FLORENCE PUGH

FLORENCE PUGH's greatest gift as an ACTOR isn't her ability to REVEAL the essential TRUTH in a CHARACTER. It's that she comes by it HONESTLY.

- ANDREA CUTTLER

Florence Pugh knew it was going to be a thing. At Valentino's couture show in Rome this past July, the 26-year-old British-born actor wore a Barbie-pink gown with layers of tulle and a completely sheer top. Working with designer Pierpaolo Piccioli and his team, Pugh approved the removal of its lining, eliminating any confusion over the intentionality of its transparency. "I was comfortable with my small breasts," she tells me while sipping a glass of rosé from a cosy hotel room in the English countryside. "And showing them like that it aggravated [people] that I was comfortable."

Pugh received a deluge of internet nastiness. "It was just alarming how perturbed they were," she says. "They were so angry that I was confident, and they wanted to let me know that they would never wank over me. Well, don't." Pugh expanded on this sentiment on Instagram, excoriating her body-shaming trolls: "Why are you so scared of breasts? Small? Large? Left? Right? Only one? Maybe none? What. Is. So. Terrifying." The post has now been liked more than 2.3 million times.

Fans have come to expect this kind of no-BS fiery candour from Pugh. Since making her big-screen debut in 2015 as a teenage girl reckoning with her own sexuality in Carol Morley's The Falling, she has built a career playing women who refuse to be silenced. Over the past seven years, she's acted in almost two dozen projects, including her breakout performances in a pair of 2019 films, Ari Aster's indie horror hit Midsommar and Greta Gerwig's adaptation of the beloved classic Little Women, the latter of which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.