Florence Pugh has revealed the intense technique she used to get into the mindset of someone lured into a Swedish death cult in the 2019 horror film Midsommar.
In the film, directed by Hereditary’s Ari Aster, Pugh starred as a traumatised psychology student called Dani, who goes on a trip to Sweden to attend a midsummer festival, which quickly turns sinister.
Speaking to The Sunday Times in a new interview, Pugh, 28, said that to get into the right mood for the movie (in which she had to scream and cry a lot), she “imagined family members in coffins, going to an open casket funeral for my siblings”.
She added: “I was hyperventilating”.
Pugh also said that, over the years, she has “had to figure out how to not utterly destroy myself” by going too deeply into roles.
Last year, Pugh admitted on the Off Menu podcast that she struggled to shake the character off and even felt guilty for leaving her behind.
“When I did it, I was so wrapped up in her,” Pugh said. “I’d never played someone that was in that much pain before and I would put myself in really s*** situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do but I would just be imagining the worst things.”
She continued: “Because each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do, I was putting things in my head that were getting worse and more bleak.
“I think by the end I definitely abused my own self in order to get that performance.”
In a four-star review for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey called Midsommar “one of the year’s strangest, most distressing, and most memorable films”.
Elsewhere in her new interview, Pugh discussed the world’s obsession with female celebrities’ bodies.
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“I’m proud I’ve stuck by myself and look the way I look,” she said. “I’m really interested in people who are still angry with me for not losing more weight, or who just hate my nose ring. I am not going to be able to just change the way that things are – but I can certainly help young women coming into this industry by making conversations happen where they weren’t before.”
