Florence Pugh says she 'most definitely' abused herself to create her Midsommar character

Sometimes you wear the flower crown, and sometimes the flower crown wears you.

In a recent conversation on the podcast Off Menu, Florence Pugh said she abused herself to get into character while filming the 2019 horror film Midsommar.

"Each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do," she told cohosts James Acaster and Ed Gamble. "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."

In the film, directed by Ari Aster, Pugh plays a grieving woman who visits Sweden with her toxic boyfriend, and a visit to a pastoral village gets… unsettling.

The Don't Worry Darling star said she hadn't played a character like Dani before, and the demands of the role affected her.

"I was so wrapped up in her, and I've never had this ever before with any of my characters," she said. "I'd never played someone that was in that much pain before, and I would put myself in really sh---y situations that maybe other actors don't need to do, but I would just be imagining the worst things."

Pugh finished her work on the film with three days left in the shoot and departed for Boston to begin work on Greta Gerwig's Little Women. When her plane flew over the field where the rest of the Midsommar cast was filming, she was flooded with "immense guilt" over the fate of her character.

"I definitely felt like I'd left her there in that field to be used," Pugh said. "She can't fend for herself, almost like I'd created this person and then I just left her there to go do another movie."

Although Midsommar leaves Dani's fate up in the air, Pugh isn't optimistic about her character's future after her psychotic break.

"I think she survives," she said. "[But] it was more like she was in a different place. She wasn't her anymore."

That said, Pugh thinks the villagers would've stepped up to care for Dani in their own way.

"I do think she will be given respect and love in a weird way there," she said. "[But] I don't think she's ever coming back from this."

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