2019 Breakthrough Entertainer: Florence Pugh
LOS ANGELES — By the end of 2019 on big screens across the globe, actress Florence Pugh will have body-slammed a famous wrestler in “Fighting with My Family,” screamed her lungs out after getting caught up in a violent Swedish cult in “Midsommar,” and tromped around New England in a Victorian hoop skirt with the three other March sisters in “Little Women.”
Each performance has garnered more critical acclaim than the last, and cemented the 23-year-old Pugh as an actress on the rise.
“It’s so weird,” Pugh recently told The Associated Press, which named her one of its Breakthrough Entertainers of 2019. “It’s a weird feeling that everyone’s talking about everything, but it’s a wonderful feeling.”
Despite having three major films come out in a 10-month period in 2019, Pugh insists not that much is different in her life. She’s able to fly under the radar, something she credits, laughingly, to “so many hair colors.”
“No one knows who I am,” she said. “I don’t really get recognized at all. I’ve actually had conversations with people where they’ve been speaking about a film that I was in. And I’m like, ‘Oh, really? You thought that? Great.’”
She does catch herself doing double-takes when she’s working opposite top actors, like Meryl Streep in “Little Women.”
“Meryl was just as powerful as you can imagine she was ... and sharing a carriage with her wearing the fanciest Amy March clothing was a definite pinch-me moment,” Pugh said.
Up next on her bucket list of roles?
“I’ve always said I wanted to do a Western. Like, I really, really, really want to be a gritty, greasy toothed, kind of hairy woman with a wax linen skirt that crunches when she gets on the horse,” Pugh said. “And I would love to play a drug lord as well, yeah. So there you go everyone. A Western and a drug lord. Sort it out.”