Florence Pugh ‘Midsommar’ Depression: Six Months of Struggle
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Florence Pugh on the Lasting Emotional Toll of ‘Midsommar‘
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Florence Pugh‘s portrayal of Dani in Midsummer remains one of the most unusual depictions of grief ever captured on the silver screen. Yet the emotional toll it took to bring those feelings of despair to life is not something Pugh is willing to endure again.
When stopping by The Louis Theroux Podcast, the actress opened up about how “horribly real” the emotions she depicted on-screen were when making the Ari Aster-directed film, leading to six months of depression. in the film, the audience witnesses Dani experience a tragic family trauma involving murder and suicide. “The character is in such a horrible state in her life and she’s constantly on the brink of a panic attack,” Pugh saeid in the new interview, explaining that she had “never, ever been through anything close to that.”
“So for that,I’d really put myself through it,” she continued. ”At the beginning, I just imagined hearing the news that one of my siblings had died. And then towards the middle of the shoot, it was like, oh no, I actually needed to imagine the coffins.And then towards the end of the shoot, I actually was going to my whole family’s funeral.” pugh said that because she had never done anything like that before, she put herself “through hell.”
After Midsummer finished filming, Pugh headed to Boston to shoot greta Gerwig’s Little Women with just three days in between. As she was on the plane and leaving Budapest, where Midsummer was shot, the actress said she began weeping because she felt like she had left Dani to “figure out how to do the rest of her life.”
The Emotional Process: Method Acting and its Risks
Pugh’s approach to embodying Dani appears to have involved a deep dive into the character’s emotional state, bordering on method acting. While she doesn’t explicitly label it as such, her description of progressively immersing herself in the grief – starting with imagining the news of a sibling’s death and culminating in visualizing her own family’s funeral – aligns with the core tenets of the technique.
Method acting, popularized by Lee Strasberg and associated with actors like marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, encourages performers to draw upon their own personal experiences and emotions to create authentic portrayals. However, it’s