The Marvelous Florence Pugh

I have, by virtue of my years in the worlds of fashion and publishing, had plenty of occasions to sit in restaurants with all kinds of very famous people. I cannot remember a single one who was received as warmly as Florence Pugh was at The Benjamin Hollywood on an early Friday in April. To put it another way, I have never in my life gotten better—or more rapturously friendly—service in the entire city of Los Angeles. The 29-year-old actress strode into the oak-lined, windowless restaurant on a shaft of setting sunlight in a two-piece navy silk ensemble, backlit like the action-movie heroine she currently is (she's reprising her role in the Marvel universe as Yelena Belova for Thunderbolts*—we'll get to that in a minute), and greeted everyone with a massive grin followed by a charmingly decisive order: Grey Goose martini, dry as a bone, twist. "I've been thinking about that all day," she smiles. Did she twinkle? I've read about movie stars twinkling before. This may have been my first taste of it.

Pugh—fresh from a day of filming promotional content for Thunderbolts* with the expertly glowing glam to prove it—warned me early that she couldn't say much about the production, whose details (including that pesky titular asterisk) have been kept tightly under wraps in advance of its May premiere. I warned her that Disney wouldn't let me see it beforehand, so I wouldn't know what to ask her anyway. She let loose her famous laugh, a sort of gloriously husky, deep belly shaker. Her martini in its frosted glass was delivered by our beaming waitress. "Our bartender says this is the best martini he's ever made," she says. "No way," Pugh replies warmly. "My friends are going to be so jealous." She snapped a picture of it for a group text: "We have a little martini crew." She'd actually been to The Benjamin a few nights prior with friends and said they'd had the burger and sampled several house martinis. (The most popular is Ben's Martini: gin, vermouth, lemon oil, its own pile of potato chips.) For the record, I don't think her repeated patronage is why our waitress, rhapsodically attentive, lingered—or why the barback later came over to catch up.

Pugh lived here in Los Angeles for a few years. Still, when she arrives, she rolls down the window in the car to smell the city, the sunshine and jasmine and smog. "L.A. always makes my heart go," she says, but these days, it's London that is home. It's where she was able to live her dream, "to have a place and have a local pub and have friends nearby." But as her roles have ratcheted up in visibility, the increased recognition has made the UK capital a bit less comfortable. She says the one-two punch of her Oscar nomination for Little Women and her introduction into the Marvel universe completely changed her reception in the film industry: "It was like I entered a completely different career. Once those two things happened, it's like I walked through a door, and everybody spoke to me differently. And it's not that my work had changed or what I could provide had changed. It was just that there was a whole different way of approaching me—almost like I didn't need to explain my corner anymore. It was like, 'No, no, we got it.'"

Before, her fans all knew her from different things; they all had their separate corners of the room. Now, all those groups in the corners fill the space. That kind of mass appeal means people notice when and where she goes, who she's with, and what they're doing while they're there, which makes going out at all a decision that can't be taken as lightly as one might like. As a result, "I feel like I don't get the most out of the city that I live in. … It feels more and more like it's not my place," she says. Pugh thinks she'll eventually settle somewhere a little slower-paced, a bit more pastoral. "That's probably on the cards at some point," she smiles, "to have a bit of dirt outside."

The four Pugh siblings grew up in Oxford, England, to a dancer mother and a restaurateur father. Big personalities abounded, and the kids were all creatively inclined: Florence remembers realizing that she was going to be an actor when she was 6 years old. "I distinctly remember knowing that I was going to be it—knowing it wasn't 'Oh, one day I might…' or 'One day, I hope….' I remember knowing and thinking and imagining my future as an adult when I was tiny and knowing that I would be doing this," she says. Her family was in full support. Her older brother Toby, an actor and musician, began acting before Florence did, so she got to see how it really worked. "Auditions, auditions, auditions, auditions, and you rarely hear much back," she says. "That was a really important thing that I got to witness before I even stepped into it: Oh yeah, I'm going to have to be okay with a lot of rejection." Her older sister Arabella is a vocal coach at the University of Liverpool, and her younger sister Raffie, "who also can sing and can dance, has decided to do something completely left field. She's basically training to be a captain of massive ships—deep-sea ships. [It's] a predominantly male field, and she's like, 'Yeah, I can shatter 'em.'" It's one of the hardest things to study, and Pugh tells me with evident pride, "She's amazing."

It's not quite piloting deep-sea ships, I say, but her filmography is pretty impressive. Even before you factor in the Marvel of it all, it's a murderer's row of auteurs and interesting, chewy roles: Midsommar, The Wonder, Don't Worry Darling, Oppenheimer, Dune: Part Two, We Live in Time. She doesn't shy away from indies, which has made her beloved across the industry (and clearly in this restaurant), and she uses her body on-screen in a way that always manages to feel unique and resonant and honest—the famed chin-crinkling "ugly cry" twist of her mouth from Midsommar and Little Women and, most recently, the scene where Andrew Garfield (really) shaved her head for last year's weeper, We Live in Time. ("I was terrified 'cause we didn't know how it would look until it happened. Can you imagine if I'd had [a head shaped like] an egg?!" she cackles.) "I feel like I've always had a good understanding of what makes me tick," she says now about how she selects her roles. "In my mind, I definitely have a clock of understanding what I know I still have to show and when I want to show it. So I know of things and characters and ways that I want to perform for like the next 10 to 15 years. It's just about finding the right one that I can associate that with." It's those unexpected indie projects that she says "keep your brain active."

She feels lucky to have begun her career when she did. For one thing, she managed to neatly avoid the worst of social media hysteria. "I was on Instagram, but it wasn't really used as it is now. … I literally posted absolute shit," she says. "Not embarrassing stuff thankfully, but more like, 'Oh, my friend with a beanie all the way down her face.' It wasn't anything special, and I actually even remember when a stranger liked one of my pictures. I was like, 'Ew, stranger danger. Who's that? Why are you liking that, @Nick123ILikeSocks or whatever it was?" (Her IG follower count today is 9.4 million. That's a lot of strangers.)

She's lucky, I say. These days, actors report that they need to have a high follower count to even get in the room for certain auditions. "It's so shit," Pugh says. "It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing at all. I had this conversation recently with a friend. … It's just mental that red carpets are even an expectancy of someone that is not… That's not even their job. … They don't model. They are good at being on a camera that is this close with that face, and they know how to show how raw their soul is on the flick of a switch. That's their talent. Their talent isn't anything beyond that. I mean, it might be, but that's what they're getting paid to do, and that's what we recognize them for. And you're supposed to be able to be like a runway model, and you're compared against runway models."

She speaks from experience here. It wasn't easy in the beginning when she'd get asked to pose for magazine shoots as a part of promoting the films she was in. She is 5'4" with curves, and it felt like designer clothes weren't made for her. The whole endeavor made her feel lost: "You don't know how it works. You feel so self-conscious in the clothes. You feel like you're not doing them justice. You're not doing what a model is going to be able to do." Pugh says she felt embarrassed a lot of the time because she didn't know how to help herself. She didn't know how to look the way the clothes needed her to look. But she kept learning from each project she was a part of, and she was a quick study, picking up how to work with her body, how to pose, and eventually how to advocate for herself on set.

"Once you do, you know, shoot after shoot after shoot, you get better, and you get more confidence," she says. "You see the pictures, and you see the work, and you're like, 'Okay, that looks great. I'm going to now make sure that I know how to argue when a certain piece of clothing isn't working.'" Through the years, you learn to understand your body, she says, and you learn to be proud of it and that there's no point in telling yourself you should be any different than the way you are. I ask whether it's like playing a role. It's the opposite, Pugh says: "It's so exposing because it's you being beautiful, which is like everybody's inner hell."

Thankfully, Pugh has learned to make the most of those moments—the film festivals and galas and premieres where she gets to don gowns by the likes of Valentino and her friend Harris Reed. She even enjoys it, though she sometimes has to remind herself why she's there. "If I'm disappointed about how something turned out or looked or if someone's saying something nasty about the dress that I was wearing or if I was a bit too heavy for the dress or a bit too this or that or whatever shit someone wanted to say to me, I have to be like, 'Babe, this is not even why you're… This is not your job,'" she says.

It's a trip, Pugh says, processing that kind of thing and being perceived by millions of people online at any given moment. If you think about human beings, it was not so long ago that we only ever met a few hundred people in our entire lives. "We're supposed to know this village and maybe the next village and maybe the butchers a bit down the road if we catch the horse and cart for a day," she says. "We're not really supposed to care about more than that, and we've kind of gone from one level of being to suddenly an entirely different way of thinking and feeling in like 15 years. We're now allowing ourselves to feel and care about what thousands of people around the world think about you in this moment right now. That's insanely hard for your brain to process." She gets overwhelmed when she invites 20 people for a party and they're all there looking at her—now, imagine thousands. (In her case, it's many multiples of that.) "It's no wonder that we're all anxious and sometimes mentally unstable and unaware of what has triggered us to make us feel a certain way about a certain thing. It's not surprising that we're vain. It's not surprising that we're scared. It's not surprising that we want to look 700 different ways because it's just too much," she says.

So how does Pugh—who, here in this deep leather booth, seems almost ludicrously well-adjusted—cope? She is getting better at taking breaks, for one thing. She just took a three-week holiday (she says it was her first ever at that length: "I've always gone back-to-back-to-back, and I was like, 'something fudged in the schedule—I've got to go away now'") with her partner and friends in Sri Lanka, staying for some of it in a national park with no phone signal. "The phone literally died of battery that night, and I didn't turn it back on, didn't charge it for another four days," she says. Straight away, she slept better, deeper and woke up without feelings of panic. "I was like, 'Oh, I have no anxiety waking up. I have no anxiety!'" she says. But she knows she can't hide from the internet forever. I mean, come on. She's in Marvel movies.

"I think my argument with it has always been, if I can put my version in it, in this incredibly complex pool of social media, if I can give what I can give to it in a slightly different way, then hopefully there's a way of people looking at that and going, 'Oh, I don't need to do the gorgeous mirror selfie face all the time,'" she says. "My younger sister is seven years younger than me, and when she was at school, all of her mates followed me, and I remember plenty of times when I was on the rise thinking, 'I don't want to deal with this shit anymore. I don't want to be on social media,' and I was always then like, 'No, well, I think it's really important that I keep doing my stupid shit so that all those little teenage girls can keep seeing my stupid shit alongside all of the other beauties that we see online.'" That's why she stays. "We can honor the amazing moments when we're on a red carpet and looking gorgeous, and then we can also honor the in-between [and] keep it real, and we can also promote our work," she adds. You're allowed to be proud of it all—even the real, messy nonsense of being human.

Her Marvel character is a bit of a messy, nonsense human, which tracks for a superhero. As introduced in Black Widow (2021), Yelena Belova was raised from infancy as a Soviet asset, brainwashed into becoming an exceptionally efficient trained assassin. She is given an antidote to the brainwashing, seeks revenge, and intercepts with the Avengers—which includes Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), who she believed to be her sister growing up. Some family-style superhero drama ensues. Belova also turns up in the TV series Hawkeye and now has made her way to this summer's troupe of mismatched misanthropic anti-hero superheroes, Thunderbolts*. (If you want more plot than that, you'll have to see it yourself.) In one much-publicized clip from the new film, Pugh serenely walks off the roof of the second-tallest building in the world, the Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur. There is no hesitation on her face. She falls as smoothly as silk. You'd think it was a green screen if not for the BTS clips.

"How was that for you?" I ask.
"Insane," she says, her eyes gleaming.
"Did you like it?"
"Loved it. Mad, though. Mad."

The hard part of jumping off a 2227-foot building is wrestling with every instinct in your body telling you not to, she says. Logically, you may know how well you're secured and strapped in and that the Disney corporation would never let anything bad happen to you—that doesn't stop every single synapse from screaming at you to step back from the edge. And then it's three, two, one, go. "The moment I jumped, every time, my brain went, 'Oh, well, you fucked it. You're gonna die,'" she says. They shot it over two days, maybe nine jumps in total, and she fell around six meters each time and was dangling by a harness over the city. Each day they shot, she went straight back to her room and slept for three hours afterward. It was the adrenaline crash, she says. If you think about it, her body thought it was going to die nine different times. The scariest part after doing it, Pugh says, was realizing she could: "I could persuade myself to do that. I could fall down the mountain. I was like, 'That's not a good trick to have. Oops.' … I can basically pretend to myself not to listen to my instincts."

What's next for her instincts? She has her heart set on a Western. "I want to just be like a really greasy, gritty head," she says, and the martini, by now, has run dry, not to be replenished, much to our devoted waitress's chagrin. "I want to have, like, mountain fluff on my face—like an earth person, a person from the earth." Horses will be involved, naturally. She recently shot the Zoe Kazan helmed miniseries East of Eden in New Zealand, based on the John Steinbeck novel (the 1955 James Dean starring adaptation of which was directed by Elia Kazan, Zoe's grandfather). She stars as central antagonist Cathy Ames and earned her second-ever producer credit on the project. She's increasingly interested in collaborating behind the camera. "I think my writing, directing era is probably getting closer and closer," she says. She likes the idea of helping to guide a story from the very beginning.

But hopefully—between the press days and public appearances, red carpets, photo shoots, reading of scripts, and preparation for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday shoot in Atlanta—Pugh can get some rest. Hopefully. "I always say this, but it never happens," she says. "It's tricky; I'm a Capricorn. I work hard—if we believe in that. I mean, it tracks. I like working, and I think I just need to find a better relationship with also appreciating that I am a better person after I've rested. I'm a kinder friend. I'm a kinder lover. I'm a kinder sibling. I know that I have more capacity for patience when I've rested." First, she has to leave (dinner with friends before tomorrow's photo shoot for the glorious images that accompany this interview) and floats out on the collective goodwill of the restaurant into the early evening gloaming. It feels like everybody inside the place looks wistfully at the door as it shuts.

Photographer: Greg Swales

Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen

Hairstylist: Bridget Brager

Makeup Artist: Alex Babsky

Manicurist: Queenie Nguyen