Florence Pugh opened up about the online criticism she often finds herself the focus of, calling the internet “a very mean place.”
“It’s so hard,” Florence, 28, said in the October issue of British Vogue. “It’s really painful to read people being nasty about my confidence or nasty about my weight. It never feels good. The one thing I always wanted to achieve was to never sell someone else, something that isn’t the real me.”
The Don’t Worry Darling star continued, “I don’t think it’s confidence in hoping people like me. I think it’s just, like, I don’t want to be anyone else.”
While Florence said that she considers photo shoots “a muscle [she’s] learnt to be all right at,” she doesn’t consider herself a model.
“I’m not a model. It’s portraying a completely different version of myself that I don’t necessarily believe in. You have to believe that you deserve to be in those pages being beautiful. But now I know what I want to show. I know who I want to show. I know who I want to be and I know what I look like. There’s no insecurities about what I am anymore.”
The Oxford native has never been afraid to shine a light on those who body shame her or any other woman in the industry. In 2019, she called out a story that compared the size of her thighs to those of WWE pro Saraya Jade Bevis. Florence had recently played the wrestler in the film Fighting With My Family.
“Oh dear. Singling out my ‘chunky’ thighs doesn’t help normalizing an ‘all shape & size’ Hollywood. In fact that’s part of the problem. I do hope people take more away from the film than the circumference of my hams,” Florence wrote via X.
The Midsommar actress received backlash for her decision to wear a sheer Valentino dress to the Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2023 in July 2022. Despite so many critics chastising her for the look, Florence stood behind her choice.
The Oppenheimer star spoke about her decision in Harper’s Bazaar’s September 2022 issue.
“I was comfortable with my small breasts,” Florence said at the time. “And showing them like that—it aggravated [people] that I was comfortable. … It was just alarming, how perturbed they were. They were so angry that I was confident, and they wanted to let me know that they would never wank over me. Well, don’t.”
Florence again broached the subject when she was interviewed by her friend Jodie Turner-Smith during the ELLE Style Awards cover shoot.
“I speak the way I do about my body because I’m not trying to hide the cellulite on my thigh or the squidge in between my arm and my boob: I would much rather lay it all out,” Florence recalled during the interview in August 2023. “I think the scariest thing for me are the instances where people have been upset that I’ve shown ‘too much’ of myself.”
“When everything went down with the Valentino pink dress a year ago, my nipples were on display through a piece of fabric, and it really wound people up,” Florence explained. “It’s the freedom that people are scared of; the fact I’m comfortable and happy. Keeping women down by commenting on their bodies has worked for a very long time. I think we’re in this swing now where lots of people are saying, ‘I don’t give a s–t.’”
