Florence Pugh can get disheartened by the flurry of “nasty” comments about her weight.
“It’s so hard. [The internet’s] a very mean place,” Pugh, 28, told British Vogue in a profile published on Wednesday, September 18. “It’s really painful to read people being nasty about my confidence or nasty about my weight. It never feels good.”
She continued, “The one thing I always wanted to achieve was to never sell someone else, something that isn’t the real me.”
While the We Live in Time star has long been a body-positive icon to Us, she hasn’t always been so self-assured.
“I don’t think it’s confidence in hoping people like me,” Pugh told the outlet. “I think it’s just, like, I don’t want to be anyone else.”
Through her years in the spotlight, Pugh has learned to “be all right” and even accept her physique during photo shoots.
“I’m not a model. It’s portraying a completely different version of myself that I don’t necessarily believe in,” Pugh said. “You have to believe that you deserve to be in those pages being beautiful. But now, I know what I want to show [and] I know who I want to show. I know who I want to be and I know what I look like. There’s no insecurities about what I am anymore.”
Pugh has previously been candid about her body image. In February 2023, the actress told Vanity Fair that she didn’t feel pressure to look a certain way.
“When I started out, my granddad would always tell me off and be like, ‘Why are you showing everyone your ugly spots?’” Pugh recalled. “He’d be really confused as to why I’d show my cellulite. My answer was like, ‘Well, I’d much rather do it than they do it, and then I feel ashamed.’”
She continued at the time, “There’s no pretending with me. When I put on makeup and step in a wonderful dress, I give credit to the people that made me look like that, and I also want my fans to know that a) I don’t look like that all the time and b) I also have stress acne, and I also have hairy eyebrows and I also have greasy hair.”
One year earlier, Pugh went viral after she wore a sheer, nipple-baring Valentino dress to the brand’s couture fashion week presentation. After an onslaught of criticism, Pugh clapped back.
“I knew when I wore that incredible Valentino dress that there was no way there wouldn’t be a commentary on it. Whether it be negative or positive, we all knew what we were doing,” she wrote via Instagram in July 2022. “I was excited to wear it, not a wink of me was nervous. I wasn’t before, during or even now after. 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.”
