Why Florence Pugh is happy her TV career never took off: “I was not built for that”

Posted On October 12, 2024October 12, 2024

Being cast as the lead in a FOX television pilot at only 19 years old is the dream for most young actors – but not Florence Pugh. In fact, when this scenario played out for the inexperienced star, it turned into a nightmare, and she wound up being happy that a future in American network television wouldn’t be on the cards.

Pugh has always been a prodigious talent. Her first professional acting role came in 2014 when she was cast as a pregnant teenager in The Falling. At just 17, she had no experience in front of the camera but came to treasure the wisdom director Carol Morley imparted to her. She told the BBC’s This Cultural Life that Morely didn’t want any of her young cast feeling self-conscious about their looks, so she did something unusual. Pugh revealed, “Carol insisted there were no monitors near set, so we couldn’t see ourselves. She did that because she didn’t want us acting for vanity.”

Unfortunately, the word “vanity” came to completely define her next role. Pugh was cast as a young pop singer on the rise in FOX’s Studio City, and the experience of filming that glitzy pilot in Los Angeles couldn’t have been further away from Morley’s British indie. Almost as soon as she was cast, Pugh revealed studio execs pushed her to alter her appearance to conform to a more classical Hollywood look. It turned into a very uncomfortable situation for Pugh, who realised she wanted no part of an industry that placed so much emphasis on superficial things.

“All the things that they were trying to change about me,” Pugh later told The Telegraph, “whether it was my weight, my look, the shape of my face, the shape of my eyebrows – that was so not what I wanted to do, or the industry I wanted to work in.”

When Pugh returned to her native England, the relentless scrutiny over her looks had left her in a bad place. In 2023, Morley, who kept in touch with Pugh after they worked together, told Vogue, “I didn’t want to take away her experience or minimize it. I just kept reinforcing the fact that it didn’t have to be that way. That it was unacceptable treatment. I didn’t know the circumstances, but I knew it had traumatized her.”

In the end, Studio City was not picked up to series by FOX, and the pilot never saw the light of day. In most situations, this would be a disaster for anyone who worked on the show, but Pugh simply felt relieved. She told This Cultural Life, “I was not built for that…I thought, ‘If this is the top of the game, getting a lead in a big series, and I’m not happy, then maybe I’ve got the wrong industry.’”

Thankfully, Pugh’s existential crisis didn’t last too long – two weeks after she came home from LA, she was cast as Katherine Lester in Lady Macbeth. That meaty role spoke much more to the young star, and she received rave reviews for her performance. It even won her ‘Best Actress’ at the British Independent Film Awards, and set her on the career path she enjoys today.

It just goes to show that no one can ever truly predict what will happen in an acting career, especially in the early days. Pugh insists, though, that when she thinks back on FOX deciding to reject Studio City: “In a bittersweet way, I’m so grateful.”

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