Florence Pugh says roles like Midsommar take a huge toll

Florence Pugh can no longer play roles like Dani in 'Midsommar' as she feels as though she "abused myself in the places that I got myself to go".

The 29-year-old actress portrayed the protagonist in Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film. Dani is a American student who is traumatised after her mentally ill sister Terri kills their parents and then herself via carbon monoxide poisoning.

As Dani struggles to accept what happened, she and her distant boyfriend Christian and their two friends, Mark and Josh, are invited by Swedish student Pelle to attend a nine-day midsummer festival at his ancestral commune, the Harga, in the rural Halsingland region of Sweden.

But the trip turns into a nightmare when it becomes apparent the commune have invited them for sinister purposes as guests go missing and Dani is forced into taking hallucinogenic mushrooms, manipulated over her deceased parents and and forced to decide whether Christian lives or dies after being crowned the commune's May Queen.

Florence doesn't think she has the mental capacity to play parts like that again because she felt "broken for a long while afterwards".

Appearing on the 'Reign with Josh Smith' podcast, she said: “There have been some roles where I’ve given too much and I’ve been broken for a long while afterwards.

“Like when I did ‘Midsommar', I definitely felt like I abused myself in the places that I got myself to go.

“The nature of figuring these things out is you need to go, ‘Alright, well, I can’t do that again because that was too much.'

“But then I look at that performance and I’m really proud of what I did, and I’m proud of what came out of me. I don’t regret it. But, yeah, there’s definitely things that you have to respect about yourself.”

Previously, the 'Oppenheimer' star said that she had “never played someone that was in that much pain” until Dani in 'Midsommar'- which also starred WIll Poulter, Jack Reynor and Isabelle Grill.

Florence - who is an Oscar nominee - said during an interview on the 'Off Menu' podcast: “I would put myself in really s***** situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do but I would just be imagining the worst things.

“Each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do. I was putting things in my head that were getting worse and more bleak. I think by the end I probably, most definitely abused my own self in order to get that performance.”

The 'We Live in Time' star - who she stars in with Andrew Garfield - also explained that she felt "immense guilt" when filming for 'Midsommar' wrapped as straight away she left for Boston to film 'Little Women' and due to the psychological strain she had put herself through for the role, she felt like she was leaving the character of Dani behind to go and work on a different project.

She added: “I remember looking [out the plane] and feeling immense guilt because I felt like I’d left [Dani] in that field in that [emotional] state.

“It’s so weird. I’ve never had that before. … Obviously, that’s probably a psychological thing where I felt immense guilt of what I’d put myself through but I definitely felt like I’d left her there in that field to be abused… almost like I’d created this person and then I just left her there to go and do another movie.”