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Florence Pugh called out the “great headlines” published by Fr Keira Knightley over the years.
Pugh, 28, spoke about the media’s scrutiny of women’s bodies in a new interview when she mentioned Knightley, 39, who was the subject of negative press attention since her teenage yearsafter her starred in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Love Actually.
Knightley once said Elle UK abuse she received: “It was a very long time when [interviewers] everyone was like, ‘Well, you’re like a*** actor and you’re anorexic and people hate you,’ which is a very strange thing for a teenager or someone in their early twenties.”
Speaking now about how she criticized her own body, Pugh said The Sunday Times: “Look, not everyone has legs that last for days. I remember looking at this industry and feeling like I wasn’t represented. I remember the scary headlines about Keira Knightley not being skinny anymore, or watching women get ripped off even though they’re talented and beautiful.
“The only thing people want to talk about is some useless crap about how they look. And so I didn’t care to follow those rules.”
She added that she wanted to “make room for a version of a person who isn’t all that they once had to be,” continuing, “I’m proud to be single and look the way I look — I’m really interested in people who are still mad at me for not being lost more weight, or who just hate my nose ring.”
She said she can’t “just change the way things are,” but she can help younger women in the industry by “making conversations happen.”
Pugh has drawn critics online in the past for references to her body shape.
And after she was criticized for wearing a see-through Valentino dress in Rome in 2022, Pugh posted on Instagram: “So many of you wanted to aggressively tell me how disappointed you were with my ‘small tits’… Grow up. Respect the bodies. Respect all women.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Pugh talked about the extreme lengths she went to while filming the 2019 horror film Midsummerrevealing that she would imagine “family members in coffins” to get into the right mood for her character.