Florence Pugh got candid about the lengths she went to in order to create her Midsommar character, Dani.
In a recent appearance on the Off Menu podcast with Ed Gamble and James Acaster, the actress said that every day on set was different.
“Each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do,” she told the co-hosts. “I was putting things in my head that were getting worse and more bleak. I think by the end I probably, most definitely abused my own self in order to get that performance.”
She explained that she was so wrapped up in her character, it was like nothing she had ever done before in any of her roles.
“There were so many places that I had to go to,” the Don’t Worry Darling star said. “I’d never played someone that was in that much pain before, and I would put myself in really shit situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do, but I would just be imagining the worst things.”
With three days left in the Midsommar shoot, the Oscar nominee headed for Boston to begin filming on Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, for which she was nominated for best supporting actress. She recalled on the podcast looking down at the rest of her cast filming from the plane and being flooded with “immense guilt” about the fate of her character.
“I felt like I’d left her there in that field, in that state, and it was so weird. I’ve never had that before. I’ve always thought all my characters, once I left like, ‘They’ll be fine,’” the A Good Person actress said. “She can’t fend for herself, almost like I’d created this person, and then I just left her when I had to go do another movie.”
Pugh added, “I created such a sad person, and then felt guilty that I’d created that person and then left her.”
