Florence Pugh “definitely abused” herself for ‘Midsommar’ performance

Florence Pugh has revealed the psychological toll it took to deliver her performance in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror film Midsommar.

In the psychological thriller, Pugh plays Dani who struggles following the death of her sister and the murder of her parents.

In a new interview on Off Menu Podcast, Pugh revealed (via Consequence) that she’d “never played someone that was in that much pain before.”

“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,” she continued. “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 probably, most definitely abused myself in order to get that performance.”

She went on to explain that she felt “immense guilt” when she left the shoot to go and film Greta Gerwig’s Little Women in Boston.

“It’s so weird. I’ve never had that before,” said Pugh. “Obviously, that’s probably a psychological thing where I felt immense guilt for what I’d put myself through, but I definitely felt like I’d left [Dani] there in that field to be abused. I had created such a sad person, and then felt guilty that I had created that person.”

Last month, Florence Pugh released two original solo songs that feature in her latest movie A Good Person.

Pugh confirmed her music would feature on the Zach Braff-directed film’s soundtrack back in January. Between 2013 and 2016, she uploaded a string of acoustic covers to YouTube as Flossie Rose. More recently, she teamed up with Harry Styles to sing ‘With You All The Time’, which featured on the soundtrack to Don’t Worry Darling.

Speaking about the two songs [‘The Best Part’ and ‘I Hate Myself’] Pugh told The Guardian “I wrote these songs for my character Allison in the movie to perform, but also as a way to process and digest her mindset and her low headspace.”

“It was unbelievably helpful and hard,” she added. “I wanted a song to reflect the self-hatred she had for herself in a way that the audience can truly understand.”