Latest news with #TheFalling
Daily Mail
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Florence Pugh reveals her grandparents have seen ALL of her racy sex scenes as she insists they're unfazed by her raunchy moments
Florence Pugh has revealed that even her grandparents watch the sex scenes in her films and said they are simply another part of her career. The actress, 29, who made her debut in 2014's The Falling, said she has gotten over any potential awkwardness this might cause as she has had sex many times on screen. She recalled taking her grandparents to see the horror film Midsommar in the cinema in 2019, with her grandfather later saying that he would have never watched the film if she hadn't been in it. Florence told NBC's Seth Meyers last month: 'I've also done many a sex scene in my career, and also unfortunately, that's part of the course of what my family watch. 'I remember going like, "Oh my God, I forgot about that", when there was a naked body splayed over breathing organisms, and I was like, "How am I supposed to explain this to my grandparents?"' Midsommar centres around an American couple who join a cult after initially believing that they were attending a mid-summer festival in Sweden. Recalling the initial awkwardness, Florence said she couldn't help but think about how bizarre it was to have those who have raised her watch her sex scenes. She joked: 'You watch it with all the people that you've taken and you're like [mouthing], "Oh, f***".' However, the actress said it is not just her grandparents who enthusiastically support her films. She added: 'My whole family are such brilliant supporters. They will be there come rain or shine.' The star said that even when she is unable to personally attend an important event like a premiere, her relations will go on her behalf. Other notable sex scenes from Florence's now glittering career include the one that took place in 2023's Oppenheimer. In the shoes of communist Jean Tatlock she gets down and dirty with Cillian Murphy's nuclear scientist character, beginning the intimacy by posing topless in a lounging hotel room chair. The actress has portrayed several different sexual scenarios in her career so far and said she particularly enjoyed simply being part of a love story. Florence has portrayed several different sexual scenarios in her career so far and said she particularly enjoyed simply being part of a love story in 2024's We Live In Time This was the case in the 2024 romantic comedy We Live In Time, where she starred alongside Andrew Garfield. She told ELLE: 'I have always wanted to do a love story. You actually get to understand the relationship, and what point they're at in the relationship, through the style of sex they have.' Florence said the story depicted in the film was beautiful to watch back and at times it felt like she was really having a baby with her co-star. The film itself, as its title suggests, centres around a 10-year love story that sees characters Almut and Tobias navigate a series of challenges, including breast cancer.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Thunderbolt Florence Pugh 'always had star quality'
Florence Pugh has fast become one of Hollywood's biggest names - but before the bright lights of Los Angeles came calling, it was among the rolling hills and dreaming spires of Oxfordshire that her star began to burn. Claire Hooper - who taught a young Pugh for "about two or three years" at Cokethorpe School, in Witney, during the early noughties - said the actress "always had star quality". She spoke to the BBC ahead of her former student's latest release, Marvel's Thunderbolts*. The film sees Pugh return to her role as assassin Yelena Belova, with the character teaming up with other antiheroes - including those played by Sebastian Stan and David Harbour - to embark on a dangerous mission. Ms Hooper said Pugh was destined for the big screen: "It was quite extraordinary for somebody of her age - it wasn't like watching a little child on the stage." Reviews for Thunderbolts* have not yet been widely published, but responses to early screenings have been positive - with Pugh in particular being highlighted for praise. The 29-year-old has called the film the "movie we all need right now". "I think we need to understand mental health a bit more and I think we need to understand that everyone is battling with their own demons - and this is a movie that certainly tackles that," she told reporters at the film's London premier on Tuesday. Her performance has been called "superb" and labelled the one that "shines the brightest" among the cast by some critics. It's something that doesn't surprise Ms Hooper: "I cast her in what was probably her first ever public performance - as Mary in the school nativity play. "She just had an amazing ability at a young age to completely embody a character and sort of let herself go." Ms Hooper, who has taught at Cokethorpe for 24 years, said Pugh performed the nativity in a Yorkshire accent: "I'm not sure where that came from at the time, but she was just brilliant." She said her former pupil - who she affectionately referred to as "Floss" - "always had star quality". The superhero blockbuster is a far cry from her first big-screen role in Carol Morley's 2014 film The Falling, that was filmed at Carmel College in Wallingford. Starring alongside Maisie Williams, 17-year-old Pugh was still in the sixth form at St Edward's School in Oxford when she was cast. Pugh was born and grew up in the city alongside three siblings - including the actor and singer Toby Sebastian, who played Trystane Martell in the HBO series Game of Thrones. In 2015 she spoke to BBC Radio Oxford's Kat Orman about her break-out role and growing up in the city. Her father, Clinton Pugh, is well known for his restaurants - and more recently for his criticism of Oxford's traffic filters. Ms Hooper said Pugh grew up in a "creative, really good and fun family", adding that she and her siblings were "all just incredibly talented, gorgeous humans". "They were really, really special children." Anna Smith, film critic and host of the podcast Girls On Film, said Pugh was a "talented, versatile actress who makes smart choices" who was now a "big star". Since her first film more than a decade ago, Pugh has gone on to star in movies such as Midsommar, Don't Worry Darling and the Oscar award winning films Oppenheimer and Dune: Part Two. In 2020, she herself earned an Academy Award nomination for her supporting turn as Amy March in Greta Gerwig's adaption of Little Women - although she lost out on the night to Marriage Story's Laura Dern. "Audiences seem to respond to her authenticity - while she's very versatile, I think she brings a warmth and wit to many of her roles that people can relate to. It's not overly 'Hollywood'," Ms Smith, who first met Pugh when the actress was 16, said. She made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in 2021, starring alongside Scarlett Johannsen's Black Widow, in what was her first appearance as Yelena Belova. Following Thunderbolts*, she is set to return as the character in Avengers: Doomsday alongside Marvel stalwarts Robert Downey Jr and Chris Hemsworth. "Florence combines relatability with talent and star power, and she appeals to a wide variety of audiences thanks to balancing superhero movies and sci-fi with thoughtful dramas," Ms Smith said. She added: "I don't think it will be too long before she lands her first Oscar." Pugh remains close to her family, releasing a song with her brother during lockdown in 2021. The Pugh family joined her at the premiere of Thunderbolts* in London and her grandmother, Pat Mackin, regularly attends her celebrity events. Talking on the red carpet, Pugh said: "I don't ever want to be caught out for something that I'm not, and I think that's always been the essence of why I've always been big mouthed, why I've always been opinionated and why I've always worn the things I want to wear. "I would much rather know that everything I've done is 100% me than have to apologise for something that was half me later." Despite her stardom, Ms Hooper said she still saw "Floss" as "that tiny child with really striking and incredible vocal quality, and the ability just to become a different person". "I can't take any credit whatsoever for her success, but I'm incredibly proud of what she's done - she's just got extraordinary talent," Ms Hooper added. You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X, or Instagram. Garfield brings cardboard cut-out of Pugh to red carpet Owner blames traffic filters for restaurant sale Florence Pugh promises Zendaya hovercraft ride Mass hysteria and female bonding Thunderbolts* Cokethorpe School
BBC News
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Florence Pugh 'always had star quality', says former teacher
Florence Pugh has fast become one of Hollywood's biggest names - but before the bright lights of Los Angeles came calling, it was among the rolling hills and dreaming spires of Oxfordshire that her star began to Hooper - who taught a young Pugh for "about two or three years" at Cokethorpe School, in Witney, during the early noughties - said the actress "always had star quality".She spoke to the BBC ahead of her former student's latest release, Marvel's Thunderbolts*.The film sees Pugh return to her role as assassin Yelena Belova, with the character teaming up with other antiheroes - including those played by Sebastian Stan and David Harbour - to embark on a dangerous mission. Ms Hooper said Pugh was destined for the big screen: "It was quite extraordinary for somebody of her age - it wasn't like watching a little child on the stage." Reviews for Thunderbolts* have not yet been widely published, but responses to early screenings have been positive - with Pugh in particular being highlighted for 29-year-old has called the film the "movie we all need right now"."I think we need to understand mental health a bit more and I think we need to understand that everyone is battling with their own demons - and this is a movie that certainly tackles that," she told reporters at the film's London premier on performance has been called "superb" and labelled the one that "shines the brightest" among the cast by some something that doesn't surprise Ms Hooper: "I cast her in what was probably her first ever public performance - as Mary in the school nativity play."She just had an amazing ability at a young age to completely embody a character and sort of let herself go."Ms Hooper, who has taught at Cokethorpe for 24 years, said Pugh performed the nativity in a Yorkshire accent: "I'm not sure where that came from at the time, but she was just brilliant."She said her former pupil - who she affectionately referred to as "Floss" - "always had star quality". The superhero blockbuster is a far cry from her first big-screen role in Carol Morley's 2014 film The Falling, that was filmed at Carmel College in alongside Maisie Williams, 17-year-old Pugh was still in the sixth form at St Edward's School in Oxford when she was was born and grew up in the city alongside three siblings - including the actor and singer Toby Sebastian, who played Trystane Martell in the HBO series Game of 2015 she spoke to BBC Radio Oxford's Kat Orman about her break-out role and growing up in the city. Her father, Clinton Pugh, is well known for his restaurants - and more recently for his criticism of Oxford's traffic Hooper said Pugh grew up in a "creative, really good and fun family", adding that she and her siblings were "all just incredibly talented, gorgeous humans"."They were really, really special children." Anna Smith, film critic and host of the podcast Girls On Film, said Pugh was a "talented, versatile actress who makes smart choices" who was now a "big star".Since her first film more than a decade ago, Pugh has gone on to star in movies such as Midsommar, Don't Worry Darling and the Oscar award winning films Oppenheimer and Dune: Part 2020, she herself earned an Academy Award nomination for her supporting turn as Amy March in Greta Gerwig's adaption of Little Women - although she lost out on the night to Marriage Story's Laura Dern. "Audiences seem to respond to her authenticity - while she's very versatile, I think she brings a warmth and wit to many of her roles that people can relate to. It's not overly 'Hollywood'," Ms Smith, who first met Pugh when the actress was 16, made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in 2021, starring alongside Scarlett Johannsen's Black Widow, in what was her first appearance as Yelena Thunderbolts*, she is set to return as the character in Avengers: Doomsday alongside Marvel stalwarts Robert Downey Jr and Chris Hemsworth."Florence combines relatability with talent and star power, and she appeals to a wide variety of audiences thanks to balancing superhero movies and sci-fi with thoughtful dramas," Ms Smith added: "I don't think it will be too long before she lands her first Oscar." Pugh remains close to her family, releasing a song with her brother during lockdown in Pugh family joined her at the premiere of Thunderbolts* in London and her grandmother, Pat Mackin, regularly attends her celebrity on the red carpet, Pugh said: "I don't ever want to be caught out for something that I'm not, and I think that's always been the essence of why I've always been big mouthed, why I've always been opinionated and why I've always worn the things I want to wear."I would much rather know that everything I've done is 100% me than have to apologise for something that was half me later."Despite her stardom, Ms Hooper said she still saw "Floss" as "that tiny child with really striking and incredible vocal quality, and the ability just to become a different person"."I can't take any credit whatsoever for her success, but I'm incredibly proud of what she's done - she's just got extraordinary talent," Ms Hooper added. You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X, or Instagram.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Streaming: We Live in Time and the best Florence Pugh films
Industry pundits are fond of telling us that the movie star is a dying concept: that blockbusters are now sold on characters and intellectual property rather than actors, to the point that even a colossus such as Tom Cruise has lately limited himself only to franchise work. That may be true, though my own definition of a movie star is looser, less money-minded and very much alive: someone, put simply, who holds your attention in pretty much anything. Florence Pugh is one. Her most recent film, We Live in Time – currently on VOD and hitting DVD shelves on 24 March – is more or less a monument to her star quality, and that of her leading man, Andrew Garfield. Without their combined charisma and unforced chemistry, this time-hopping romantic drama wouldn't amount to an awful lot. Playwright Nick Payne's script essentially uses the same building blocks that made Love Story a smash 55 years ago: two young, beautiful people meet, fall in love and plan the rest of their lives together – only for cancer to suddenly decree that they haven't long left. Payne and director John Crowley twist their reliable tearjerker formula by scrambling its chronology, showing us the couple's first fight before their first kiss, and their meet-cute some time after the end is signalled. It's a cosmetic rejig, since we're never in doubt as to the overall shape of the story, and it sometimes stalls the emotional momentum of proceedings – but Pugh is so compellingly radiant as the dying woman, spiny and resistant and actively angry in the face of her fate that we feel along with her. It's a little over a decade since I interviewed Pugh, then just 18, for the Observer's 'Rising stars of 2015' feature, which remains one of the better professional calls I've made. Back then, it was based on a single screen appearance: her eye-catching debut as an ill-fated schoolgirl in Carol Morley's slippery psychological mystery The Falling. An object of obsessive desire for Maisie Williams's protagonist, she exits proceedings early, but her bright, beguiling presence haunts the remainder of the film. That brief promise was more expansively confirmed two years later in Lady Macbeth, William Oldroyd's rigorous, ruthless study of a headstrong 19th-century child bride taking violent revenge on the patriarchy, which rested heavily on its young star's capacity for simultaneous vulnerability and sangfroid, all while brazenly rejecting easy sympathy. It was the role that really turned Hollywood on to her talents: few star-is-born vehicles have been quite so uncompromising. What followed were some standard stepping stones for an ingenue on the rise – lively but disposable supporting part in the Liam Neeson action film The Commuter and David Mackenzie's epic Outlaw King (Netflix); creditably headlining the entertaining-enough horror flick Malevolent (Netflix) – along with the less expected prestige assignment of the BBC's chic, Park Chan-wook-directed Le Carré miniseries The Little Drummer Girl (BBC iPlayer), to which Pugh brought a certain intriguing modernity. Also on the Beeb that year, she was a fine Cordelia to Anthony Hopkins's King Lear (BBC iPlayer). It was 2019 that showed the full breadth of Pugh's gifts. She was warmly rowdy and physically committed as an aspiring wrestler in Stephen Merchant's underrated sports biopic Fighting With My Family, before returning to the intensity with which she made her name in Ari Aster's brilliant folk horror Midsommar. Here, she played an unwilling, trauma-ridden cult recruit with an air of abandoned desperation, gradually lapped by numb resilience. And she got a much-deserved Oscar nomination for the best Amy March yet put on the screen in Greta Gerwig's Little Women, imbuing the youngest sister of Louisa May Alcott's oft-adapted chestnut with an unashamed brattiness, giving way to a more mature, cunning pragmatism. The Marvel machine came for Pugh next. As Yelena, the arse-kicking adopted sister of Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, she was game in both the film Black Widow and the spin-off series Hawkeye (Disney+), though neither repaid her with much in the way of inspiration. (Perhaps the forthcoming 2 May release Thunderbolts*, elevating Pugh/Yelena to first billing, will serve her better.) Pugh hasn't let the Marvel Cinematic Universe consume her career, however. Sebastián Lelio's lithe period psychodrama The Wonder (Netflix), in which she plays a doughty nurse investigating a supposed miracle child, is certainly a more generous fit for the flinty curiosity she projects on screen. The same was even true of Olivia Wilde's slick but narratively shambolic thriller Don't Worry Darling, a sort of Stepford Wives update that accidentally amplified Pugh's talents by casting her opposite a floundering Harry Styles. And her unvarnished performance as a guilt-plagued recovering addict in her ex Zach Braff's earnest grief drama A Good Person deepened and sharpened a soft script. Christopher Nolan's Oscar-guzzling Oppenheimer and Denis Villeneuve's ravishing Dune: Part Two are better films, of course, though ask less of her; Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and the English-language dub of Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron (Netflix) require only Pugh's distinctively throaty voice. I eagerly await her turn in a forthcoming new TV adaptation of Steinbeck's East of Eden – though I'm confident her movie star status isn't going anywhere. All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified. All We Imagine As Light (Amazon Prime) Payal Kapadia's wistful, sapphire-toned character study of two Mumbai nurses and flatmates, each bearing their own personal frustrations and romantic yearnings, was a high point in cinemas last year. Rita (Signature) Spanish actress Paz Vega makes her directorial debut with this tender but unsentimental child's-eye study of a broken home. It's largely seen from the perspective of its eponymous seven-year-old girl (affectingly played by Sofía Allepuz), looking on as her mother, Mari (Vega), attempts to escape a cycle of abuse. Kinoteka Polish film festival online (Klassiki) As the annual Polish film showcase plays in various UK cinemas until 25 April, a handful of titles are also available on Klassiki, a streaming platform specifically for eastern European cinema. They include two classics by the late Wojciech Jerzy Has – The Hourglass Sanatorium, a head-spinning 1973 adaptation of Bruno Schulz's surrealist short stories, and Farewells, a melancholy study of a love affair severed by the second world war – and something new in Maria Zbąska's It's Not My Film, a wry relationship road movie.
