Florence Pug made headlines for recent comments she made about her intense experiences on the set of midsommar (2019). The modern horror classic is written and directed by Ari Aster and follows Pugh’s protagonist Dani. After witnessing the tragic death of her family, Dani nearly invites herself on a trip with her no-strings-attached boyfriend (played by Jack Reynor) and his college friends to rural Sweden, where her perceptions are slowly distorted until her life takes a turn for the worse. waking nightmare.
The role of Dani was never written as an emotional walk in the park, even for the most indifferent of actresses. But Pugh internalized her character’s emotions to an extent she would soon regret. Speak on the Off menu podcastPugh said:
I think towards the end [of filming] I probably, most definitely, abused myself to get that achievement… There were so many places I had to go. I had never played someone who was in so much pain, and I would really put myself into it [expletive] situations that other actors may not have to do.
It’s not entirely clear from her recent comments whether Pugh intended to lose herself in her midsommar character from the start or if she fell into method acting during filming. What is clear is the result. Not only Pugh’s performance is in midsommar the best of her career to date, but Dani is one of the most fully formed and three-dimensional characters in horror cinema, a genre notorious for two-dimensional clichés of female characters.
Florence Pugh is fearfully sublime in Midsommar
Even some of the genre’s best female characters have less emotional depth and psychological complexity than Pugh’s character midsommar like Ripley, Sigourney Weaver’s iconic badass from the Alien franchise, and Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis’s character in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978).
While Aster wrote a good part in his screenplay, Pugh deserves credit for realizing the character for her dedication to Dani’s physicality. Every move Pugh makes midsommar it looks like it’s causing her a lot of pain. Her muscles are tense. She’s jumpy like a prey animal. A lesser actress would have turned the role into a “fearful millennial” caricature. But the fear Pugh exudes feels so authentic that it inevitably spills over to the audience during the film’s two-and-a-half hour runtime, turning Aster’s steady pace into an excruciatingly slow burn.
Pugh embodies the unique sense of fear midsommar in the same way that F. Murray Abraham embodies envy in that of Milos Forman Amadeus (1984) or how hot-headed aggression is epitomized in Robert De Niro’s performance in Martin Scorsese’s Raging bull (1980), both of whom won an Oscar for their roles.
Did Pugh win an Oscar for midsommar like Abraham or DeNiro? Did she even receive a nomination for the role? No. Although Pugh received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars ceremony that aired in February 2020, just a month before the Covid-19 pandemic halted most major Hollywood productions, she was not recognized for her role in midsommar.
Florence Pugh was nominated for an Oscar Little women
Pugh plays along midsommar was overlooked by the Academy. But that same year she did get an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Amy March in Little women (2019), Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 coming-of-age novel of the same name.
Pugh’s character in it Little womenthe snotty, youngest daughter of the March sisters who falls through the ice into a frozen lake was most memorably played by Kirsten Dunst in Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation of the same name, which also starred Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon and Christian Bale in the part Timothée Chalamet would later play in Gerwig’s adaptation.
In the end, Pugh lost the Oscar to Laura Dern for her role as a predatory divorce lawyer in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage story (2019). This was the same awards season in which Dern should have won the Primetime Emmy for her role as Renata Klein in Season 2 of Big little lies (2019), if only for her unforgettable delivery of one of the funniest lines on modern television: “I will not not be rich!”
Florence Pugh should have been nominated for Midsommar instead
Pugh does a good job with what little she has to work with in the role of Amy March. In fact, she annoys her mother and older sisters better than Dunst did in the 1994 adaptation. But the fact that her performance in Little women drew the Academy’s attention to her role midsommar is a classic symptom of one of the film industry’s most blatant prejudices: overhyping costume dramas and period pieces while outright ignoring the horror genre. How is it possible that in the history of the industry’s most famous award show, there has only been a pathetic one six horror films nominated for Best Picture?
It doesn’t take a critic of Roger Ebert’s caliber to realize that Pugh was nominated for the wrong movie at the 92nd Academy Awards. The only aspect of her performance in Gerwig’s Little women what’s worthy of an Oscar nomination is how little time she had to prepare for the role.
After she put on her part midsommar with just three days left of production, Pugh hopped on a plane that took her straight from Sweden to Boston, where she began filming her role in Little women almost immediately. Is it any surprise then that the shadow of her midsommar character loomed large over the actress? In that same podcast, Pugh said she felt guilty as her plane took off and she looked out the window at the crew finishing production midsommaradding:
I felt like I was gone [Dani] there in that field, in that state, and it was so weird. I’ve never had that before. I always thought that once I left all my characters would say “they’ll be fine” she can’t take care of herself, almost like I made this person, and then I just left her when I had to go another do movie.
Within days, Pugh jumped to another continent, another genre, into the hands of another emerging director and, most impressively, another character who couldn’t be further than the one she left behind in that Scandinavian field. . Amy March is a spoiled child surrounded by the warmth of a large and respectable Yankee family during the Civil War. Dani’s entire family is dead and she is all alone in the smartphone-addicted 21st century, apart from her boyfriend, who is little more than a hot body.
Peal star Mia Goth thinks the Oscars should recognize horror films
There was a deluge of fans online claiming that Ti West’s critically acclaimed horror movies X and especially the prequel, Pearl (2022), were the latest victim of Oscar snubbing. The star of the film, Mia Goth, was asked if the Academy ignored horror films and the actress gave her peace, saying:
I think it’s very political and it’s not entirely based on the quality of a project per se. I think there’s a lot going on there. Many chefs in the kitchen when it comes to nominations and categories being recognized. I think change is needed. There has to be a, you know, there really has to be a shift. And if they want to engage with the wider public, I think that would be really helpful.
While there’s something to be said for horror’s status as the black sheep of cinema, Goth is right about the Academy’s ignorance of the genre and how they’re out of step with public taste, especially in light of their recent nominations from action blockbusters like Top gun: Maverick (2022) and Avatar: the way of the water (2022), who would never have been nominated in previous years.
If breathtaking performances in horror movies like the one Pugh gave the audience midsommar ever get the recognition they deserve from the Academy Awards, then “change is necessary.”