Florence Pugh has shared she had to go to extremely dark places when she starred in Midsommar and would probably never play a similar character again.
The A24 film, directed by Ari Aster of Hereditary fame, follows Pugh’s character, a traumatised psychology student named Dani, on a trip to Sweden for a midsummer festival with her increasingly distant boyfriend Christian, played by Jack Reynor, and his friends.
The Oppenheimer star, 29, said playing the grief-stricken Dani felt like abusing herself.
“I don’t think I would be able to do this without going there all the way and putting myself in all of those characters that I’ve played,” Pugh said on the Reign with Josh Smith podcast in reply to a question about how she looks after her mental health when playing an intense character. “There’s always a piece of me.”
She said “protecting” herself while playing some characters is something she has had to “learn how to do”. “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,” she said.
“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 is definitely things that you have to respect about yourself.”
In December 2024, Pugh talked about how intense filming for Midsommar was, and how she “imagined family members in coffins, going to an open casket funeral for my siblings” to get into the right mood.
“I was hyperventilating,” she said, adding that, over the years, she has “had to figure out how to not utterly destroy myself” by going too deeply into roles.
Last year, Pugh admitted on the Off Menu podcast that she struggled to shake the character off and even felt guilty for leaving her behind.
“When I did it, I was so wrapped up in her,” Pugh said. “I’d never played someone that was in that much pain before and I would put myself in really s*** situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do but I would just be imagining the worst things.”
She continued: “Because 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. I think by the end I definitely abused my own self in order to get that performance.”
Pugh has previously also spoken about feeling “raw” and “exhausted” after the film’s lengthy crying scene with other women from the Harga commune.
“By the end, we were all in each other’s laps and crying and allowing our bodies to keep heaving,” the actor wrote on Instagram.
In a four-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey called Midsommar “one of the year’s strangest, most distressing, and most memorable films”.
