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Did you know that Oscar-nominated star Florence Pugh starred in a horror movie before her big breakout role (not that one, but we’ll get to that). Malevolent, which I regularly mistake for Malignant, is currently streaming on Netflix. Pugh stars as a plucky ghostbuster and skeptic whose work draws her into a haunting more personal than she could have expected. It’s… fine? At the very least, it’s easy to see why Pugh has become one of the most reliable performers of her generation. Few could make the familiarity work, but Pugh sells us on a haunting we’ve seen before.
What does Pugh think of Malevolent? Probably not much. But, she did recently have some thoughts to share on the other horror film she starred in. Ari Aster’s Midsommar certainly didn’t make Pugh’s career—please go watch Lady Macbeth—but it did profoundly impact its star. So much so, she doesn’t envision doing another movie like it. Check out a trailer and synopsis for Midsommar, now streaming on Max, below:
Per Max: A couple’s trip to Sweden devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.
In a recent sit-down on the Reign with Josh Smith podcast, the conversation shifted toward one of Pugh’s earliest mainstream roles. In the interview (per Variety), Pugh remarked, “There have been some roles where I’ve given too much and I’ve been broken for a long while afterwards. Like when I did Midsommar, I definitely felt like I abused myself in the places that I got myself to go.”
Later during the conversation, Pugh remarked, “Each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do. I was putting things in my head that were getting worse and more bleak. I think by the end I probably, most definitely abused my own self in order to get that performance.” Pugh doesn’t fault filmmaker Ari Aster—she has nothing but praise for him—but rather her own method for getting into character for Dani.
And, despite the innate comedy, Midsommar is a pretty bleak film. It’s sunlit trauma, pastoral fields of grief and rage. It’s uncomfortable to watch, so I can only imagine how challenging it was to perform. In our review from the time of release, we wrote, “Bathed in warm sunlight, Midsommar exposes Dani’s grief against drug-fueled undulations as bright, vibrant colors splash the screen, challenging the notion that horror must be all doom and gloom. This is a dreamlike phantasmagoria that Aster cleverly manipulates, lulling the audience into a hypnotic state that allows the 140-minute runtime to pass by with unfettered ease.”
What do you think? Are you a fan of Midsommar? Interested in hearing whether Toni Collete has something similar to say about Hereditary because, woah, that performance cut deep. Let me know over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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