Florence Pugh: ‘Me, the next Kate Winslet? That’s ridiculous’

After starring in Lady Macbeth, the Oxford-born actor has hopped from job to job, been taught to punch by The Rock and cast in a John Le Carré miniseries

Florence Pugh is listing her pinch-me highlights of 2017. Where to start? There was the taxi ride in Los Angeles, when she picked up an email saying that Richard Eyre wanted her for Cordelia in his BBC Two film, opposite Anthony Hopkins’ King Lear. (“My Uber driver was giving me funny looks because I was squealing.”) Or the time Dwayne Johnson showed her how to throw a punch on the set of Fighting with My Family, Stephen Merchant’s upcoming comedy-drama about the Norfolk-raised WWE fighter Paige. Oh, and that breakfast with director Park Chan-wook, who subsequently cast her in the lead of a six-part BBC miniseries of John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl that is being made by the team behind The Night Manager.

“I’ve had a few whoppers of experiences recently,” Pugh says, breaking into a throaty laugh down the phone.

If you haven’t guessed already, Pugh is going to be everywhere in 2018. The past 12 months have whooshed by as she has hopped from job to job, any one of which could make her a household name. The actor made an almighty splash in the multi-award-winning costume drama Lady Macbeth in April. Filmed two years ago, when she was 19, Pugh played Katherine, a teenage girl married off to a snivelling bully twice her age in the north of England, some time in the mid-1800s (humiliatingly sold off in a two-for-one deal, packaged with a plot of land). Rather than suffering in silence like a good little Victorian wife, Katherine kicked back. And then some. The shock value of a corset-wearing antiheroine in a period drama with a feminist streak had the critics slavering – and everyone else rushing out to Farrow & Ball with a screengrab to copy Lady Macbeth’s stormy pastel-painted interiors.

During a Q&A earlier this year, someone in the audience shouted out: “She’s a monster!” But Pugh is team Katherine all the way: “I’m completely in love with her. Everybody looks at me funnily when I say that and thinks I’m going to kill them. But I won’t. I’m not like that. I don’t agree with what Katherine did, but I don’t agree with the situation she was forced to be in. I will be her defender to the end.”

She banters away like this. You suspect that a few more years of being interviewed will knock the unstuffiness out of her, to be replaced with the usual actorly poise and polish.

Pugh grew up in Oxford in a loud, creative family, one of three children. Her dad owns a handful of restaurants in the city (“I can’t remember a Friday when I was younger when I wasn’t eating a pizza, flirting with the barman”), her mum was a dancer and her older brother, Toby Sebastian, is also an actor and has appeared in Game of Thrones.

She got her break in Carol Morley’s British indie mystery The Falling, after picking up a leaflet advertising auditions while studying for her A-levels. Did she have her head screwed on after that first flush of success? “Well, I tried not to party too much,” she says. “I tried not to come off my track. I think it’s all working out.”

Pugh is Flossie to her mates, most of whom are still at university. While they are beginning to think about their careers, she finds herself being garlanded with praise and awards. She was up against Isabelle Huppert at the European film awards for best actress earlier this month, for Lady Macbeth, and won a British independent film award. She knows the film has changed her life. Not for her a decade of temping in offices and acting in pub theatres to a crowd of six. She started 2017 a virtual unknown. Now, at the end of a long year, she finds herself being labelled “the next Kate Winslet”. How does she feel about that?

“The Kate Winslet thing has been a shocker,” she exclaims, with a massive huff of disbelief. “I was like: that is the most ridiculous claim. Amazing, obviously. She’s been my idol since I re-enacted Titanic and fell in love with Leo. And it’s a privilege to be called the next anything. But I suppose to be the next you is all you can do. If I can make my mark just a little bit, then great.”

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