Florence Pugh has called out the “godawful headlines” published about Keira Knightley over the years.
Pugh, 28, was speaking about the media’s scrutiny of women’s bodies in a new interview when she brought up Knightley, 39, who has been the subject of negative press attention since her teenage years, after she starred in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Love Actually.
Knightley once told Elle UK of the abuse she received: “There was a very long time when [interviewers] were all: ‘Well, you’re a s*** actor and you’re anorexic and people hate you,’ which, for a teenager or somebody in their early twenties, is a very strange thing.”
Speaking now about how she has had her own body criticised, Pugh told The Sunday Times: “Look, not everybody has legs that go on for days. I remember watching this industry and feeling that I wasn’t represented. I remember godawful headlines about how Keira Knightley isn’t thin any more, or watching women getting torn apart despite being talented and beautiful.
“The only thing people want to talk about is some useless crap about how they look. And so I didn’t care to abide by those rules.”
She added that she wants to “make space for a version of a person that isn’t all the things they used to have to be”, continuing: “I’m proud I’ve stuck by myself and look the way I look – I’m really interested in people who are still angry with me for not losing more weight, or who just hate my nose ring.”
She said that she can’t “just change the way that things are” but she can help younger women in the industry by “making conversations happen”.
Pugh has a history of taking critics to task online over references to her body shape.
And after she was criticised for wearing a see-through Valentino dress in Rome in 2022, Pugh posted on Instagram: “So many of you wanted to aggressively let me know how disappointed you were by my ‘tiny tits’… Grow up. Respect bodies. Respect all women.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Pugh spoke about the extreme lengths she went to while filming 2019 horror movie Midsommar, revealing that she would imagine “family members in coffins” in order to get into the right frame of mind for her character.
