Florence Pugh has honestly said in previous interviews that she would never play a role like the one she played in Midsommar again, as the role took a toll on her mental health. In a new interview on the Louis Theroux Podcast, the Oscar nominee revealed that he went into depression for six months due to the mental exhaustion of filming Midsommar.
“We can’t afford to exhaust ourselves like that because it has a ripple effect,” Pugh said. “I think it made me sad for about six months[after watching Midsommar]and I didn’t know why I was depressed. I came back from filming Little Women, and it was a really fun experience, and it was obviously a very different tone than Midsommar, so… I think I put all that aside. And when I got home for Christmas, I was so depressed and I thought, ‘Oh, I think this is a ‘Midsommar’ thing,’ and I just couldn’t deal with it,” and I probably shouldn’t do that again. ”
“Midsommar” is the second feature film from “Hereditary” director Ari Aster. The film required Pugh to play a character who was “in such a bad place in his life,” and Pugh responded by cutting head-on into Dani’s mental breakdown, the actor explained.
“I had never seen the level of grief and mental health that was required of me on this page,” Pugh said on the podcast. “For that, I really gave myself a hard time. At first I just imagined hearing the news that one of my brothers had passed away, but towards the middle of filming I was like, ‘Oh, I really needed to imagine a coffin.’ And towards the end of filming, I was actually going to go to a funeral for the whole family. ”
“It wasn’t just crying; it had to sound like pain,” Pugh continued. “I’d never done anything like that before, so I thought, ‘Okay, here’s my chance. I have to give it a try.'” And I was basically going to put myself through hell. But I don’t do that anymore. It was really a mess. ”
After completing Midsommar, Pugh immediately headed to the Boston set of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. The Oscar nominee was emotional during the film cut and even broke down in tears when she learned that she and Dani had broken up on the plane on the way to the set of Little Women in Boston.
“My brain was obviously feeling pity for myself because I was abusing myself and actually manipulating my emotions for the sake of performance, but at the same time I felt sorry for what I had done,” Pugh said. “It was very, very strange, and I never once worried about my character from the day we finished filming. But I felt like it was[Dani]who just filmed her crying and left her alone on set with the film crew.”
The abuse Pugh suffered while working on Midsommar was entirely self-inflicted and had nothing to do with Aster. She has always been full of praise for the director, telling the New York Times last year that he was “some kind of crazy genius” and “a stand-up comedian at heart.” She added, “Once you laugh at one thing, he’ll try to make you laugh at other things. He’ll keep going, and everyone will be crying with laughter.”
“The Louis Theroux Podcast” is available on Spotify.
