall her stage debut, as Mary in a Yorkshire version of the Nativity story. She really hammed up the regional dialect.

“I would come on and be like, ‘Will you help me with me donkeh?’,” she says, with a laugh. “‘Oh me back, me baaack!’”

At school, Pugh struggled academically, but says that her father encouraged her to focus on her goal of becoming an actress and not sweat her A-levels. She realises now that this was atypical parenting. “My dad was like, ‘Look, if you can’t do [something], and you don’t like it, then don’t stress about it.’ I’d constantly have this reminder that I’ve got really kind parents that don’t mind if I’m not fantastic at everything.”

But Pugh was fantastic at one thing, and people began to take notice. After The Calling, she was cast in a Hollywood television drama called Studio City in 2015, when she was still only 18. The show never made it past the pilot, which Pugh now sees as a blessing in disguise. While she was in Los Angeles, she says, the media began to construct a narrative around her body: pointing out that she wasn’t rail-thin. It left her with a sour taste about what the industry does to young performers.

“I think I was supposed to be feeling really grateful and really appreciative, which I was,” she says. “But the treatment of me and weight and body image was not good at all. Hollywood knows exactly what to do with everyone. I think because I was so available and eager, that was the problem – when you don’t know who you are yet.”

Pugh returned to England, in need of a “new lease of love for the film industry”. She found it in Lady Macbeth, William Oldroyd’s 2016 independent film about a young Victorian wife trapped in a terrible marriage, who ends up poisoning her husband and becoming a serial murderess (she even kills a horse). The role – violent, unhinged, brutal – showed Pugh had the ability to play off even the harshest moments with sensitivity and depth.

After Lady Macbeth, she appeared in another period drama, Outlaw King, and a Liam Neeson thriller, The Commuter. She then veered back into television, though this time on her own terms, in the BBC’s adaptation of the John le Carré spy novel The Little Drummer Girl. She played Charlie, an actress-turned-informant who becomes increasingly radical. “Charlie is so hectic, and so loud, and so opinionated, and just so hungry for life,” Pugh says. “She just wants to fall in love and shout. And then run away. I’ve met so many people that are like that. And I know there’s probably a piece of me in that too.”

Last year, Pugh returned to Hollywood for the first time since her negative experience, to play a wrestler in Stephen Merchant’s Fighting with My Family. It was a comic role – a first for Pugh – but also a swaggering one; she got to have jet black hair and ripped muscles, and take people down on the mat. To train for the part, she became a CrossFit aficionado and studied with pro wrestlers. She discovered that she has iron thighs. “I’m really good at squeezing with my legs,” she says. “Like really, really, good. So I get them on the floor then I just squeeze them like an anaconda.”

Now, she says, she is back working in America in a way that feels healthy and exciting for her. She’s no longer an ingénue that people can bend to fit their own story, but one of the most in-demand actresses of her generation. “I think when you’re out of work there, it’s horrible. Everybody’s busy, and everybody’s got a job but you. That’s not a nice feeling. But when you can relax and know that you’re done, that’s nice.”

After Midsommar, Pugh appeared in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation, playing the priggish youngest sister, Amy March, who goes after the rich playboy Laurie. She was just nominated for an Oscar: for Best Supporting Actress. “I think the reason why people hate Amy is because she secretly says what all of us want to say,” Pugh says. “She’s the voice in your head that goes to say something and then you tell yourself that you can’t say that. But she says it anyway. She has no filter.” Pugh wears lace and corsets for the film, which she has now done several times, but says that her run of period dramas is only incidental. She wanted to do Little Women because the story is timeless.

“This book resonates with so many different generations,” she says. “And even though we are so many years past what was deemed as normal back then, even now it’s still shocking people and even now, it’s still a story about these women that essentially were brought up in such a hippie and wonderful way. And they were allowed to make their own choices.

“Greta is so about making these girls seem as normal and as energetic and loud as siblings would be,” she says. “Talking over the top of one another, and pulling each other’s hair, and just being bodies that have grown up together. And not being pressured by it being a period film.”

This month, Pugh will fully leave the past behind and rocket into the stratosphere of global celebrity that comes with being in the Marvel universe; she is set to star opposite Scarlett Johansson in the new Black Widow film. She could not tell me much about it – Marvel is notoriously secretive – but she did say: “This film has been wanted by fans for such a long time and I think it’s well needed. So I feel like it’s only got support and love. And that’s a very exciting thing.”

When I ask Pugh if she is drawn to “strong” female characters – she’s played murderers, spies, athletes, and now a woman who takes her revenge in the Swedish mountains – she baulks at the term. For her, she says, strength is not a prerequisite. What she craves in a character is complexity.

“It doesn’t matter if she’s kind, or a bitch, or she kills a kid,” she says of the roles she takes on. “As long as she’s saying something. And I don’t even mean verbally. If you were to just watch her silhouette, what have you taken away from her?

“But it’s never been about being a strong woman,” she goes on. “Because as we’ve realised in the last two years, what does that mean? No one’s strong. Everyone has their flaws and insecurities. That is what makes people human, and that is what makes people empowered. When they see people that have problems or flaws or cracks. That’s the thing that makes someone go, ‘OK, I can do this now. I can be this, because it’s not so alien any more’.”