Florence Pugh | Erik Madigan Heck Photoshoot for Harper’s Bazaar UK - 05/2025
"I want to feel like I'm part of the change": Florence Pugh on fame, fertility and fighting for our futures
From charming Hollywood to confronting her critics, Florence Pugh has always charted her own course. Ahead of taking the lead in a major new Marvel project, the forthright star speaks to Harper's Bazaar
Florence Pugh grins at me, kicks off her boots and tucks her feet underneath her. “Take your shoes off too!” she insists jovially, and proceeds to gesture towards the enormous cheese platter before us.
“At some point in my life, I think I said I like cheese, and now I’m always given this,” she picks up a slice of Comté and adds, with her mouth full: “But I’m not mad about it at all. Because, you know, I do fucking love cheese.”
So far, Pugh is more than living up to her reputation as one of the scrappiest stars in Hollywood – as brilliantly potty-mouthed and down-to-earth as you would expect. We are in a small room at Tate Britain – the setting for Harris Reed’s autumn/winter 2025 London Fashion Week show, which she will open that night. “When he dresses me, he genuinely cares about how I feel, and that is such a beautiful thing to give someone before they’re about to do something big like this,” she says. Today, she appears completely at ease, but at the start of her career she felt self-conscious during premieres and award ceremonies. “It wasn’t until I realised I could have fun, and that other people enjoyed watching me having fun, that I could relax.”
Her red-carpet persona shows her, she says, at her most playful. Sartorially, she has a penchant for audacious proportions and rainbow shades, and she approaches what she calls "the pageantry" of fashion with a devil-may-care attitude. She famously shut down online trolls who took umbrage at her exposed nipples in a sheer pink Valentino gown in 2023 (“Why are you so scared of breasts?”) and brought her grandmother, ‘Granzo Pat’, onto the red carpet with her at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. Her dress for Reed’s show – a diaphanous black gown with a dramatic neckpiece that makes her look like a modern-day Maleficent – fits the bill perfectly.
When we meet, Pugh is still basking in the positive response to her most recent film, the bittersweet tear-jerker We Live in Time, in which she portrays a young chef battling a cancer diagnosis with the support of her partner, played by Andrew Garfield. She will next be seen in Marvel’s latest blockbuster Thunderbolts – reprising Yelena Belova, her role from 2021’s Black Widow. The ruthless assassin is, she tells me, the character she would most like to go to the pub with: “It would be fucking hilarious.” On paper, Yelena could have been a straight-up nemesis when she first took her on in Black Widow; in Pugh’s hands, she became remarkably empathetic – not to mention funny. Her talent “comes from something alive inside her”, says Scarlett Johansson, her co-star in that film. “Her magnetism comes from her authenticity.”
Pugh was born in Oxford in 1996 to Deborah, a former dancer, and Clinton, a restaurateur. She spent holidays tending the bar at her father’s establishments, which is possibly where she finessed her easy charm. Following in the footsteps of her elder siblings Arabella and Sebastian, she decided to pursue an acting career, attending an open casting call for the film The Falling 11 years ago. Her subsequent performance as the charismatic schoolgirl Abbie earnt her multiple award nominations. “She just instinctively knew how to bring the character to life,” the director Carol Morley tells me. “I will always look back with great fondness at the electricity in the room when she first auditioned, knowing with absolute certainty that we had discovered a star.”
Hollywood courted Pugh almost immediately. She was flown out to LA to shoot a TV pilot that was never optioned – a blessing in disguise, she says, as the experience exposed her to some of the industry’s crueller facets, including executives who told her to lose weight. It proved a course corrector. She returned to the UK and independent cinema, signing on to the low-budget British period drama Lady Macbeth, written by Alice Birch, the script- writer behind Normal People. Her character Katherine was thorny and desperate; Pugh made her mesmerising.
A series of varied and complex roles followed. In 2019 alone, Pugh played a young WWE wrestler in Fighting with my Family and a grieving woman in Ari Aster’s cult horror Midsommar, as well as receiving an Oscar nomination for rehabilitating Amy March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation. Next, she stepped into the shoes of a Victorian nurse (2022’s The Wonder), while 2023 saw her embody a drug addict in A Good Person, and the American psychiatrist Jean Tatlock in Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Oppenheimer.
With so many interesting independent films under her belt, Marvel may not seem a natural fit, but Pugh surprised herself by falling in love with the Black Widow script. “Until then, I hadn’t really seen it as something that was about the lives of women,” she says. When she returns this spring as Yelena, she will be the film’s lead character. Thunderbolts’ cast includes David Harbour and Sebastian Stan, who are part of a motley crew of trained killers forced to collaborate. (Pugh’s dry wit is on display when we discuss how to work with a group of people who don’t trust each other: “You mean in my industry, or Yelena’s?”)
“I got to do a stunt that has never been done before. I give so much of my body to what I do”
She clearly also adores the process of making a big blockbuster. “I got to do a stunt that has never been done before,” she says, proudly. “My double, the female co-ordinator and I are all now Guinness World Record holders!” All I can reveal about this impressive achievement is that she jumps off something very, very high.
In one way or another, Pugh is always willingly throwing herself off heights for her career. She talks about putting herself through ‘trauma’ for Midsommar, picturing her entire family in coffins to tap into her character Dani’s grief (“I left the film feeling like I had abandoned myself in that field”). We joke about the apparent disregard she has for her hair, which she hacked to pieces on camera for her role in A Good Person and which Andrew Garfield shaved off for her in We Live in Time. “I give so much of my body to what I do,” she says.
This summer, Pugh will begin filming the third instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune, in which she returns as the enigmatic Princess Irulan (“I hope we see more of her. I want more cool outfits!”). She has just come back from New Zealand, where she has been making a miniseries of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, playing the anti-heroine Cathy Ames. In many ways, the character is perfect for Pugh’s tastes – a woman Steinbeck himself describes as having a “malformed soul”. “People keep on saying to me, ‘I read the book. She’s a terrible person.’ But I get really arsey about that,” she says. “I can explain all the awful things that she does. It’s my responsibility to understand the character, because they can’t defend themselves.”
Pugh was first approached about the project by the show’s writer Zoe Kazan (the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, the director of the 1955 film starring James Dean), who also asked her to executive-produce. “I remember reading the scripts and thinking, ‘She wants to give me this power?’” It will be her second producer credit after A Good Person, and it has inspired her to do more behind the camera. “I love writing dialogue. It’s my second main enjoyment outside of acting,” she says. “I’ve got a couple of shows and a movie that I want to make. I know who I want to play, and I see how I want it shot.”
But her decade of stratospheric professional success has come at the expense of her personal life. “I’ve worked back-to-back since I started, and I’ve missed so much,” she says, listing family events, birthdays, barbecues with friends. “I’ve now come to terms with things that I don’t like about myself and want to change. I don’t want to have things just happen to me any more.”
Part of this reckoning – brought on, she says, by the themes of mortality in We Live in Time – was her desire to take control of her romantic life. Following her amicable break-up in 2022 with her partner of nearly three years, the actor and director Zach Braff, Pugh embarked upon a relationship (she won’t be drawn on the question of who it was with) that ended as the film began shooting. “It was a scary break-up,” she says, “and I think that movie forced me to realise I can’t wait for people any more. I can’t accept this version of love. I have to help myself.”
“I’ve come to terms with things that I don’t like about myself and want to change”
She tells me she is currently in love and is approaching her new relationship very differently. “I’m more sympathetic to the people who are in love with me, because it’s not easy! I’m tricky – I’m always busy, I can never make dates,” she admits. “But it’s not good enough for me to ask someone to just accept that. I’ll just end up alone. I don’t want that – I want a family.”
Having being diagnosed with endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome, she has begun the process of freezing her eggs which she describes as “tiring and horrible”, though she recognises she is lucky in being able to afford the procedure. “There was a clickbait article about me doing it,” she says. “I know you shouldn’t read the comments but... urgh. I wish there was a little more tenderness and understanding.”
The last time Pugh publicly called for kindness was in defence of Braff, when she posted an Instagram video in 2020 condemning the vile torrent of abuse the pair received once their relationship – and their 21-year age gap – was revealed. It may be for this reason that she will not make her current relationship public. “It can be such a hate-fest out there,” she says.
Recently, Pugh deleted Instagram for five months which she describes as “bliss” (her dream, she later tells me, is eventually to leave London for a quieter rural existence), but she was compelled to come back on to post about the LA fires, feeling that her platform could be useful for spreading information. After all, she does have more Instagram followers than the entire population of Austria, I tell her. “Wait, what?” Pugh is flabbergasted. “Wow, that’s funny.”
"I want to feel like I’m a part of the change"
Nonetheless, she displays a healthy degree of scepticism about social media, increasingly feeling a responsibility to move beyond armchair activism. “Instagram posts can only go so far. Yes, they make you aware, yes, they can change a few opinions, but I want to make sure that I’m awake to what’s going on and feel like I’m a part of the change.” At a time when, as she puts it, “plenty of unstable, powerful men are dictating our futures”, she would like to be on the front line of the resistance movement. “Being more active in this very aggressive change in the world right now feels correct to me,” she explains. “At least I know that my energy is going somewhere.”
A few hours later, I watch her perform on the catwalk. “Be determined,” she says to the crowd. “Be fearless... but always, always be yourself.” It is an apt description of Pugh’s compelling career thus far; and the rallying cry of a woman prepared to fight for what she believes in.
The May issue of Harper's Bazaar UK, starring Florence Pugh, is out now. 'Thunderbolts' is in UK cinemas from 1 May.
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