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Post by Admin on Jan 10, 2020 18:30:23 GMT
Just 24, Pugh has been working as an actor for the past seven years, eschewing predictable routes to fame and choosing intriguing roles without ostentation. In 2018, she starred in Park Chan-wook’s supremely stylish TV adaptation of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl—a performance so fully realized that it inspired le Carré himself to put a character named Florence in his most recent novel. Last year, she starred in the wrestling comedy Fighting With My Family, made by Stephen Merchant, cocreator of The Office; in Midsommar; and, most notably, in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. This year she’ll play Yelena, Scarlett Johansson’s athletic sidekick, in the Marvel movie Black Widow. All of which has made Pugh, somewhat meteorically, a Hollywood performer of wide-ranging, unconventional power—and a person who does, it seems, know exactly what she wants.  WHEN WE MEET, Pugh has just returned to London from Morocco, after spending months grappling with Johansson on set. We are in a Middle Eastern restaurant in a quiet corner of Borough Market, which is bustling with butchers and bakers and licorice-makers, with truffle purveyors and guardians of high-class cheese. Pugh’s maternal grandmother, the indomitable matriarch Granzo Pat, used to bring her here from Oxford when Pugh was a child, and they used to taste the food before going to the theater. Today she sits opposite me in a black Ragyard T-shirt with two appliquéd scorpions on it, and nurses a vodka and soda over lunch. By her side is a black silk bomber jacket she bought in a charity shop when she was eight and has worn ever since. Her voice is both worldly and cheerful, with a rasp that derives—she later tells me—from a childhood illness.  “I didn’t quite know what it was to be involved in one of these films,” she says of the Marvel enterprise. “Obviously you have to be physically able because the whole point,” she adds with irony, “is that you’re a super-hero.” But the rest, she was told, was up to her. Pugh headed straight to the warehouse where the stunt people were hanging out. “Learning from them was my favorite part,” she says, Although she had a stunt double, she wanted to know how to do it all—and as Black Widow’s director, the Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland, reports, Pugh did most of her own stunts: “She is bloody scary. Steely. Absolutely will not back down. She has a healthy amount of anger in her as a person, at the injustices she sees around her.” |
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Post by Admin on Jan 11, 2020 7:29:30 GMT
More than anything, though, it was the “gut punch” of the film that surprised Pugh. With Shortland—reportedly selected from among 70 directorial candidates—at the helm, and influenced in large part by Johansson herself, Black Widow is only the second film in the Marvel universe (after Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel) to focus on women. Although details of the plot are under wraps until the movie is released in May, Pugh says the story “deals with some really hard things. It’s rough and painful and emotional and funny, and not in any way. . . girly. It’s about broken women picking up the pieces.” Shortland adds that she—along with Pugh, Johansson, and Rachel Weisz, who also stars in the film—“wanted to make something intimate within the massive Marvel universe. We created female relationships with flesh and blood. They didn’t have to play nice.”  Pugh has entered the industry on a very particular cusp: a time when women can call (at least some of) the shots. Her first role was in The Falling, a hypnotic, minor-key meditation on hysteria, set in an all-girls’ school and directed by Carol Morley. Her two latest projects—Little Women and Black Widow—have also been directed by women. She Has been in a position to take this female force for granted, and to forge ahead undaunted. If the archetype of the ingenue implies something of a young, impressionable woman whose ascent depends in part on the favor of her (likely male) superiors, Pugh may offer an alternative, a new kind of star on the rise who is emerging at a time when different power dynamics are possible. Looking at her career so far, an optimist might think that the old model holds diminished sway. Pugh remembers reading about Jennifer Lawrence being paid less than her male costars and thinking, “Hey? This cannot be a thing.” But she knows that what’s happening now is the result of a longer conversation. As she puts it: “They’re actually making a reason for women to talk in films now. When a woman speaks, she’s going to have something to say.”  Pugh grew up in a family of hosts: Her father owns restaurants in Oxford; her grandfather worked in fruit markets and ran a pub. “We’re a big eating family,” Pugh says with a throaty laugh. Her mother taught dance, and Pugh relates all of this—the good food and exuberant company—to performance. “It’s all big and loving and homey,” she explains. To this day, she finds making food for someone “one of the simplest but most wonderful ways to have a date.” When we wander, after lunch, to a cheese stall in the market, Pugh asks the stallholder such acute questions that she is instantly offered a job. “I’ve always been a very loud personality,” Pugh says. “Like, when I was younger I would always wear the brightest thing. I loved painting my face. And because I was good at it, I don’t think my parents found it offensive.” As a teenager, Pugh would often operate as the resident baby-sitter for a visiting Sunday crowd. With a small troupe at her feet, she’d make costumes, serve tea in toy cups, and invent a drama that inevitably included a key role for herself. “I’d be like: ‘No, that’s my part. I play the weeping woman who’s lost her husband.’ ” |
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Post by Admin on Jan 11, 2020 19:06:33 GMT
 But before that, between the ages of three and six, she lived in Spain with her parents and siblings, Arabella and Sebastian, who are 10 and four years older than she is respectively. (A younger sister, Rafaela, was born when Pugh was seven.) The move from Oxford to Spain was intended to help with Pugh’s health issues: She suffered from what was later diagnosed as tracheomalacia—meaning her trachea partly collapses after she breathes—and as a toddler she spent a good deal of time in hospitals. Now she just has, she says, “a very scary cough,” and anyone who has seen her sobbing in Midsommar will recognize the alarmingly throaty punctuation in her performed grief.  It also left her with an uncommonly mature singing voice. When Pugh was an adolescent, her mother started uploading home videos of her singing onto YouTube—without entirely realizing, until she developed a following, that anyone could watch them. You can still find “Flossie Rose” wearing heavy black eyeliner, sitting barefoot on a bed, singing Oasis covers and accompanying herself on the guitar. Since then, she has sung in some of her films, and music is something she’d like to do more of.  Singing and performing has become the family business. Sebastian, who goes by the professional name of Toby Sebastian, released an EP in 2019, and his acting career includes playing Trystane Martell in the fifth season of Game of Thrones. Arabella (now Gibbins) is an actor, singer, and voice coach. Rafaela, who is 16 and still at school, also acts. The siblings, with whom Pugh spends as much time as possible, play the very important function of keeping one another sane. By way of example, Pugh tells me about going to see Midsommar with her family. Midsommar is partly a film about losing your family and attempting to re-create it elsewhere—with disastrous results. |
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