Florence Pugh

Florence Pugh (birthname: Florence Rose CM Pugh) has enjoyed one of the fastest and most acclaimed rises of any actor in English-language cinema. Only five years after her film debut, as co-star (while Pugh was still in high school) along with Maisie Williams in Carol Morley’s atmospheric and well-reviewed The Falling (2014), Pugh was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Amy in Greta Gerwig’s highly regarded version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (2019). Pugh’s stardom rose as the spy Yelena opposite Scarlett Johansson in Marvel’s Black Widow (2021), earning nearly $380 million box office worldwide.

Florence Pugh was remarkably a face on the poster of her first movie, The Falling, which premiered at the London Film Festival, earning her a festival nomination for Best British Newcomer. Two years later, Pugh delivered a stunning, slashing performance reconsidering Shakespeare in Lady Macbeth (2016), director William Oldroyd’s and writer Alice Birch’s fascinating adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s play, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

Pugh was cast in a supporting role in the Liam Neeson action thriller, The Commuter (2018), with Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Jonathan Banks, and Sam Neill, followed by a bigger role in David Mackenzie’s Netflix epic, The Outlaw King (2018), with Chris Pine, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Stephen Dillane. Pugh turned to contemporary comedy-drama for a starring role in writer-director Stephen Merchant’s British wrestling movie, Fighting with My Family (2019), with Dwayne Johnson, Lena Headey, Jack Lowden, and Vince Vaughn, and released domestically by MGM. 

In Ari Aster’s disturbing folk horror drama, Midsommar (2019), opposite co-star Jack Reynor, Florence Pugh made a major impact, arguably solidifying her star status (underlined by Pugh being the big face on the movie poster), and earning her a Best Actress nomination from the Gotham Independent Film Awards. Pugh capped a triumphant 2019 in Gerwig’s Little Women, leading to her first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Although Florence Pugh was fairly quiet in 2020, that was because of her ambitious superhero action performance in 2021 in director Cate Shortland’s Marvel movie spinoff, Black Widow, the first MCU movie about a female superhero directed by a woman.

In fall 2022, Pugh made quite a noise in both The Wonder, Sebastián Lelio’s Netflix-released psychological drama co-written by Alice Birch and based on Emma Donoghue’s novel and highly acclaimed at its Telluride Film Festival world premiere, and as the lead of Olivia Wilde’s anticipated thriller, Don’t Worry Darling, with Chris Pine and Harry Styles, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival amidst much controversy about reportedly personal or artistic disagreements between Pugh and Wilde. 

Florence Pugh starred in—and also produced–writer-producer-director Zach Braff’s return to feature filmmaking, A Good Person (2023), with Zoe Lister-Jones, Molly Shannon, and Morgan Freeman, and set to be released by United Artists Releasing. Pugh co-starred opposite the imposing cast of Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Robert Downey Jr. (to name a few) in Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated Oppenheimer (2023) for Universal Pictures.

Pugh is also a part of the large ensemble of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (2023), the writer-director continuation of his first Dune, with a cast including Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, and Zendaya. In the summer of 2022, Florence Pugh was cast in the MCU antihero movie, Thunderbolts (2024), in which Pugh reprises her Yelena Belova spy character opposite Sebastian Stan, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, and David Harbour. Pugh is attached to the science fiction film, Dolly (date to be announced) and a feature version of Nita Prose’s acclaimed novel, The Maid (date to be announced).