Florence Pugh said her first Hollywood role made her feel like she’d “made a massive mistake.”
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, the British actor, now 26, recalled being pressured to completely change her appearance at age 19, after she left the U.K. for Los Angeles and landed a lead role in a pilot.
Pugh had been cast in “Studio City,” a dramedy about a pop star on the rise. The show was also to star Eric McCormack and Heather Graham. “I felt very lucky and grateful, and couldn’t believe that I had got this top-of-the-game job,” Pugh told The Telegraph.
But once she got the part, executives began telling her she needed to make changes.
“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.
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Two years earlier, she’d made her on-screen debut in “The Falling,” a British psychological drama in which she was cast from an open audition.
“I’d thought the film business would be like [my experience with] ‘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 of her time on “Studio City.”
The pilot wasn’t picked up for series, and Pugh said she returned to England feeling like her career was over. But two weeks later, she landed an audition for “Lady Macbeth,” which she ended up starring in.
“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 told The Telegraph. “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.”
In 2018, Pugh also spoke about her experience with “Studio City” and the pressure put on her to look a certain way, telling The Guardian: “What I’ve noticed about Hollywood is, if you go out there shouting about who you are, they will love you for it. But if you go out not knowing what it is that you’re representing, and you are just a canvas, they will make you into the thing they need you to be.”
Pugh has since landed roles in major Hollywood fare including “Black Widow,” “Dune: Part Two” and “Don’t Worry Darling” ― and remains firmly committed to looking and dressing as she damn well pleases.