Whether she’s inhabiting a complex role or posting candid ripostes to her Instagram trolls, Florence Pugh has never been afraid to be a voice of truth
FLORENCE PUGH KNEW IT WAS GOING TO BE a thing. At Valentino’s couture show in Rome in July this year, the 26-year-old actress wore a Barbie-pink gown with layers of tulle and a completely sheer top. Working with the designer Pierpaolo Piccioli and his team, Pugh approved the removal of its lining, eliminating any confusion over the intentionality of its transparency. ‘I was comfortable with my small breasts,’ she tells me, while sipping a glass of rosé from a cosy countryside hotel room. ‘And showing them like that – it aggravated [people], that I was comfortable.’
Pugh received a deluge of internet nastiness. ‘It was just alarming how perturbed people were,’ she says. ‘They were so angry that I was confident, and they wanted to let me know that they would never wank over me. Well, don’t.’ She expanded on this sentiment on Instagram, excoriating her body-shaming trolls: ‘Why are you so scared of breasts? Small? Large? Left? Right? Only one? Maybe none? What. Is. So. Terrifying.’ The post has now been liked more than 2.4 million times.
Fans have come to expect this kind of fiery candour from Pugh. Since making her big-screen debut in 2014 as a teenage girl reckoning with her own sexuality in Carol Morley’s The
Falling, she has built a career playing women who refuse to be silenced. Over the past seven years, she has acted in almost two dozen projects, including her breakout performances in a pair of 2019 films, Ari Aster’s indie-horror hit Midsommar and Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of the beloved classic Little Women, the latter of which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
She has established herself as one of the most fearless, versatile talents of her generation – that rare performer who manages both to disappear into a role and still emanate a singular star wattage. ‘I guess all of my movies have that element of women being forced into a corner, forced into an opinion, forced into a way of life,’ Pugh says. ‘And then, finally, something cracks.’
This is an apt description of Pugh’s character, Alice Chambers, in her latest film Don’t Worry Darling, a psychological thriller in which Pugh stars alongside Harry Styles and the director Olivia Wilde. It is set in an idyllic desert town in the 1950s, where every male resident works at the mysterious Victory Project. The women spend their days in a housewife loop: vacuuming and doing laundry, ballet lessons and shopping, poolside martinis and preparing multi-course dinners. After one of the wives disappears, Alice begins to question everything: what they’re all doing there, where their husbands really go, her own reality.
Gossip sites and Styles devotees have breathlessly tracked every little morsel about Don’t Worry Darling since production began in autumn 2020. After Wilde and Styles became romantically linked, the internet went into overdrive. When the trailer debuted in May, the sex scenes were predictably what was seized upon. ‘Obviously, the nature of hiring the most famous pop star in the world means you’re going to have conversations like that. But when it’s reduced to your sex scenes, or watching the most famous man in the world go down on someone, it’s not why we do it. It’s not why I’m in this industry,’ Pugh says. ‘That’s just not what I’m going to be discussing, because [this movie is] bigger and better than that. And the people who made it are bigger and better than that.’
Pugh grew up in Oxford, where her father is a restaurateur and her mother is a former dancer. She acted in school plays and performed at her dad’s cafés but had no formal training; she responded to an open casting call for The Falling at her mother’s behest, with a video audition recorded on her phone.
The low rasp in Pugh’s voice is the result of a condition called tracheomalacia, which can cause recurrent bronchitis and upper-respiratory infections. To safeguard her health, she spent the early part of the pandemic under lockdown in Los Angeles, seeking refuge in the warmer weather and spreading joy across Instagram with her ‘Cooking With Flo’ videos. Nevertheless, she was itching to get back to work. ‘Part of the reason we all do this is because we run away with the circus,’ she says. ‘I think that one of the pulls for me is that I get to see places, see people, befriend people, fall in love with people, and then move on and do it again.’
Of course, the circus can take on a life of its own. When Pugh and the actor-director Zach Braff began dating in 2019, much was made of their 21-year age gap. It was an experience that Pugh found cruel and invasive. ‘Whenever I feel like that line has been crossed in my life, whether it’s paparazzi taking private moments, or moments that aren’t even real, or gossip channels that encourage members of the public to share private moments of famous people walking down the street, I think it’s incredibly wrong,’ she says. ‘I don’t think that people, just because they have this job, should have every aspect of their life watched and
written about. We haven’t signed up for a reality-TV show.’
Pugh and Braff quietly ended their relationship earlier this year. ‘We’ve been trying to do this separation without the world knowing, because it’s been a relationship that everybody has an opinion on,’ Pugh says. ‘We just felt something like this would really do us the benefit of not having millions of people telling us how happy they are that we’re not together. So, we’ve done that.’
Before the break-up, the pair collaborated on A Good Person, due out next year, about a woman who picks up the pieces of her life after a tragedy. Braff wrote the script with Pugh in mind. ‘The movie we made together was probably one of my favourite experiences,’ she says. ‘It felt like a very natural and easy thing to do.’
More than that, it helped her realise how she wants to work in the future. ‘I feel like I am now getting into this groove in my career, where I’m knowing what I can take, what I give, and what I will not accept any more,’ says Pugh, who also appears this autumn in Sebastián Lelio’s sweeping Netflix film The Wonder.
She has just finished work on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, and began shooting Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two over the summer. ‘Being on these last few movies with some of the greats has been a wonderful way to kick myself back into the mode of, “This is what you want to do”,’ she reflects.
Still, some, at least, have remained unfazed by all the buzz. ‘I went to see my gran, and she goes, “So what’s all of this business about your nipples, then?”’ Pugh showed her a few photos. ‘She gasped,’ Pugh says. ‘Because the dress was so beautiful.’
‘I don’t think that people, just because they have this job, should have every aspect of their life watched and written about. We haven’t signed up for a reality-TV show ’
FLORENCE PUGH
ACTRESS, 26
‘The best piece of advice I’ve received is to be grateful. My mum gave it to me, but also life taught me to be grateful every day for everything’
MIKA SCHNEIDER
MODEL, 21
‘My therapist gave me one of the best pieces of advice ever, which was “Compare and despair”. If you compare yourself to people, you’re always going to feel this sense of emptiness’
ELLA EMHOFF
ARTIST, MODEL AND DESIGNER, 23
‘When my mom was growing up, she was told by the elders around her, “Go change the world”. And, in my generation, we’re told to go save the world. It’s completely different stakes’
AMANDA GORMAN
POET, 24
AMANDA GORMAN ALREADY KNOWS THAT YOU
want her to save the world. ‘Young people are expected to rescue everyone, even when we are struggling to rescue ourselves,’ she tells me in the same clear, strident voice she used to perform her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at President Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
At 22, Gorman became the youngest inaugural poet in American history when she delivered that call for unity on the steps of the US Capitol a mere two weeks after militant far-right factions stormed the building in an attempt to prevent the election from being certified. She would go on to become the first (and so far only) person to recite a poem during the Super Bowl – another performance that would help to thrust her into the stratosphere of the public imagination.
We’re talking on a sunny day in July. Gorman, now 24, is at her home in Los Angeles; I am in Brooklyn. She is wearing a grey zip-up sweater, her flawless brown skin glowing, dappled by the shade in the outdoor courtyard where she’s seated. Occasionally, as we speak, she stops and raises her eyes to the sky; she’s distracted by a hummingbird nearby. It’s an idyllic scene beamed at me through my laptop screen, like those visions of a technocratic green utopian future that were popular in sci-fi films in the early Noughties, back when the future seemed exciting.
The overall response to Gorman’s success, especially from people older than her, has been that she is a symbol of hope – a promise of something better than the division and violence of 2020. But, as Gorman points out: ‘When my mom was growing up, she was told by the elders around her, “Go change the world”. And, in my generation, we’re told to go save the world. It’s completely different stakes when you look at those two sentences. The world that I and so many other members of Gen Z are living in is one of emergency, one of destruction.’
If the members of Gorman’s generation are expected to rescue all humanity against extraordinary odds, ‘it’s not something we can do alone’, she says. ‘No sustainable and worthwhile future is ever built by one. It has to be built by many.’
She’s talking about reaching across generations – something that is central to her work. Wherever she writes, she stacks copies of books by the authors she sees as her forebears: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange. ‘I like to give myself a source of historical power,’ she explains. ‘And then it’s all “cross fingers” from there.’
She was raised by her mother, Joan Wicks, in West LA, alongside her twin sister Gabrielle, now a film-maker. Gorman was drawn to writing at an early age. Dinah Berland, who mentored her through the LA-based literary organisation WriteGirl, says: ‘It was clear that Amanda was curious about the path to becoming a successful poet, and I had no doubt that she could get there.’ Gorman’s interest in art was matched by a passion for politics, but she sees poetry as part of political work. Poets, she says, ‘are working with a few syllables. We get the fewest amount of stones to throw to make the most impact. How can I say the most by saying the least?’ She has stated in interviews that her ultimate goal is to become president of the United States.
But, for now, she is a recent Harvard graduate with the bestselling poetry books The Hill We Climb and Call Us What We
Carry. This success comes as the genre itself has seen a renaissance; according to the National Endowment for the Arts, 28 million adults read poetry in 2017 – the highest readership recorded in 15 years, with those aged 18 to 24 representing a large part of that audience. Poets including Gorman, Danez Smith, Rupi Kaur and Patricia Lockwood all loom large on the cultural landscape, aided by the ease of sharing on social-media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
Gorman also has an acute sense of the visual possibilities of being a public intellectual. Think of the now-iconic yellow Prada coat and red headband she wore at the inauguration. In this, she is like the writing giants who came before her: Joan Didion, Maya Angelou and even Zadie Smith – all writers who understood fashion as another language to play with. ‘As much as possible, I try to include my physical person in conversation with the beliefs that I hold,’ she says. ‘There is a real joy and power that comes with being intentional with our aesthetics. It goes beyond looking “pretty”. It gets into looking our fullest selves.’
First and foremost, though, Gorman is a lover of words. I ask her what terms she’s currently attracted to, and she offers ‘long haul’. ‘It sounds so boring,’ she says, laughing, ‘like I’m moving cross-country. But I think so much of what’s happening in the world – the attacks on women’s rights, you choose which disaster – the idea of being in it for the long haul is really important to me.
‘Oh!’ she adds, as the light continues to fall around her, ‘also,
go vote. Put that in before everything else.’ She does, after all, still want to be president one day.
‘I think that, in order to be an inspiring person, you have to be interested in inspiring people’
JADÉ FADOJUTIMI
ARTIST, 29
‘I want a world where everybody can experience joy. I want a world where you can live your life and thrive, not just survive’
XIYE BASTIDA
CLIMATE-JUSTICE ADVOCATE, 20