Florence Pugh says she couldn’t work on something like Midsommar again

A couple of years ago, Florence Pugh said that she felt she had “abused herself” working on the 2019 horror film Midsommar (watch it HERE)… and that’s a feeling she has reiterated in a new interview on the Reign with Josh Smith podcast, saying she couldn’t work on something like that movie again.

Pugh said (with thanks to Variety for the transcription), “There have been some roles where I’ve given too much and I’ve been broken for a long while afterwards. Like when I did Midsommar, I definitely felt like I abused myself in the places that I got myself to go. The nature of figuring these things out is you need to go, ‘Alright, well, I can’t do that again because that was too much.’ But then I look at that performance and I’m really proud of what I did, and I’m proud of what came out of me. I don’t regret it. But, yeah, there’s definitely things that you have to respect about yourself.“

In case you need a reminder, Midsommar had the following synopsis: Dani and Christian are a young American couple with a relationship on the brink of falling apart. But after a family tragedy keeps them together, a grieving Dani invites herself to join Christian and his friends on a trip to a once-in-a-lifetime midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village. What begins as a carefree summer holiday in a land of eternal sunlight takes a sinister turn when the insular villagers invite their guests to partake in festivities that render the pastoral paradise increasingly unnerving and viscerally disturbing. The film was written and directed by Ari Aster.

Pugh previously said, “I’d never played someone that was in that much pain before, and I would put myself in really shitty situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do but I would just be imagining the worst things. Each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do. I was putting things in my head that were getting worse and more bleak.” Despite her rough times on Midsommar, she has nothing but praise for Aster, calling him a mad genius and a stand-up comedian at heart.

Pugh will soon be seen in the Marvel movie Thunderbolts*, which is set to reach theatres on May 2, 2025 and probably gave her much more pleasant, less emotionally troubling material to work with.

What do you think of what Florence Pugh has said about her experience working on Midsommar, and the fact that she won’t be working on anything else like that movie in the future? Let us know by leaving a comment below.