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“There are fine lines women have to stay within, otherwise they are called a diva, demanding, problematic. And I don’t want to fit into stereotypes made by others,” Pugh shared.
Florence Pugh has a few things to get off her chest about being a woman in Hollywood.
In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, the We Live in Time actress said it’s “exhausting” being a woman in the entertainment industry.
While touching on the recent headlines made by fellow Brit, Keira Knightley, who said she was publicly shamed by the press after starring in Pirates of the Caribbean at just 17 years old, Pugh touched on the line women have to tow to survive Hollywood’s wrath.
“There are fine lines women have to stay within, otherwise they are called a diva, demanding, problematic. And I don’t want to fit into stereotypes made by others,” the 28-year-old Oscar nominee told the publication. “It is really exhausting for a young woman to just be in this industry, and actually other industries.”
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She continued, “I remember watching this industry and feeling that I wasn’t represented. I remember godawful headlines about how Keira Knightley isn’t thin anymore, or watching women getting torn apart despite being talented and beautiful. The only thing people want to talk about is some useless crap about how they look. And so I didn’t care to abide by those rules.”
This is a topic Pugh has touched on before, with the Midsommar star telling The Telegraph in 2022 that she thought becoming an actor was a “massive mistake” after she was body shamed by studio executives at age 19.
Pugh recalled coming off her feature film debut in the 2014 psychological drama The Falling, when she landed a lead role in the Fox sitcom Studio City. It didn’t take long before she said the studio executives who hired her for the show began to body shame her, and allegedly requested Pugh change things about her physical 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,” Pugh said. “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.”
Studio City was never picked up, and Pugh was eventually cast in Lady Macbeth, which won rave reviews for her performance.
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“That made me 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,” she explained. “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.”
The Little Woman star continued, “There’s nothing glamorous about it, and I think that’s what I love. When I get to be completely raw, that’s when I feel like I can really be watched. 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,'” Pugh concluded.
