Florence Pugh leaned on emotional intensity to bring her character of Dani to life in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror film Midsommar.
The English actress revisited a scene in the Sept. 25 episode of Vanity Fair web series Scene Selection, where she recalled being drained while having to cry among a group of women. Spoiler alert: the scene happens after Dani witnesses her boyfriend, Christian, played by Jack Reynor, cheating on her.
“Let's watch me absolutely cry my eyes out,” Pugh joked around the 13-minute mark while watching herself hyperventilate.
Pugh added that the night before filming the scene, she envisioned the performance she “needed to give” and said she usually strives to “fling emotion out” while in front of the camera.
“Because you can't choreograph it and you can't shape it,” she explained. “With this, because the breakdown of the scene was so long, I needed levels where I could just figure out where I was emotionally and know where I was going next.”
The actress added that some of the takes lasted for ten minutes and that it was “tolling” to repeatedly cry. Pugh, however, is “proud” of the performance because of its difficulties.
“And I think the reason why it was so hard is because I couldn't hide. I knew what I needed to do,” she said. “I needed my body and my face to look destroyed. I needed to look like grief was wearing me, not as a cloak, but as like a heavy, heavy crown.”
In a 2021 Instagram post, Pugh wrote that filming the scene was “terrifying,” but she was able to persevere with the support of her scene mates.
“I’m not a big crier, so going through that with them was true safely and love and respect. It only happened because I had them,” she wrote.
