Florence Pugh is hesitant to play another role like the one she portrayed in 2019 horror Midsommar, saying she felt like she “abused” herself and was “broken for a long while afterwards.”
In the movie, the British actress starred as Dani, a grieving graduate student who joins her boyfriend on a visit to rural Sweden to observe a festival that happens every 90 years during the summer solstice.
Pagan rituals and cultish horrors soon begin to unfold in the seemingly friendly community in the Ari Aster-directed movie loosely inspired by the Scandinavian festival of midsummer.
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“Protecting myself is something I’ve had to learn how to do,” Pugh told the Reign with Josh Smith podcast.
The actress, who stars alongside Andrew Garfield in the newly-released romantic drama We Live in Time, said on the podcast that some roles she has played require giving “too much” of herself and can leave her feeling “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.
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“The nature of figuring these things out is you need to go, ‘Alright, well I can’t do that again cause that was too much.'”
In an interview with The Sunday Times last month, Pugh said that, in order to enter the frame of mind needed for the role, she had to imagine family members in coffins and going to an open casket funeral for her siblings.
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“I was hyperventilating,” she told the British newspaper.
“Over the years I’ve had to figure out how to not utterly destroy myself.”
Although the process was grueling, Pugh has previously praised her director, telling the New York Times in 2023 that Aster was “peculiar in the mad genius kind of way.”
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Despite the difficulties she faced during filming, Pugh said she was proud of her performance in the movie, which won praise from critics and was a box office hit.
“I’m really proud of what I did and I’m proud of what came out of me, so I don’t regret it,” she said.
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