Actors have to be able to portray the full range of human emotion in order to get an audience invested in their character and the story, and Florence Pugh has done just that. Like the best actors in the world, Pugh can make fans truly believe she's dealing with grief, pain or trauma. Of course, there are times when the acting seemingly ceases to become acting. That was apparently the case when Pugh made Ari Aster’s Midsommar.
Florence Pugh recently appeared on The Louis Theroux Podcast, where she revealed that all the pain that her character went through in Midsommar honestly had a real impact on her. She realizes now that the movie actually made her "depressed." Despite that, I love hearing that the movie she made right after, an adaptation of a celebrated book, allowed her to put the darkness away, at least for a while. Pugh said…
I just can’t exhaust myself like that because it has a knock-on effect. I think it made me sad for like six months after that, and I didn’t know why I was depressed. I got back after shooting Little Women, and Little Women was such a fun experience, and obviously a completely different tone from Midsommar, so I think, shelved all of that.
Midsommar sees Pugh play Dani, a young woman who is traumatized by the death of her family before visiting a rare midsummer festival in Sweden. While there, Dani, still dealing with trauma and depression, witnesses the dark rituals of the cult putting on the festival. This wild tale concludes with a truly depressing ending, one that Pugh and the director don't actually agree on.
Midsommar, like Aster’s Hereditary before it, is an absolutely dark film that is not for the faint of heart and the sort of feature that can really hit you wrong if you’re in the wrong mood while you watch it. Pugh admits she had to envision some pretty terrible things, including the death of her own family, in order to properly portray the character, and the result was depression.
However, for as dark as Midsommar was, it's great hearing that the process of making Greta Gerwig’s Little Women was something else entirely for Pugh. It seems that a much warmer set allowed her to put aside the darkness she was dealing with at the time. Although, she now admits that it didn’t completely solve the problem as, once filming was over, the depression came back. Pugh continued…
And then when I got home for Christmas, I was so depressed, and I was like, ‘Oh, I think that’s from Midsommar, and I didn’t deal with it, and I probably shouldn’t do that again.
While Florence Pugh is great in Midsommar, it doesn’t sound like she’ll be making a lot of movies like it in the future. While she says she’s better now at managing herself and her emotions, and she gets better with every film, it sounds like while this is an experience she’s glad she had, she’s not looking to repeat it. And, quite frankly, I don't blame her.
