Florence Pugh Speaks Out On ‘Nasty’ Weight Criticism Comments

Florence Pugh, known for her role in “Midsommar,” has been targeted by hateful comments, particularly regarding her weight.

The 28-year-old has previously discussed Hollywood’s beauty standards, including being approached about her weight after securing a lead role as a pop star in a TV pilot at 19.

Once again speaking out on her weight, Florence Pugh has called the internet “a very mean place,” acknowledging that it “never feels good” to encounter negative comments.

“It’s really painful to read people being nasty about my confidence or nasty about my weight. It never feels good,” she told the outlet. “The one thing I always wanted to achieve was to never sell someone else, something that isn’t the real me.”

The actress then commented on the experience of doing magazine cover shoots, like the one for British Vogue, calling it “a muscle I’ve learnt to be all right at, but I’m not a model. It’s portraying a completely different version of myself that I don’t necessarily believe in.”

She added, “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, also spoke to British Vogue, revealing that the actress “embodies everything that I want my work to be, which is just unapologetically, ‘F-ck you, this is who I am. This is what I stand for. This is what I’m about.’”

“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 added, “Florence Pugh is one hundred percent authentically and unapologetically just who she is. That’s very rare.”

During an interview with The Telegraph last year, the actor first discussed being approached about her weight. She revealed to the publication that after landing a lead role as a pop star in a TV pilot at 19, a studio executive wanted to alter her appearance.

“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 said at the time. “I’d thought the film business would be like [my experience of making] ‘The Falling,’ but actually, this was what the top of the game looked like, and I felt I’d made a massive mistake.”

She also discussed everyday beauty standards and emphasized how body image can be a “major thing” for women.

“From the moment you start growing thighs and bums and boobs and all of it, everything starts changing. And your relationship with food starts changing,” she told Vogue earlier this year.

“I had a weird chapter at the beginning of my career, but that was because I wasn’t complying. I think that was confusing to people, especially in Hollywood,” Pugh continued. “Women in Hollywood, especially young women in Hollywood, are obviously putting themselves in all these ways in order to get whatever opportunity that they need to get because that’s just the way that it’s been.”

As she told Elle UK last year, “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.”

And in her British Vogue cover story, she explained that her straightforwardness isn’t a deliberate attempt to seem confident. “I think it’s just, like, I don’t want to be anyone else.”