Some movies alter the psyche of actors; for Florence Pugh, it was Midsommar. “It really fucked me up,” Florence Pugh says, speaking up about the psychic toll that filming Midsommar took on her. In a recent interview with The Louis Theroux Podcast, the actress revealed that her role as Dani in the Ari Aster-written movie caused her to experience depression for six months. Following a terrible family tragedy, her character travels to a rural Swedish commune with her problematic partner, where a cult manipulates and ultimately experiences a psychological disintegration.
“I just can’t exhaust myself like that because it has a knock-on effect,” she added. “I think [Midsommar] made me sad for like six months after, and I didn’t know why I was depressed. I got back after shooting Little Women, which was such a fun experience and obviously a completely different tone from Midsommar, so I think I shelved all of that. And then when I got home for Christmas, I was so depressed and I was like, ‘Oh, I think that’s from Midsommar,‘ and I didn’t deal with it and I probably shouldn’t do that again.”
“I really put myself through it,” she furthermore elaborated. “At the beginning, I just imagined hearing the news that one of my siblings had died, and then towards the middle of the shoot, it was like, ‘Oh no, I actually needed to imagine the coffins.’ And then, towards the end of the shoot, I was actually going to my whole family’s funeral. It wasn’t just crying. I needed to sound pained. “I’d never done anything like that before, and I was like, ‘OK, well here’s my opportunity. I need to give this a go.’ And I would just basically put myself through hell. But I don’t do that anymore. It really fucked me up.”
Pugh claimed that after wrapping up Midsommar, she was traveling to film Greta Gerwig’s Little Women when she first noticed how much playing a distressed character affected her. She remembered crying because she thought she had abandoned Dani “in that field with the film crew just filming her cry.”
