In an interview with Time, Florence Pugh reflected on a moment when she was asked to lose weight for a role, and how she refused to let it define her.
The Don’t Worry Darling star recalled her relief after playing a WWE wrestler in Fighting With My Family, a role that helped her embrace her true self. “The person I came back to was a female wrestler with muscles and big thighs who made her own name as a champion,” she shared. It was a stark contrast to an earlier experience when a studio boss insisted she slim down. “I quite liked that because the last time I’d been there, I was told I needed to lose weight—it was just so not the person I wanted to be.”
Pugh’s clash with Hollywood’s beauty standards wasn’t new. Back at 19, she had landed a lead role in a TV pilot as a pop star, only to be met with demands to change her look. “All the things that they were trying to change about me—whether it was my weight, my look, the shape of my face, the shape of my eyebrows—that was so not what I wanted to do or the industry I wanted to work in,” she told The Telegraph in 2022. The project, Sin City, never made it past the pilot stage. Disillusioned, she returned to England and found her breakthrough in Lady Macbeth, a film that reignited her passion for acting.
Since then, she has prioritized roles that give her creative freedom. “I think it’s far too easy for people in this industry to push you left and right,” she noted. Her experience working on The Falling reinforced that belief. Director Carol Morley wanted her cast to embrace their natural selves, an approach that shaped Pugh’s mindset. “I think she didn’t want us to act for vanity or to know what we didn’t like about ourselves onscreen,” she recalled. “She wanted to keep us as naive as possible.” That lesson stuck with her. “I don’t mind my double chins—that’s not the acting part to me.”
Even when she stepped into the Marvel universe, she made sure she wasn’t sacrificing her authenticity. Before accepting her role in Black Widow, she wanted clarity. “When I got the job, I wanted to know what the regime was,” she said in 2020. “I wanted to know whether it was them or me calling the shots. That was a big deal for me. I didn’t want to be part of something where I was constantly checked on. And people making sure I was in the ‘right’ shape. That’s not me at all.”
From a young actress navigating industry pressures to a Hollywood star defining success on her own terms, Pugh has never let anyone dictate her worth. She walked away from roles that didn’t align with her values and found her way back to projects that did. In a world that often tells women to shrink themselves, she’s taken up space, and owned every bit of it.
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