WORDS by HANNAH NATHANSON
PHOTOGRAPHS by LIZ COLLINS
STYLING by AURELIA DONALDSON
Florence Pugh is having a moment of intense pleasure. Slowly, elegantly, with the tantalising precision of Nigella Lawson, she slices into a glistening ball of burrata. ‘Oh my god! Did you see that…’ It sits in front of her, drizzled in pesto; its contents oozing onto the plate. ‘It was quite sexual, wasn’t it?’ she says. There’s a pause. ‘Don’t tell everyone I said popping cheese was quite sexual.’
But eating lunch with Florence Pugh is a sensual experience. Maybe it has something to do with our afternoon being filled with eyebrow-raising innuendo (hers, not mine), or the fact that Pugh’s laugh – a full-bellied growl (she calls it her ‘dinosaur laugh’) – bounces across the restaurant every few minutes. Or perhaps it’s just that Pugh is one of the great sensual artists – someone unfettered by PR fluff; possessing prodigious appetite, bountiful opinion and a rare openness that makes everyone who meets her want to luxuriate in her company.
We meet at Luca, an Italian restaurant in London’s Clerkenwell. (This is only a few weeks before we’re forced into Covid-19 lockdown.) Pugh is at that delicious stage in her career when she’s still game to offer a journalist more than an hour’s ‘chat’ on her cover shoot, so we’ve decided to make lunch. Her father was a restaurateur and she has a successful sideline testing recipes on her Instagram Stories, so she’s very much at home rolling up her sleeves in the confines of a stranger’s kitchen. When she arrives, she stumbles in with a suitcase almost as big as her and various bags chocked with what looks like all her worldly possessions. She explains that she’s spent the past few months in LA but just touched down in London for a couple of nights before heading back to her family home in Oxfordshire.
| This video was filmed pre-lockdown
Currently back in LA where she is living in lockdown, she says cooking has been her saviour during these anxious times spent apart from her family: 'When the world lockdown started and it obviously got serious very quickly, I found myself desperate to chop. Feed. Eat. Repeat! It keeps me calm, stirring and creating.' She's not been immune to the sourdough-making frenzy either: 'I’ve become a sourdough bread creator,' she tells me from LA. 'I’ve saved a slice of each loaf in the freezer so my mum can try the progress, from beginning to end when the lockdown eases.'
As well as sharing her bread-making skills, Pugh is looking forward to getting back to normality after lockdown: 'I keep on daydreaming about walking through Soho or East London as the sun's out with an M&S canned cocktail (it’s tradition) in hand and my girlfriends on my arms,' she says.
The restricted living conditions have also been a moment of self-reflection: 'I was so surprised by how unkind I am to myself! Living in lockdown I found there’s no point or energy in being annoyed at yourself for not reading that book, writing that song or working out that day. I’m teaching myself to find joy as much as I can and ease in these open long days.' This means also staying away from Zoom: 'I’m not in any way tech savvy...I did a live virtual play, In Our Youth a few weeks back and as I was logging in I got the meeting ID number wrong and entered a strangers meeting that THANKFULLY wasn’t starting for another 30 minutes!'
Back in a pre-lockdown London, we’re half an hour into our pasta-making class with the head chef when it starts. While rolling gnocchi on a pasta board that looks like a ridged doorstop, Pugh declares: ‘Who decided to get a spanking tool and say, “I’m going to rub my pasta on it?”’ Cue the ‘dinosaur laugh’ and a blushing head chef who hastily produces a different-shaped board. As chefs come into the room, one with mounds of dough, another bearing plates of dessert, Pugh is like an excitable puppy. ‘Errrrm what?’ she cries, at a mountain of tiramisu. ‘Tiramisu is my favourite dessert. Did you know that?’ she asks the bemused chef. He confides that he’s put on weight since taking the job. ‘That’s all right,’ she reassures him. ‘You’re a chef… It suits you.’
Pugh is used to creating camaraderie with strangers. She puts it down to a bustling family, half food-lovers, half thespians (her brother and sister are also actors). ‘I’ve grown up in a very big family, where eating, performing and chatting were an every Sunday thing,’ she says as we sit down to enjoy our pasta. ‘We’d have big lunches with all sorts of people from around the world – musicians, artists, writers – and it was expected that we [kids] spoke and hosted.’
When Pugh was a 17-year-old at private school in Oxford, she auditioned for Carol Morley’s film The Falling, about a group of girls who mysteriously keep fainting. Pugh, who excelled in the arts but was never academic, got a main role opposite Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams, who was then still relatively unknown. Despite never attending drama school, it was a star turn from Pugh, who played a promiscuous teenager bewitching all who met her.
During filming, Morley didn’t let the girls watch themselves back on the monitor: ‘I think she didn’t want us to act for vanity, or to know what we didn’t like about ourselves on screen,’ says Pugh. ‘She wanted to keep us as naïve as possible.’ This style of direction has no doubt helped as Pugh’s career has taken off. ‘I’ve never been bothered by the odd things that happen on camera, maybe because of that. I don’t mind my double chins, that’s not the acting part to me.’
Earlier this year, Pugh was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress, following her role as Amy March alongside Saoirse Ronan and Emma Watson in Little Women. Greta Gerwig, the film’s director, tells me that Pugh brought her familiar and playful energy to set every day: ‘She instinctively knows how to be in a big family group. She was always the first one in the play-fight, the first one telling a joke, starting a giggle-fest, eating the prop cakes. She had that bubbling-over energy of sisterhood.’
That sisterly closeness is something Scarlett Johansson, her co-star in Marvel’s upcoming Black Widow, also felt: ‘I don’t have a little sister,’ she tells me on the phone from New York. ‘But with Florence, it feels to me like there’s some elements of big sister little sister.’ With the latest Marvel film, Pugh is making her own mark: her newfound stellar status was confirmed in just 30 seconds in a trailer shown during the Super Bowl, watched by more than 100 million people. In it, Pugh was given equal airtime to costar and fellow Oscar nominee Johansson.
In the midst of her success, it’s easy to forget that Pugh is still in her early twenties. ‘I wish I was as confident as she is when I was her age,’ says Johansson. ‘She’s body confident and has a lot of self-respect. She reminded me – just by listening to her talk about relationships with friends, family or her partner – how important it is to have confidence in your beliefs and desires.’
Pugh’s partner is fellow actor Zach Braff, who also happens to be 21 years older than her. Much has been made of the age gap (much of it pillorying – more of which later) but when you spend time with Pugh, you wonder how a 24-year-old man could make the cut.
Her decision to accept the role of Yelena Belova in Black Widow – a Russian spy who, like Johansson’s character Natasha Romanova, has been trained in the Black Widow programme – wasn’t an easy one to make. ‘When you think of Marvel, it’s big and daunting. Especially being a relatively small actor to look at it and go, “Oh! I’m going to be a part of this,” that’s a big decision,’ she says. But nothing could have prepared Pugh, who admits she wasn’t a Marvel fanatic growing up, for the huge global response. Last summer, the cast was revealed at San Diego’s Comic-Con, the annual superfan conference. ‘It was like a warehouse full of people,’ she says. ‘We went out and I’d never heard a roar like that.
‘What was really lovely was that we said hello, then went to the front of the audience and watched a clip. All this time, Scarlett had marched out like she was their queen,’ Pugh says. ‘She’s so amazing and effortless. Then we watched the clip and I was scared because my Russian accent was going to be out there and I didn’t know what it sounded like. I’m also playing a character who no one’s seen before but they’ve read about her; I didn’t know whether people were going to hate me. We both stood there and I instantly had clammy, sweaty hands. Scarlett gave me her hand and we squeezed each other, and she also had clammy hands! And then I was like, “Oh, this never gets old. This is just as powerful [for you] and you’re their legend”.’
Pugh’s Black Widow character is described as being ‘in peak athletic condition’. When I put this to Pugh, she lets out a raucous laugh that appears to come, not from her belly, but from her feet. ‘Essentially you need to look good moving. For me, I loved all of that because I grew up with a lot of dance and a lot of movement. I was always fighting my brother [actor and musician Toby Sebastian], so I find all of that combat stuff so exciting. Once you’ve put it on camera you’ve got to know how to make it look right and that’s a whole different beast,’ she says.
There have long been rumours that stars of Marvel films have to submit to gruelling workouts and exacting diets, which is interesting given Pugh has previously spoken out about bad body-confidence experiences she had in Hollywood as a teenager. ‘When I got the job, I wanted to know what the regime was,’ she says, tucking into a forkful of salt cod. ‘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.’
Still, she says she ate well, cooking in the morning and taking in a Tupperware of homemade food each day. ‘Scarlett had this amazing guy who cooked beautiful things for her and her team. I thought that was clever because you’re doing fitness all the time and you need to have someone who’s on top of what you’re eating and the nutrients you’re getting. I remember her asking, “Why are you cooking for yourself? Just let us feed you!” And I was like, “Nope,”’ she says, laughing at the memory. ‘My brain is so “Pew, pew, pew,”’ she says, shooting imaginary lasers with her fingers. ‘Genuinely, my therapeutic thing is chopping and cooking and stirring and tasting.’
One of the things Pugh’s fans love her for is her frank approach to life as an actor, especially on social media. She recently did a series of Instagram Stories berating her iPhone for automatically changing a filter on a selfie she posted: ‘It should be your decision,’ she says, still visibly riled by the experience. ‘I’m not saying I want to wave around my flaws, but the point is that I should have decided that those were eliminated, not my phone automatically programmed to take away the things that make me me.’
She admits she approaches online life with a touch of amusement. ‘When I’m making marmalade, I don’t have pretty hair. There are moments in my life when I get dolled up and two amazing artists will come to my house and paint, pull and brush me for two hours. Then I go to the red carpet. That’s a two-hour event, then I go home and take it off. But when I make marmalade, I look normal,’ she says.
Social media is also where she’s hit back at snipes towards Braff. When paparazzi shots emerged of them holding hands trolls weighed in on the Scrubs actor saying: ‘You’re 44-years-old’, Pugh replied with the simple retort: ‘And yet he got it’. When she looks back on her reply, she says it was ‘necessary’. ‘Because people need to realise that it’s hurtful. I have the right to hang out and be with and go out with anyone I want to,’ she says, letting out a nervous laugh.
‘I’ve always found this part of what people do really bizarre. I’m an actor because I like acting and I don’t mind people watching my stuff, but people have no right to educate me on my private life.’ She is, however, aware that dating another actor might attract more attention: ‘I know that part of being in the spotlight is that people might invade your privacy and have opinions on it, but it’s bizarre that normal folk are allowed to display such hate and opinions on a part of my life that I’m not putting out there. It’s a strange side of fame that you’re allowed to be torn apart by thousands of people even though you didn’t put that piece of you out there,’ she says, suddenly serious. ‘I don’t want to talk about it because it’s not something I want to highlight, but my point to all this is that isn’t it odd that a stranger can totally tear apart someone’s relationship and it’s allowed?’
Pugh took her parents, not Braff, to the Oscars. ‘That wasn’t a diss on anyone; I needed them to be there,’ she says. She found the experience ‘so amazing, so strange, so weird’, but she had snacks to get her through the four-hour ceremony. ‘At one point, everyone stood up to applaud Martin Scorsese. I’d just got out a bag of M&Ms. As we all got up, a camera popped right in my face and I was waving this bag of M&Ms about. So I just had to drop it… on the floor. I thought, “I can’t be the girl who’s eating M&Ms while giving Martin a standing ovation.”’
We’re on our third bowl of pasta and our interview time is up. There’s a driver waiting to take Pugh to Oxfordshire. She politely asks for the leftovers to be boxed up. ‘My mum would love a doggy bag,’ she says, obviously looking forward to some home comforts. We walk through the restaurant and I ask whether she gets recognised. She says that unless she’s with someone (like Scarlett) and people put two and two together, no one really stops her; she gets away with being ‘a regular blonde’.
She wheels her suitcase to the car while juggling several bags: ‘At the Oscars one week, and look at me now!’ she exclaims as we hug goodbye. But, as she’s driven away with leftovers on her lap, I’m not sure how long life as a regular blonde will last.
Black Widow is out in UK cinemas on October 30, previewing from October 28.
ELLE UK's June 2020 issue is on newsstands from May 7, 2020. Alternatively, you can buy single issues of the magazine online here.
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Natasha Bird is the Former Executive Editor (Digital) of ELLE.
