Last April the British actor Florence Pugh was visiting New York with her sisters when she walked into a tattoo parlor. She didn’t know what she wanted. And then she did.
“All right, I want a bee,” she said.
“What kind of bee?” asked the tattoo artist.
“I want bird’s-eye-view. Quite mathematical. Not lifelike,” she replied.
The tattoo artist smiled. “For someone who didn’t know what she wanted,” he said, “you knew—exactly.”
“Yeah,” said Pugh, more surprised than anyone. “That’s weird.”
She tells me this story one afternoon in London, looking down at the tiny line drawing on her inner wrist and frowning a little in confusion at her own impulse. The tale of her first and only tattoo seems to say a great deal about the way Pugh operates. Ari Aster, who directed her in last summer’s terrifying Midsommar, suggests that she is “somebody who really needs to rely on her gut,” and that it’s important for others to trust that as well “because her gut is so extremely trustworthy.” It gives her a beguiling mix of confidence and modesty, of commitment without brash ambition.
The symbol she bears on her body is, it turns out, a worker bee.
“I know,” she says when I suggest this is apt, “and I had no idea.”
“I was staying in Lower East Side — does that make sense? Does that sound right?”
As evidenced by the above, 21-year-old Oxford native Florence Pugh is in New York for the first time “ever ever ever,” and she’s a tad excited.
“I want to eat a bagel. I want to [eat a vendor hot dog]. [I] basically want to eat every form of food that I’ve seen someone eat in New York,” the actress says. “I want to shout ‘taxi!’ and I want to basically just do all the general stuff that you see in films.”
Pugh is in New York courtesy of her breakout moment, starring as Katherine in “Lady Macbeth,” which is out this weekend. The film, which was a hit at Sundance (where WWD first met the actress), is not the Shakespearean tragedy we know and love but rather an adaptation of the Nikolai Leskov novel “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.” Her character Katherine is a young woman trapped in a marriage to a man many years her senior, who begins an affair with her household’s groomsman.
Now 17-year-old Florence Pugh, from Oxford, is set to appear next year on the silver screen, acting in a major role opposite Game of Thrones actress Maisie Williams in The Falling.
Greta Scacchi, star of The Player and Presumed Innocent, and Maxine Peake from Shameless will also star in the BBC Films production, which will be directed by BAFTA-nominated Carol Morley.
This is the first film for the Oxford teenager, who goes to St Edward’s School in Woodstock Road.
Florence told the Oxford Mail: “Due to such a widespread casting call to girls and schools across the country, I was particularly thrilled to find I would be acting alongside Maisie Williams, Maxine Peake and Gretta Scacchi.
“When reading the script, I knew from the beginning the character was going to be hugely challenging.”
