Florence Pugh just opened up about how bosses tried to change her “look” at the start of her career

“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,” said Pugh.

Florence Pugh is undoubtedly one of the most sought-after actors right now.

From starring in critically acclaimed movies such as Midsommar, Little Women and Black Widow, the star continues to generate buzz with everything that she does – and now, the actor is getting real about the struggles she faced early on in her career.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Pugh said that she was cast in the lead role of a television pilot, where she played a popstar – but bosses wanted to make changes to her 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.”

Pugh said the pilot was not picked up by a network and she felt that her career was over. However, after returning to the UK, she audition for Lady Macbeth – something that made her “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 told the paper.

“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,” she said.

Pugh will next star in The Wonder, a Netflix period drama-thriller that tells the true story of a 19th century social phenomenon called the “fasting girls”.

Based on Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel of the same name, the film is set in rural central Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine of the mid-1800s and tells the tale of an 11-year-old girl named Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who has stopped eating but remains miraculously alive and well.

The film is directed by Sebastian Lelio (A Fantastic Woman, Disobedience), while the screenplay was written by Donoghue and Alice Birch, who collaborated with Sally Rooney on the scripts for Normal People and Conversations With Friends.

The Wonder will be available to stream on Netflix on 16 November.

Image: Getty

Source: Read Full Article