By
Annette Lin
Photography by
Paola Kudacki
Styling by
Julie Ragolia

Hair by Lacy Redway at The Wall Group. Makeup by Tyron Machhausen at The Wall Group. Manicure by Tee Hundley at Melbourne Artists Management. Photographer’s assistants: Kyrre Kristoffersen and Sydney Pensky. Stylist’s assistant: Bertille Noiret. Manicurist’s assistant: Shannon March. Digital technician: Kylie Coutts. Shot at Slate Studios, New York.

Florence Pugh Loves to Control Her Audience


Acting has always held a certain allure for Florence Pugh, and the English 23-year-old—pragmatic, but still a little mischievous—laughs when she describes it, knowing it might make her sound a bit megalomaniacal. “This may scream alarm bells,” she says, “but I love the power of being on stage.”

Luckily, the attraction is less despotic and more one of trust. “I love having an audience captivated,” she explains. “If I try and remember why I loved being in plays as a kid, it was that silence, of only you knowing when you’re going to say your next line. When I watch plays, I love how you’re in the performers’ hands. There’s something very magical about it and I think that also moves over to film and television. It’s an amazing feeling when you have no idea what’s happening.”

On screen, Pugh is an actor who knows how to wield this control, embodying her characters’ emotions with such totality the audience can’t help but trust her. In her latest release, the biographical Fighting With My Family, she plays Saraya-Jade “Paige” Bevis, a real-life punk goth professional wrestler from Norwich, England, who rose to fame when she won the title of youngest WWE Divas Champion ever at the age of twenty-one in 2014. Like acting, wrestling, too, requires a leap of faith. “If you’re not safe and the [other wrestlers] are not safe, it falls apart,” Pugh points out.

All clothing by Gucci.

Directed by Stephen Merchant of the British version of The Office, with Dwayne Johnson as executive producer (he also makes a few cameos), the film is based on a 2012 documentary about Bevis and her family produced by the UK’s Channel 4. In the fictional version, Pugh’s Paige—her stage name comes from the witch played by Rose McGowan on her favorite television show, Charmed—is an outsider, her kohl-rimmed eyes and English rose skin the polar opposite of the tanned, glamour girl æsthetic favored by the other WWE wrestlers (“You, you look like you haven’t seen the sun in twenty years,” Johnson yells at her in the movie). Part of the film deals with Paige’s journey in coming to terms with her identity, not just as part of her performative personality in the ring, but also outside of it, given it’s her first time so far from her home and comfort zone. “I have no idea who I’m supposed to be out there,” she says at one point, her voice trembling with achingly relatable vulnerability.

But perhaps what makes the film so touching is that it isn’t afraid to address the harsh, and sometimes ugly, emotions that can come out when a loved one suddenly becomes vastly more successful than those around her are used to. Paige’s achievements drive her brother, played by Jack Lowden, to alcoholism as a way to deal with his jealousy; at the same time, she has to deal with pressure from her parents to bring home the prize money, not just for her, but for the whole family. Yet the film shows that success isn’t always what we think it is and ultimately that both families and individuals can achieve more when they band together. Pugh says that in some ways, the film reminded her of her own family; she calls the film’s depiction of sibling rivalry “so real and honest.”

Dress by Valentino.

In real life, Pugh grew up in a self-described “theatrical” family—both her older brother and sister act as well, although on stage rather than on screen. Raised in Oxfordshire, with a short stint in Andalusia, Spain, where her family hoped the clearer weather would help her asthma, she says, “My mum was a dancer when she was younger and my dad is a restaurateur, so between the two of them, they know how to put on a good show.” The young Pugh always knew she would be involved in some form of acting, although given that both her siblings have formal performance education, she always imagined her path would take her through drama school.

Instead, she says her entry into acting happened in such “a bizarre way that I [would have] put my money on it not happening.” At the age of seventeen, she made her professional acting début alongside Maisie Williams in The Falling, a mystery film set at a conservative all-girls school. She was discovered through an open call by Shaheen Baig—the same casting director who found her for Fighting With My Family.

Her roles since then have been similarly laudable: In 2016, she landed the titular role in Lady Macbeth, a dark drama based on Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in which she plays a young wife trapped in a loveless marriage, and won the award for Best Actress at the British Independent Film Awards over eventual Oscar-winner Frances McDormand for her deftly human portrayal of sociopathy. “Who, under similar circumstances, wouldn’t have done something similar?” her acting seems to ask.

Last year, she stood out as Charlie, a young, intriguingly unreadable British actress drawn into a life of espionage by Alexander Skarsgård’s character in the BBC adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. She also wrapped up filming on Midsommar, a disarmingly beautiful horror film due out in August directed by Hereditary’s Ari Aster about a Swedish Midsummer celebration that’s nowhere near as innocent as the pastel-colored flower crowns worn by the film’s protagonists make it look. On top of that, she just finished filming on Greta Gerwig’s coming adaptation of Little Women, alongside Meryl Streep, Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, and Eliza Scanlen, in December.

Dress by Valentino.

Though Pugh essentially fell into film, she hasn’t ruled out stage acting entirely and conjectures that theater might hold a place in her future. “I would love to do stage,” she admits. After all, stage and drama were how she began her career in the first place. But Pugh has watched her siblings navigate the theater world and says she would go to acting school if, eventually, she did decide to take that path: “I’m aware that theater is a different body and voice and soul, so if I did do it, I think it wouldn’t be fair to jump into it.”

Still, Pugh is clearly not an actor who is afraid of going all in. When she got the role of Paige, Merchant broke the news to her that she would be filming one of the movie’s most pivotal scenes, a WWE Raw match, in front of nearly twenty thousand people: “You do realize you’re going to wrestle at [Los Angeles’s] Staples Center.” Her reaction was, she says, “Surely not.”

“I thought, ‘Surely there would be a stunt double,’” she says, laughing. While in the end the professional wrestler Tessa Blanchard was on hand as a body double for some of the more difficult scenes, ultimately Pugh and her co-stars did as many of their own stunts as they could, training with “the best of the best” wrestlers in London and Florida. It was a lot of fun, she says, once she “got past the initial weeks of looking awful” in the ring. “I think with pretty much every single job I do, I’m always learning,” she adds. “Obviously, I still don’t know everything—I don’t think I’ll ever know everything. That’s the wonderful thing about acting.”

In the meantime, though, she needs a break. “In a wonderful way, I’m very lucky I’ve been able to be busy for the past couple of years, but I do need a breather I think: a second to read some scripts, some time in Spain and maybe in Italy,” she says. “I need to eat my bodyweight in cheese!”

Fighting With My Family is out on digital on April 30. Midsommar is out July 3. See this story and more in print by ordering our Spring 2019 issue here.

Top by Theory.





By
Annette Lin
Photography by
Paola Kudacki
Styling by
Julie Ragolia

Hair by Lacy Redway at The Wall Group. Makeup by Tyron Machhausen at The Wall Group. Manicure by Tee Hundley at Melbourne Artists Management. Photographer’s assistants: Kyrre Kristoffersen and Sydney Pensky. Stylist’s assistant: Bertille Noiret. Manicurist’s assistant: Shannon March. Digital technician: Kylie Coutts. Shot at Slate Studios, New York.

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