Florence Pugh has never been one to shy away from throwing herself into dramatic, highly emotional performances, but her role in Ari Aster’s unsettling Midsommar took her to extremes she’s not keen on revisiting.
Pugh recently reflected on the challenges of such a deeply immersive role. In Ari Aster’s Midsommar she played Dani, a grief-stricken woman grappling with personal tragedy while being drawn into the clutches of a Swedish cult.
“There have been some roles where I’ve given too much, and I’ve been broken for a long while afterwards,” Pugh said, speaking on the Reign with Josh Smith podcast (as quoted by People). “Like when I did Midsommar, I definitely felt like I abused myself in the places that I got myself to go to.”
While her performance was lauded by critics and audiences alike, Pugh is honest about the toll it took on her well-being. “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,’” she shared. “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.”
The Oscar-nominated star has talked about her experience on Midsommar before. Speaking on the Off Menu podcast in March 2023, she talked about the spiralling nature of her role. “Each day, the content would be getting more weird and harder to do,” Pugh shared. “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.”
Even after production wrapped, the emotional weight lingered. Pugh recalled boarding a plane to her next project, Little Women, and feeling an unexpected sense of guilt for leaving Dani behind. “I remember looking [out the plane] and feeling immense guilt because I felt like I’d left [Dani] in that field in that [emotional] state,” she said. “It’s so weird. I’ve never had that before. […] I definitely felt like I’d left her there to be abused.”
Despite the challenges, Pugh is proud of her work and grateful for the opportunity, though she’s learned to set boundaries to protect herself in the future. As for Midsommar writer-director Ari Aster, Pugh, speaking to The New York Times in March 2023, described him as “peculiar in a mad genius kind of a way” and a “stand-up comedian at heart.” She also recalled his humour on set, saying, “Once you laugh at one thing, he will try and make you laugh at all the other things. He’ll keep going, and everybody will be crying in fits of laughter.”
The ever-busy star was recently seen in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, has romantic-drama We Live in Time (with Andrew Garfield) in the midst of its release roll-out, and will soon be seen reprising her MCU role of Yelena Belova in Thunderbolts*.
