How the British star turned her back on Hollywood glamor and teamed up with director Sebastian Lelio for Marvel, her best film ever.
“This is a discovery,” Sebastian Lelio told Florence Pugh in a hangar near Dublin. Do you think it’s a little strange?
The Chilean director and British actress are filming their new psychological thriller, Miracle, set in 1860s Ireland. One corner of the vast interior space is the ground floor of a dreary wooden farmhouse that sits on scaffolding with room for cameras and studio lights.
Step inside and you immediately experience a hallucination: you may find yourself in a Rembrandt painting where artificial sunlight silvers the gloom of the countryside. But from behind, beyond the hallucinations, the set looks more like a Rachel Whiteread installation, a steel and plywood ghost of a forgotten space. It is from this unsettling point of view that Lelio wants to start.
In a frame behind the building, an unidentified voice announces that a movie called “Marvel” is on its way and invites viewers to “believe that the story” is on its way. The camera then rolled and panned across the hangar to find Pugh in another scene, now in costume and a character ignorant of the world beyond the story she was a part of.
- Scary? Pugh chuckled. “Of course it’s weird. We’re making a weird movie. We’ll manage.”
A year later, Pugh, 26, and Lelio, 48, were enjoying afternoon tea at a private club in central London. His thickly accented warm voice makes a delightful contrast to her husky intonation, a soft splash of milk and sugar in a tingling glass of English breakfast.
However, Pugh’s prediction turned out to be correct. Coming to theaters next week and coming soon to Netflix, Marvel is arguably the best movie ever made by Pugh or Lelio. Based on the novel by Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue, his Booker-listed room was the 2015 film that won an Oscar and a UK for its star Brie Larson, the impossibly beautiful and disturbing mystery of Lieb, the English nightingale nurse (played by Pugh, who was called to look after an 11-year-old girl from the Irish countryside.
Anna (Lord Cyrus Cassidy), who hasn’t eaten in months, says she lives on “manna from heaven” – a statement that resonates with local believers as the Great Famine has just passed 13 years.
Quickly realizing that she was not here to expose, but to agree, Lib began to invent her own story, in which reason and medicine would prevail and the life of a young girl could be saved. In this assignment, she found a passionate collaborator among the slutty and witty Daily Telegraph reporter Tom Burke – finally featured! – Nobody causes special suspicions in Anna’s statement.
During her eight years of growth, one of Pugh’s secret weapons was her talent for creating and controlling heat – watching her was like watching a fire flicker under a glass jar. In the case of Lib, the flames have never been more intense.
Tessa Ross, a former Channel 4 film director, approached Lelio, who had purchased the rights to Donoghue’s novel a few years earlier, about directing the film. He had no ties to Ireland, but his upbringing in the green, unyielding Catholic south of Chile gave him what he called a little piece of common ground. His love for stories about women on the fringes has also been fully shown in his previous films, from the Oscar-winning film Fantastic Woman, in which a transgender waitress grieves for a married lover, to his English-language debut. “Fantastic woman.” Naughty about forbidden lesbian relationships. The strict Jewish community of North London, his Spanish middle-aged dating drama Gloria and its English remake Gloria Bell with Julianne Moore.
“I grew up in a matriarchal society in Chile and my grandmother was the center of attention,” said Lelio. his idea: “For me, Emma’s novel is about the power of fiction and the role of storytelling in our lives – we tell our own stories, write together, and collectively agree to believe. Because social and political power often comes down to storytelling. – That’s why we talk about “narrative management”.
“So I want to start by saying, ‘Listen, you’re about to enter the power of fiction, you’ll suspend your disbelief, and we’ll remind you that this is the same mechanic that affects the characters.’ he added.
“I wish I could think about it,” Pugh interjected. “I remember reading the first page [of the script] and not really understanding what it was for—I mean, I worked with it, but I didn’t fully understand what it was. I just thought, “Oh, we…” figure it out.”
Lelio and Pugh are a great creative duo. Movies like this one, the 2016 novel Lady Macbeth, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, in which she plays the extraordinarily brooding Amy March, or Ari Astaire’s Little Women. that is, generally not very happy places. However, her career could have turned out very differently if not for a twist of fate.
Pugh, who made her debut in Carol Morley’s psychodrama The Fall in 2014, described the role as “an accident at the right time and place”: at just 17 years old, with no acting training other than high school drama, she auditioned. open. Immediately after that, she flew to Hollywood for the pilot season, an intense audition where American television networks search for stars for their upcoming prestigious TV programs. At 19, Pugh starred in Studio City as a rising pop star: “I feel so lucky and grateful, I can’t believe I got this top job.”
However, as soon as she got the role, those who gave her told her that she was not suitable for the role at all. “They are trying to change everything about me — whether it’s my weight, my appearance, the shape of my face, the shape of my eyebrows — that’s not what I want to do and not the industry that I want to work in. ”
In the end, Studio City wasn’t taken and Pugh flew back to the UK, feeling his career was over. “Two weeks later I auditioned for Lady Macbeth. It made me fall in love with cinema again – films like this are a place where you can be opinionated and it’s loud and I stick with it. I think the industry is easy to push you from side to side. I was lucky to find out what kind of performer I wanted to be when I was 19.”
It’s hard to hear, and hard not to think about the recent pivot around Don’t Worry Darling, Pugh’s only major studio project since then, aside from Marvel’s Black Widow (who plays Scarlett Johansson’s Switch adversary Elena Belova). The glossy sci-fi thriller directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Harry Styles was filmed before the release of Marvel. At the film’s tense premiere in Venice in September, stories of on-set feuds were leaked and Pugh skipped all the publicity. (However, she walked the red carpet with her grandmother Pat.) What did she think went wrong?
“I really wanted to put my energy into this film,” she said. “So I’m happy to just focus on the Miracle.”
Is she sure she doesn’t have any ideas about what she wants to share? A previously unseen maid bursts in from the next room and announces that yes, it is her.
It’s not that Pugh has left Hollywood entirely, he’s just landed starring roles in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer 2 and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune. Her partnership with Marvel went well, followed by a semi-sequel: Thunderbolt due out in 2024. Black Widow director Cate Shortland described Pugh’s “healthy level of anger” as key to her role in Marvel, a quality Lelio also recognizes.
“I remember telling you that I need your warrior energy,” he told her, before launching into an elaborate digression about the appeal of having a big screen presence in the “artistic struggle between performer and character.” He continued: “I’m trying to somehow capture what’s going on between these two intersecting dimensions. So I think you can see both Lib and Florence here, and that’s the beauty of it.”
For the actress herself, the moment of erasing the lines comes when she puts on her outfit – in Marvel, a cornflower blue tight dress and a white nurse apron with pockets. “I’ve always loved clothes and I’ve always enjoyed wearing my costumes, even when I was six and playing,” she explained. “It’s the last part that makes everything perfect. I don’t like rehearsing historical dramas because I don’t have [costumes] yet.”
Clothing – especially when it requires a corset – “changes your ability to do things,” she added. “Even just walking through this landscape was tiring because of all the materials I had with me. It affected everything.”
At the beginning of the film, Lib’s blue dress “stands out because she’s from a completely different place,” Pugh said. “But by the end of the film, the mud was knee-deep, and that was the actual mud of the shoot itself.”
“There is nothing glamorous about it, and I think I like it,” she admits. “When I get completely raw, that’s when I feel like I can really be watched.”
Pugh compares the experience to Lady Macbeth: “No matter how old I am, I can be naked, with a bare face, and the performance can speak for itself. People are not distracted: they cannot say, “Oh, I don’t want to.” I love the make-up… It’s a great reminder, “Oh yes, it’s you.”
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