Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield navigate love, parenthood and serious illness in new film

It is mid-afternoon in London, but Florence Pugh looks ready for bed. The English actor has ditched her socks and shoes and is curled up on a sofa wearing a pair of sleek black pyjamas decorated at the cuffs and hems with white silk poppies. Her bare feet are covered by a small rug which, she informs me, belongs to Billie, the rescue dog she adopted during lockdown with her former partner, the American actor and filmmaker Zach Braff.

It is unclear whether Billie is waiting patiently for his mistress in another part of the smart hotel, or if the rug is her way of feeling connected to her absent pet. There are, in any case, more important things to discuss.

Hollywood has no shortage of prodigious female talent, but 28-year-old Pugh stands out regardless. Ten years since she was plucked from the sixth form of her Oxford school to star in The Falling, a mystery-thriller about an all-girls school plagued by a fainting epidemic, she has built a storied reputation for playing complicated women whose outward confidence masks deeper fears. The fact she’s done so in films ranging from indie hits like 2016’s Lady Macbeth – a “lusty, jaw-droppingly amoral bodice-ripper” as one critic called it – to blockbusters such as Marvel Studios’ 2021 caper Black Widow, is the reason she’s now breathing the same air as chameleonic A-listers like Emma Stone and Anya Taylor-Joy.

Today, she’s promoting We Live in Time, a film in which she and Andrew Garfield (another actor whose work runs the gamut from cineplex superheroes to intense indie roles) play a pair of young Londoners navigating life, love, parenthood and serious illness. Pugh is Almut, a Michelin-starred chef. Garfield plays Tobias, a strait-laced IT executive at a cereal company. The film, one part Richard Curtis rom-com, two parts heart-wrenching drama, employs a time-hopping narrative to create a patchwork quilt of memories and experiences. The producers call it “an exhilarating new take on a classic romance”. Everyone else is calling it a weapons-grade “weepie” that leaves you in bits by the time the credits roll.

Pugh has clearly grown accustomed to people telling her the film had them reaching for a hankie. “Everyone’s been wanting to share about the bits of the film that made them feel something and reminded them of their own life,” she purrs. “That’s been a beautiful thing to hear and it’s such an honour to know that what we did is working.”

Besides We Live in Time, Pugh’s recent slate of movies includes the sci-fi epic Dune: Part Two, in which she plays Princess Irulan. A few months back, she finished work on Thunderbolts, a $US150 million ($240 million) Marvel Studios movie in which she reprises her Black Widow role as sardonic Russian superspy Yelena Belova. The difference this time: she won’t be playing second fiddle to Scarlett Johansson.

Well-known actors are often disingenuous about success, but Pugh is disarmingly straightforward. “Everything I’ve achieved was something I wanted to achieve,” she says matter-of-factly. “If you’d asked me what I wanted 10 years ago, I’d have said, ‘I want to get nominated for a BAFTA, I want to get nominated for an Oscar, I want to be working all the time and I want to meet amazing directors.’ Sometimes you just have to pinch yourself and say, ‘Yeah, you’ve done that. You’ve climbed that mountain.’”

Her international reputation was established in 2019 with a trio of films. In the bonkers-but-brilliant horror flick Midsommar she was drawn into a violent cult in rural Sweden; in Fighting with My Family she played an English wrestler grappling her way to the big time in America. BAFTA and Oscar nominations came courtesy of Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s touchstone novel Little Women. In Pugh’s hands Amy March, the youngest and least likeable of the sisters, became a vulnerable, ultimately loveable soul. There’s already talk that We Live in Time could earn Pugh a second Oscar nod, although in movie circles it can be hard to distinguish real buzz from hype and wishful thinking.

So, who is she, this 162-centimetre powerhouse? Florence Rose Christobel Mackin Pugh, or “Flossie Rose” as she sometimes refers to herself on social media, is one of four children born to Clinton Pugh, a restaurateur, and his wife, Deborah, a former ballet dancer. She caught the acting bug at the age of six, when she portrayed Mary in a nativity play and gave Jesus’ mum a Yorkshire accent to raise a few laughs. Teachers at her private schools, she has said, discouraged her ambition to become an actor.

As a child Pugh suffered from a condition called tracheomalacia, which causes the walls of the windpipe to collapse. It was so serious her family moved to Spain for several years in the hope the warmer climate would alleviate her condition. The legacy of her illness is a deep voice and the kind of throaty laugh that used to be the hallmark of a committed smoker.

In person, she’s confident, cool, a bit intimidating; the kind of girl you met at uni who designed her own clothes, rolled her own cigarettes and discovered the Cocteau Twins (insert your own cultural reference here) before everyone else. She wears a gold ring in her septum and there’s a bee tattoo on her wrist. Her eyes are the colour of treacle and her heart-shaped face is framed by strands of slicked-back blonde hair that don’t quite reach her shoulders. She has a reputation for making bold fashion choices and it’s easy to imagine her staring down the “nipple-shamers” who dared to criticise the sheer gown she wore to a Valentino fashion show.

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She is not impregnable, of course. Trolled over the age gap between her and Braff – the Scrubs actor is 21 years her senior – she hit back with a video on Instagram defending her right to make her own choices. She’s also admitted to an insecurity about her lack of formal drama training. When she arrived at a read-through for Richard Eyre’s 2018 production of King Lear, for example, she was mortified to see the other actors’ scripts were covered in handwritten notes while hers was pristine.

“In some ways I don’t worry about that kind of thing any more,” she says when I mention it. “But I do know that when I go and do theatre at some point, I’ll have to spend time preparing myself because I never did training for voice and body.”

Her “drama school” is the film sets that are her second home. Her “tutors” are directors including Dune: Part Two’s Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan, who cast her as J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mistress, Jean Tatlock, in his 2023 Oscars-sweeping juggernaut. “When we shot Oppenheimer it was so fascinating hearing Chris talking about cameras,” she says. “He knows everything about cameras and producing and making movies. All of this information is there, and if you ask people they’ll happily give it to you.”

Fear of failure drives her to take difficult roles. There’s invariably a scene in a script that frightens her, makes her wonder if she can pull it off (anyone who’s seen Oppenheimer can probably guess which one did the trick in that movie). “It’s a very risky game because one day I might not be able to do it,” she says. “And then it will have been recorded and everyone can watch it!” She emits a throaty cackle.

The scene in We Live in Time that got her interest takes place in the toilet of a petrol station. Almut is forced to give birth on its grimy floor when gridlocked traffic prevents her and Tobias getting to a hospital. It’s visceral stuff. Pugh crouches half naked while Tobias takes instructions from a midwife on his phone.

“I’d never read anything like that or seen a scene like that on camera,” she says. “It was one of those scenes that read perfectly, like a transcript of a real-life incident. Knowing all the birthing stories I’d heard from my sister, my mum and my gran, I knew it was important to get it right.”

Pugh wore a prosthetic belly to play the heavily pregnant Almut. “It took three hours to go on and two hours to come off. It went all the way round to the back of my body and they painted the seams so they didn’t show. It was heavy too … which changed the way I moved and obviously helped with the acting.”

‘If you’re hoping it will resonate with people who live with cancer, I don’t think it would be appropriate to wear a bald cap.’

When she signs up for a film, she’s all in. “I love giving parts of my body and my soul to roles.” In the case of We Live in Time, it was her hair that was sacrificed on the altar of veracity. When Almut is diagnosed with ovarian cancer and requires chemotherapy, she asks Tobias to shave her head as a pre-emptive measure.

The film’s director, John Crowley (best known for the 2015 romantic drama Brooklyn), offered Pugh the option of wearing a bald cap. She cut him off mid-sentence, insisting Garfield run clippers through her real hair. “I truly believe I wouldn’t have done the movie if I hadn’t been allowed to do that,” she says. “I don’t think it would have been appropriate. If you’re lending yourself to a story like this and hoping it will resonate with people who live with cancer or have someone they know who’s been through chemo, I don’t think it would be appropriate to wear a bald cap.”

One imagines she jumped at the chance to play a successful chef. After all, she’s the daughter of a restaurateur and she has a YouTube channel called Cooking with Flo. Her face lights up. “Yeah, I understand restaurants because I grew up in that world,” she says. I have a passion for food because my family were food lovers and hosts. There was respect for the ingredients and respect for animals … all of that.”

In the film’s opening scene, we see Almut cracking eggs with one hand and separating whites from yolks with the shells. Pugh says she “went through a fair few eggs” getting it right. Luckily, she was able to hone her skills by spending a day with star chef Ollie Dabbous at Hide, his Michelin-starred restaurant in London’s Mayfair. “I’m really proud and grateful to all the chefs who showed me around and showed me the level of respect, focus and attention to detail that’s required,” she says. “We really put all that into our movie.”

So far, we’ve mostly been talking about acting. But when Pugh makes the admission she was drawn to Almut because she recognised aspects of herself in the character, things become more personal. There’s a pivotal moment in the film when Tobias asks his sick wife why she’s risking her health to take part in the Bocuse d’Or, a high-profile cooking competition. Her response is an anguished cry: “I don’t just want to be someone’s dead f—ing mum!”

As a woman who makes no secret of her own drive and ambition, Pugh says she understands Almut’s cri de coeur. “I was really keen to play a young woman in this day and age who is dealing with things me, my friends and my siblings are dealing with,” she says.

“Almut is a young woman who is driven, who has a craving for success and won’t let anything get in her way. But she’s also juggling the question of whether to be a mother, whether she can do that as well as everything else. I thought that was such a needed conversation. It’s something that happens with every single young woman who wants to make something for herself. There’s always a ticking clock whether you like it or not.”

As if to prove the point, an assistant appears at the door and tells her it’s time to go. There’s a plane to catch, more interviews to do. Billie the dog is still nowhere to be seen.

We Live in Time opens in cinemas on January 16.