Thr 21-year-old actress plays the lead role in the critically-acclaimed dark drama
Rising star Florence Pugh has admitted that she found her n-de scenes in dark new period drama Lady Macbeth ‘difficult’ to shoot but ‘beautiful’ to watch back .
The British actress, 21, won the Evening Standard Breakthrough Award last year for her performance as an oppressed young married woman who embarks on a passionate and dangerous affair in Victorian England.
Directed by William Oldroyd, the critically-acclaimed film is a loose adaptation of Nikolaj Leskov's 19th-century novella.
“Reading any script, if any n-dity comes up you can pretty much gauge it pretty quickly. If it feels necessary then you read it and go ‘Oh well that’s quite lovely’,” Pugh told the Standard.
After being rejected and humiliated by her cruel husband, Pugh’s character Katherine turns her attentions to servant Sebastian, played by Jarvis.
“Throughout this script it was always obvious that all of these scenes with Sebastian were so natural,” she said.
“In a storyline where a 19-year-old is starting a relationship with a really hunky farm hand, of course they’re going to be in bed every two seconds, that’s what they do .
“That’s what she’s been dying to do since she got married so it never really felt like it just came in at the end – it was very natural.”
Despite being confident in the script, Pugh said that “on the day” shooting the racy scenes was “difficult.”
“I don’t like prancing around n-ked every two seconds,” she said. “You just have to realise that what you’re doing, if you do it right, will be beautiful and if you don’t then fingers crossed. But it was and I really appreciate all those scenes now watching them back.”
Pugh, who first gained attention for her role in 2014 drama The Falling, also found that some of the film’s more violent scenes had an impact on her.
Although she found the character easy to “shake-off”, she said: “That’s not to say that scenes weren’t difficult, they were. Lots of the violent scenes I did find difficult.”
Director Oldroyd auditioned a number of people for the lead role, but settled on Pugh because she had the “necessary determination and character and spirit.”
“She was the best person we met. The difficulty with this part is that when you hear ‘Lady Macbeth’ you think ‘Oh I know who that is’. Everyone has an idea of who Lady Macbeth is so a lot of people came in playing that,” he said.
“We know what the expectations of period drama are so we wanted to look around and see who was there, who was available and who was the best person – and that was Florence.”
Pugh is set to become a fixture of the big screen over the next couple of years, having already filmed roles in Olaf de Fleur Johannesson’s Hush and Fighting With My Family, written and directed by Stephen Merchant.
She will also star opposite Liam Neeson and Vera Farmiga in Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Commuter, slated for release next year.
