Florence Pugh’s Bosses Wanted Her to Lose Weight Early In Her Career
Florence Pugh is opening up about her early days as an emerging actress. The Don’t Worry Darling star told The Telegraph over the weekend (October 29) that after landing a television pilot as a pop star on Studio City at age 19, her bosses wanted to make changes to her appearance.
“I felt very lucky and grateful, and couldn’t believe that I had got this top-of-the-game job,” she told the outlet. But it immediately took a turn when executives started asking her to make changes to her appearance. “All the things that they were trying to change about me – whether it was my weight, my look, the shape of my face, the shape of my eyebrows – that was so not what I wanted to do, or the industry I wanted to work in. I’d thought the film business would be like [my experience of making] The Falling, but actually, this was what the top of the game looked like, and I felt I’d made a massive mistake.”
The pilot was ultimately not picked up and she felt that her career was over but when she returned to England, she landed an audition for Lady Macbeth which made her “fall back in love with cinema.”
“The kind of cinema that was a space where you could be opinionated, and loud, and I’ve stuck by that,” the 26-year-old actress added. “I think it’s far too easy for people in this industry to push you left and right. And I was lucky enough to discover when I was 19 what kind of a performer I wanted to be.”
“There’s nothing glamorous about it, and I think that’s what I love,” she confessed in the interview. “When I get to be completely raw, that’s when I feel like I can really be watched.” The Midsommar actress said she loves doing films that focus on her acting, telling the publication, “When I could be naked at whatever size I was, and bare-faced, and the acting could speak for itself. There’s nothing for people to be distracted by: they can’t be like, ‘Oh, I don’t like the make-up.’ It was a wonderful reminder: ‘Oh, yeah — this is who you are.'”
You can watch Pugh’s latest work in the upcoming Netflix period drama/thriller called The Wonder, as an English nurse trying to crack the case of why an 11-year-old girl hasn’t eaten in four months. Watch the trailer below:
'Don't Worry Darling:' Scenes From The Psychological Thriller
