On a Monday in late July, in a subterranean screening room in Soho with four total strangers, I bawl my eyes out like a teething baby to Florence Pugh’s new film, We Live in Time. As a grown man with something of a stiff upper lip, I was expecting a wet eye, maybe, but not to cry. I was expecting another decently dramatic romance, something robust and feminine that made some people weep but not me people weep. I was expecting another tale of two people meeting and greeting and, after a few whimsical tribulations, finally getting together. Something sad would happen, of course: the stepmum would outlive the first mum, or we’d get to the final beach in Beaches, or Macaulay would find the bees. I was expecting, dare I say it, a little whiff of ham. But director John Crowley’s snap-shotted, chronology-hopping romance – that explores how our time is spent, how much of it there is left to use and the texture of those precious hours – threw me for a loop.
A week later I meet Florence Pugh – or little woman Amy March, or Dune’s Princess Irulan, or the Midsommar May Queen – in central London. In We Live in Time, Pugh stars as Almut, a competitive figure skater turned competitive chef, so we meet at Hide, the Michelin-starred restaurant on Piccadilly where she trained in “big kitchen” for the film. I hear the Oscar nominee before I see her. There’s an entire driveway of gravel poured into her vaguely asthmatic laugh, which bounces into a room before she does. That’s not to say she’s loud – we have the entire crow’s nest of the restaurant’s upper floor for our playdate and sound carries like the Whispering Gallery – but it’s such a signature of her presence that it tinkles in the distance with instant familiarity. All at once she’s arrived, an eddy of blonde crop and nose ring and partially healed burn on her wrist from cooking dinner – “I didn’t want to drop the pasta,” she admits.
In one of We Live in Time’s more surreally emotional scenes, Pugh’s chef cracks eggs one-handed into a bowl, which shorthands Almut’s cooking expertise as well as providing a poignant gastronomic legacy from mother to daughter. “That was what I was most terrified by,” she says. “Not the birthing scene. Not any of the illness. No, it was cracking the egg with one hand. I literally had two or three 12-dozen boxes of eggs and I would just be in the corner practising.” I tried to crack an egg one-handed at home and gave up quickly because it’s difficult and messy and a waste of eggs if you don’t have to do it for a part. Pugh and I have time in the Hide kitchen before our tête-à-tête and I want, more than anything, to come away from that having mastered one-handed egg-cracking. At hangover breakfasts, I want to one-hand eggs in front of people and say, “Oh, this highly skilled cheffy thing… Yeah, Florence Pugh taught me, but I don’t make a thing of it” while making a thing of it. Yet when we get to the kitchen, Pugh and I must actually master a less-transferable breakfast skill: we’re piping dollars of lemon curd and Chantilly into small croissant baskets. As the dish comes together, with a dune of cream at the centre, the undeniable visual is that of a breast, a cartoonish vaudeville boob. Florence fiddles the final accent of red fruit “so it’s not so aggressively nipple”. “You never go full nipple,” agrees Hide’s executive chef, Ollie Dabbous.
We Live in Time follows the chance meeting and subsequent relationship of Almut and Tobias – a Weetabix salesman, played by Andrew Garfield – a couple negotiating how they use their time in the wake of a shattering medical diagnosis. The film is an ode to life’s ifs and maybes – it’s palpably fraught with the should we/shouldn’t we dilemmas that breathe down all our necks. It also cleverly loops within its own timeline, meaning we witness the couple’s devastating prognosis long before their meet-cute. Expect mascara stalactites and ribbons of tissue before the end credits.
“Watching this movie makes me want to be active in my decisions and actually live,” Pugh, who turned 28 at the beginning of the year, says in the restaurant, now with a black coffee and a zebra croissant, wearing a patchwork trousers-and-shirt two-piece. If Pugh’s red carpet appearances lean towards the frothily hyper-feminine (jewel-toned glossy satin gowns or light-as-air tulle), her downtime dressing veers festival – she’s not long back from Glastonbury, where she was photographed having a riot in a flower crown, black slip and Dr Martens.
“I was at the right age for this movie to land,” she continues. “I was going through a lot of weird stuff with relationships last year and I think part of the story is to not be passive, is not to let things wash over you. I want to go and find love and I want to have babies.”
She wants to have babies? “Oh, I’ve always been thinking about starting a family,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’ve wanted to have kids since I was a child myself. I love the idea of a big family. I come from a big family. I love kids. I love hanging out with kids. If ever there’s a dinner party, I go straight to the kids to chat to them. So much easier. I love the honesty. I love how bored they can get. I’ve never stopped knowing that I want to have kids. It’s just figuring out when.”
Indeed. In just a decade, Pugh has gone from indie darling (with no formal training – she was still in sixth form when she debuted in 2014’s The Falling) to Marvel star via a series of astutely chosen and committed performances that have seen her lauded as one of the most acclaimed actors of her generation. There’s an astounding breadth to her range, from her Oscar-nominated Amy March in Little Women – “[director Greta Gerwig] just let me breathe life into young Amy and make her naughty and annoying, mischievous and cute and funny” – to the guttural trauma of her Dani in Ari Aster’s folk horror hit Midsommar – “She’s uncomfortable in herself. She’s uncomfortable in her relationship. She’s uncomfortable in grief.” More recently, she’s had parts in two of cinema’s biggest releases: the damaged Jean Tatlock in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and as Princess Irulan in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two. She must be absolutely shattered? She admits I have caught her “at the first time ever in my career when I’ve actually asked for a summer break”, she says. “I’m an absolute work maniac, [but] I can see I’m exhausted. I suddenly woke up last year and I was like, ‘I hate how much of my life I’ve missed.’ Yes, I want to have a career forever, but that’s not going to happen if I work myself into the ground.”
What is it, exactly, that sets Pugh apart from her peers? Her costar Andrew Garfield describes her as possessing an “extra mysterious factor that can’t be named”. There are certain people, he tells me, “who are meant to perform and entertain and be watched. Who are tasked with being the vessel for an audience’s personal hopes and dreams and longings and hurts to be projected onto. Florence is incredibly accessible as an actor. She is in touch with her first primal impulses. And she allows herself to be governed by her heart.”
But it’s her alchemy of confidence and sincerity, an avid interest in other people, a lack of self-importance, that’s felt beyond the screen. She has an ease, an all-round down to earth-ness that separates her from more untouchable, unknowable actors. Emma Thompson’s her mentor and comparisons to Kate Winslet are “absolutely mad, in a wonderful way”, but there’s a certain British unshowiness the three share, a sort of no-fuss Oscar girls mentality. She’s as straight up as her signature drink: a vodka martini with “no frills, no twists, no vermouth”.
British singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri describes Pugh as “magnetic”, “loving”, “one of a kind”. Last year, Pugh DMed her to tell her she loved her music – Chinouriri took a chance and asked if the actor would star in her music video. A week and a half later, they met to hatch a plan for it to happen. “I wish everyone could just meet her and sit with her for 10 minutes,” Chinouriri enthuses. “She’s just so beautiful inside and outside.”
For Pugh, the most important thing is “that I’m a good person and people feel good in my presence”. On an increasingly lookist planet, in an industry often based on appearances, she has a lack of vanity, refusing to bend herself out of shape to fit a Hollywood mould. “I’ve never found it a challenge to be acting in pain,” she says of taking on Almut’s diagnosis. “I sometimes prefer it. That’s always the most important thing, whatever I do. I feel like it’s my duty to play human and ugly, to translate what looks real and what feels painful – whether that’s an ugly cry or a face that doesn’t settle or a stomach that sits [isn’t held in] when you’re naked.”
I don’t want to fall into a tired trope combo, but her body has been much discussed online, as people point out when they feel she hasn’t met some established, draconian beauty standard (she basically told the internet to shut up about her tits when she wore a sheer halterneck gown in 2022). The scrutiny must be immense. Her body language shifts, the open shirt nonchalantly pulled to – I don’t think she even notices doing it. “It’s so hard,” she says, sighing. “[The internet’s] a very mean place. 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.” Has she always been body confident? “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.”
Magazine cover shoots, like this one, are “a muscle I’ve learnt to be all right at”, she says, “but 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.”
British American designer Harris Reed, for whom Pugh made her catwalk debut by opening his a/w ’23 show last year, voice-notes me to say Pugh “embodies everything that I want my work to be, which is just unapologetically, ‘Fuck you, this is who I am. This is what I stand for. This is what I’m about.’” The pair met at Reed’s birthday party in Ibiza (she gifted him a crocheted kaftan) and have been friends since (“That fabulous laughter, like anyone who knows [her will tell you], is absolutely infectious”).
“I think in a business that is so overly curated and overly saturated, with massive teams of people trying to control and force a look,” Reed continues, “Florence Pugh is one hundred per cent authentically and unapologetically just who she is. That’s very rare.”
I ask about shaving her head on camera as Almut, a dramatic cut she would publicly debut in a Valentino headpiece on the 2023 Met Gala red carpet. Someone suggested online shaving her head was an attempt to “get my freedom back” and “own my image” but she calls bullshit: “I’m so glad I get to talk about it now. For any actor taking a role like this, it is completely important that you see her head and we see her shaving it – it was just always a no-brainer. You have the honour of doing something to yourself that is totally in support of the character.” For Pugh, the feeling of no hair resonated more than the aesthetic: “In many religions, hair is the most precious thing on the body – it’s where you store your memories and your dreams and your history. [Shaving] it was really bizarre. My head was so sensitive and so many people were trying to touch it and it was so alive. My body went into a bit of trauma from it. I was cold all the time.”
“It was a privilege to be given that job,” says Garfield of being entrusted with the clippers. Although he was, of course, nervous. “What if I somehow destroyed the head of one of the best actors of her generation? It was terrifying, but ultimately it was a very beautiful, intimate scene to shoot and thank God she has such a nicely shaped melon.”
Losing her hair was emotionally transformative. “I was going through so many [aesthetic] iterations when I was also going through life decisions,” she says, taking another sip of her coffee. “I was like, ‘Cool, well I don’t look like me. I’m changed. I’m changing.’ Looking back on that summer, I was growing into a new thing.”
Pugh was born in Oxford, one of four kids, and comes from a long line of performers. Her mother, Deborah, was a dancer. Her father is the restaurateur Clinton Pugh. Each of the Pugh children pulled shifts at his restaurants and bars, but Florence always wanted to perform – she even sang at her teachers’ weddings. Wow, I say, you sang them down the aisle? “I was, like, mates with them, so it meant I got away with a lot of stuff.” Was there a back-up career? Could we have had Florence Pugh the brain surgeon? “No. No. Nope.” She wasn’t studious? “I was just bad at it. I loved being in plays and I loved being in the art studio, but my brain never worked in chemistry.”
But she points out that she still has the same friends she had at 13. “They are the most honest and the most intelligent and the most ridiculous. I take it very seriously that there is potential for me to evolve in ways that maybe might not suit me best. I don’t want to be someone that no one else likes outside of this industry. Having friends that link me to my old life and what I was like as a child is really important, so I can constantly recognise who I’m supposed to be.”
The fame thing doesn’t appeal. She’s living in London now, though doesn’t love it…“I love being close to my friends and I love being close to the pub, but I don’t think I’m a city girl.” What is it about the relentless, throbbing metropolis, its deafening soundtrack and its pure filth that doesn’t sit well with her? “When I lived in LA, I would always dream of when I was going to come back. I was desperate to live in London. But now I’m here I don’t think I suit this. Everything’s busy all the time. I definitely suit a bit more countryside.” She won’t, she insists, miss much about the bright lights of the big city. “I don’t really hang out in famous circles,” she says, shrugging. “I don’t go to special places that I will get papped at. I don’t really have a care for that level of lifestyle.”
Accordingly, it would be remiss of me not to mention the infamous 2022 press tour for Don’t Worry Darling, which saw unbridled, unsubstantiated speculation of a feud between Pugh and the film’s director, Olivia Wilde. In many ways, it was a tired, transparent narrative that pitted two women against each other, but a wildfire of rumour blazed across the internet, culminating at the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Florence remained silent on all platforms. I wonder if she wanted to speak out, but she won’t be drawn in: “There’s so many times when I’ve been doing press for a movie and I am asked questions about [Don’t Worry Darling], and I always think it’s unfair to take the space away from the movie that I’m talking about. So I’m going to politely move away from that.” Does she generally feel like wading in makes things worse? “I had to be public in the past because people were bullying me and bullying my partner.” She’s referring to her three-year, pandemic-spanning relationship with her ex-boyfriend, Zach Braff, the American actor. “Mine and Zach’s relationship was actually quite private until it was nasty, and I could see the toll that it was taking on him and us and our families. And that’s when I spoke out. I think for anyone I’m with, I want to protect them. It’s not nice knowing that people are saying the worst things I’ve ever read about someone that I love. So that was necessary. I needed to talk about it. I think any relationship in this limelight is going to be stressed.”
Is she… in a relationship now? “I am.” She pauses. “OK, so something that I resonate with is that I believe that if magic is real, then it’s falling in love. And I am someone that loves falling in love. I love looking after people. I love caring for people. I love the feeling of someone being there. I love knowing that someone is thinking about me and someone cares for me in the same way that I’m thinking about caring for them. I think in this portion of my life, I’m trying to make sure that I’m making all the right decisions so that I can have the thing that I want… which is safety, family, a home and security.” So there is someone. “Yes. We are figuring what we actually are. And I think for the first time, I’m not allowing myself to go on a roller-coaster. I’m allowing myself to take time to let something evolve and let it be completely real to its core, as opposed to racing into that.” Your sense of being in love is maturing, I venture, as un-patronisingly as possible. “Falling is the most amazing feeling,” she says, nodding, “but unfortunately if that’s the only thing that you know in a relationship, then that’s the thing that you chase. That’s not gonna last.”
On the way home, listening back to the interview, I’m struck by Florence’s honesty, her openness, her willingness to delve into the nuances of a subject on instinct, without pretence. Earlier on, I’d been praising her role choices over the past decade and stumbled over my words, pausing to find the right vocab. “Are you going to be mean?” she deadpans. No, I assure her, I’m not trying to sugarcoat being mean, I was worried about oversimplifying a stellar career, of sinking into platitudes. “That’s all right,” she teases, even-toned, “you’re not the one that gets written in quotes.” She’s joking, of course, but she’s also a person, an actor, a commodity whose entire world is amplified, whose very presence invites a little too much attention for her liking. The magic of Florence is her ability to hold that intense scrutiny, to face down the pressure of the limelight, to be written up as a quote, yet somehow to know herself extremely well.
Or as she puts it in that perfect Pugh-speak way: “I don’t want to become a narcissist,” she says, gravel laugh rattling. “I don’t want to become a twat.”
We Live in Time will be in cinemas on 1 January 2025. Cover look: Pleated dress with lace trim and slip, Vivetta. Embroidered mesh shoes, Khaite. Hair: Evanie Frausto. Make-up: Alex Babsky. Nails: Adam Slee. Set design: Sean Thomson. Production: Image Partnership. Digital artwork: Hempstead May
