“The Person I Came Back To Was A Female Wrestler With Muscles And Big Thighs": Florence Pugh Opened Up About Her Early Roles And Body Standards In Hollywood
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Florence Pugh opened up about being asked to lose weight for a role early in her career.
After making her movie debut in the 2014 movie The Falling, Florence was cast in a pilot for a show called Studio City when she was just 19. It would have been her American TV debut, but the show ended up not going forward.
Speaking to Time about that time in her career, she noted that the experience left her not wanting to return to Hollywood until she had a better idea of what she wanted. She ended up landing her first lead role in the British drama Lady Macbeth (where she received rave reviews), before returning to Hollywood with the WWE movie Fighting with My Family.
“The person I came back to was a female wrestler with muscles and big thighs who made her own name as a champion,” she said of her return to Hollywood.
“I quite liked that because the last time I’d been there I was told I needed to lose weight — it was just so not the person I wanted to be.”
Of the characters she does play, she said, “Even if they’re not defined on the page, I always find some way to make them quite confrontational. I never see the bad in them — even when they have killed children and burned boyfriends. I’ve always understood them as people that needed to do what they had to do to survive.”
This isn't the first time Flo has addressed this time in her career. She told the Telegraph last year, “I’d thought the film business would be like [my experience with] The Falling, but actually, this was what the top of the game looked like, and I felt I’d made a massive mistake."
“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."
Florence has further emphasized that she wasn't interested in changing her body for aesthetic reasons for a role, saying earlier this year, “I’m never losing weight to look fantastic for a role. It’s more like, how would this character have lived? What would she be eating?”
