Florence Pugh recently told The Sunday Times that it’s “exhausting” be a young woman in Hollywood. The 28-year-old Oscar nominee has been a working actor since she was a teenager and can relate to headlines recently made by Keira Knightley, who was publicly shamed by the press after the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise made her a worldwide star at just 17 years old.
“There are fine lines women have to stay within, otherwise they are called a diva, demanding, problematic. And I don’t want to fit into stereotypes made by others,” Pugh told the publication. “It is really exhausting for a young woman to just be in this industry, and actually other industries.”
“I remember watching this industry and feeling that I wasn’t represented,” she continued. “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.”
Pugh revealed in a 2022 interview with The Telegraph that she thought becoming an actor was a “massive mistake” after she was body shamed by studio executives at age 19. She was coming off her feature film debut in the 2014 psychological drama “The Falling” at the time when she landed a lead role in the Fox sitcom “Studio City.” The studio executives who hired her for the show began to body shame her as soon as she got selected for the role. The execs allegedly requested Pugh change things about her physical appearance.
“All the things that they were trying to change about me – whether it was my weight, my look, the shape of my face, the shape of my eyebrows – that was so not what I wanted to do, or the industry I wanted to work in,” Pugh said. “I’d thought the film business would be like [my experience of making] ‘The Falling,’ but actually, this was what the top of the game looked like, and I felt I’d made a massive mistake.”
Knightley, meanwhile, recently told The Times of London that she relentlessly mocked by the press for being a bad actor after the first “Pirates” movie opened in theaters. She then spent years battling media speculation about her weight and rumors that she had an eating disorder.
“It’s a funny thing when you have something that was making and breaking you at the same time,” Knightley said. “I was seen as shit because of them, and yet because they did so well I was given the opportunity to do the films that I ended up getting Oscar nominations for. They were the most successful films I’ll ever be a part of and they were the reason that I was taken down publicly. So they’re a very confused place in my head.”
Read Pugh’s full interview with The Sunday Times here.
