Florence Pugh has made a career out of stepping into characters with enough emotional baggage to fill several suitcases. Yet Dani Ardor in Midsommar, her international breakout role, often towers above the rest. Pugh has recalled how her instinct to sympathize with such characters could leave her mentally exhausted, pushing herself further than she realized.

That revelation may make Midsommar and her demanding performances feel different, adding another layer to the emotional wreckage audiences witnessed.

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Florence Pugh explained that she does not know how to play a character without sympathizing with them. She reflected on how that instinct has shaped her approach to acting, particularly after Midsommar. For Pugh, understanding a character has often meant stepping emotionally closer to experiences that can be difficult to leave behind.

 "I’ve learned over the years to know when enough is enough, when I’ve abused my state of mind or put my body through things that I shouldn’t," she said.

That approach became especially intense while making Midsommar, as Pugh deliberately pushed herself into increasingly bleak mental spaces to portray Dani Ardor’s devastating grief. She described imagining increasingly horrific scenarios throughout the shoot, beginning with the death of a sibling and eventually visualizing an open-casket funeral for her entire family. The emotional immersion was relentless.

The aftermath proved just as difficult to shake. Pugh has earlier revealed that she experienced depression for six months after filming wrapped, while moving almost immediately into Little Women. Although playing Amy March offered a completely different emotional world, the transition left little room to process what Midsommar had demanded, with Pugh later describing the strange guilt and sadness that followed and famously stating that she is never going to pick a role that mentally tortured her as Midsommar did, even though she remains proud of it.

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Midsommar may have drained Florence Pugh emotionally, but it certainly did not put an end to her fascination with complicated characters, as East of Eden proves.

Midsommar changed Florence Pugh’s relationship with emotionally bruising characters, but it certainly did not end her fascination with them. If anything, her later roles show a more measured kind of complexity. Amy March brought ambition beneath the bickering, Yelena Belova concealed vulnerability beneath sarcasm, and Alice Chambers gradually discovered the machinery behind her supposedly perfect life.

The pattern continued through Lib Wright’s guarded grief, Princess Irulan’s watchful calculation, and Almut’s fiercely complicated relationship with love and mortality. These characters were hardly uncomplicated, yet Pugh approached them without always having to disappear completely inside their pain. In that sense, her post-Midsommar filmography suggests that complexity remained essential, even as the way she carried it changed.

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Do you feel Florence Pugh's emotional connection with her characters through her performance? Let us know in the comments!