Florence Pugh Says Past Execs Tried to Change Her 'Look' Early in Career: 'Not What I Wanted to Do'

Florence Pugh is happy she didn't listen to Hollywood naysayers.

The Don't Worry Darling star, 26, shared that despite pressure to change her appearance, she has never given in, during a conversation with The Telegraph posted Saturday.

Pugh broke into the business at age 17, in 2014's The Falling, which she told the outlet was a "complete right-place-right-time fluke."

She said that after her onscreen debut, she headed to Los Angeles for pilot season to take part in the intensive audition process when networks look for new stars for their upcoming TV shows. At just 19, Pugh was cast in Studio City as a pop star on the rise.

"I felt very lucky and grateful, and couldn't believe that I had got this top-of-the-game job," she told the outlet. But it immediately took a turn when executives started asking her to make changes to her appearance.

"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.

Aidan Monaghan/Netflix Florence Pugh in The Wonder (2022)

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The Little Women star said her previous role — which she was cast in with no training, just experience in school plays and a killer audition — had not prepared her for the industry.

"I'd thought the film business would be like [my experience of making] The Falling, but actually, this was what the top of the game looked like, and I felt I'd made a massive mistake," she recalled.

The show wasn't picked up, so Pugh went home to England, where she auditioned for Lady Macbeth. The drama based on a novel ended up being a career vehicle for the young actress, who received rave reviews for her lead performance.

"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. 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."

RELATED: Florence Pugh Explores a Girl's Chilling Case in The Wonder: Trailer

David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty

"There's nothing glamorous about it, and I think that's what I love," she confessed in the interview. "When I get to be completely raw, that's when I feel like I can really be watched."

She said she loves doing films that focus on her acting: "When I could be naked at whatever size I was, and bare-faced, and the acting could speak for itself. There's nothing for people to be distracted by: they can't be like, 'Oh, I don't like the make-up'. It was a wonderful reminder: 'Oh, yeah — this is who you are.' "

The actress now stars as an English nurse trying to crack the case of why an 11-year-old girl hasn't eaten in four months in The Wonder, her upcoming Netflix period drama-thriller based on the 2016 Emma Donoghue (Room) book of the same name.

Wilson Webb/Columbia Pictures Florence Pugh with Timothée Chalamet in Little Woman

An official trailer for The Wonder, released Tuesday, shows Pugh's character Lib Wright arriving to help care for "a young Irish girl, Anna O'Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), whose Catholic family claim she has eaten nothing since her eleventh birthday ... four months ago."

Pugh shared the photo on Instagram as well, saying in the caption that she and her fellow cast members and production crew had been "traipsing around the Irish hills for the last week and it's truly been a magnificent start to a beautiful and exciting film."

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"What a story to get our teeth stuck into, what a crew to be working alongside and a fantastic director Sebastian Lelio to be leading us!" she wrote, shouting out the film's director. "This will be fun."

The Wonder, with a screenplay co-written by Donoghue, 52, will have a limited theatrical release on Nov. 2 before streaming on Netflix Nov. 16.