Florence Pugh says it's 'exhausting' to be a young woman in Hollywood due to unrealistic beauty standards

Florence Pugh is speaking out about the unique hardships endured by young women in entertainment.

"There are fine lines women have to stay within," Pugh said in a recent interview with The Times. "Otherwise they are called a diva, demanding, problematic. And I don't want to fit into stereotypes made by others. It is really exhausting for a young woman to just be in this industry, and actually other industries. But I've always been encouraged to have a voice."

Reflecting on the constrained, manipulated, and ultimately rebellious characters she has played throughout her career, from Lib Wright in The Wonder to Alice in Don't Worry Darling, Pugh reflected, "Well it's always been fashionable to tell a woman how she should live her life... Or that the decisions they are making are wrong or too loud. It's about control, isn't it? It's still ultimately about suppressing one sex, and we’re dealing with it all the time."

Pugh made her feature film debut just a decade ago, in Carol Morley's girls' school mystery The Falling, but she's wasted no time in establishing herself as one of the foremost acting talents of her generation.

She's since received nominations at the Academy Awards and the BAFTAs, and wins at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Cannes Film Festival for her performances in films like Lady Macbeth, Little Women, and Oppenheimer. But with fame came a backlash, and Pugh has found herself on the receiving end of a particularly insidious form of misogyny several times.

After wearing a sheer pink gown to a Valentino haute couture show in Rome, Pugh says she was inundated with cruel comments scrutinizing her body. "What's been interesting to watch and witness is just how easy it is for men to totally destroy a woman's body, publicly, proudly, for everyone to see," she wrote on social media at the time. "It isn't the first time and certainly won't be the last time a woman will hear what's wrong with her body by a crowd of strangers."

Reflecting on the experience a year later with ELLE, Pugh commented, "I speak the way I do about my body because I’m not trying to hide the cellulite on my thigh or the squidge in between my arm and my boob: I would much rather lay it all out."

Pugh continues to speak about the discomfort and even outrage she has generated for simply existing in her body and is even able to situate herself within a lineage of actresses the British press in particular has targeted and harassed.

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"I remember watching this industry and feeling that I wasn't represented. I remember godawful headlines about how Keira Knightley isn't thin anymore, or watching women getting torn apart despite being talented and beautiful. The only thing people want to talk about is some useless crap about how they look. And so I didn't care to abide by those rules. I've loved challenging ideas I don't like," she told The Times.

Knightley has recently been opening up about hateful and disturbing comments from members of the public and the press alike during her rise to fame in the early 2000s. While reflecting on the "very violent, misogynistic atmosphere" of the time, she recalled a "shocking" amount of "gaslighting to be told by a load of men that 'you wanted this.'"

Pugh sees it as part of her duty as an actress today to "challenge how women were perceived, how we are supposed to look," and to "make space for a version of a person that isn't all the things they used to have to be."