When cinema audiences meet Florence Pugh’s striking Lady Macbeth later this week they won’t get what they expect. For a start, this is not that Lady Macbeth.
Pugh, 21, has not been cast as the Shakespearean villain who urges her husband to further her ambitions by killing a Scottish king. Instead, the acclaimed rising star from Oxfordshire plays the lead in a British retelling of a lurid Russian story from 1865 about a discontented, and ultimately violent, young bride.
While the costumes are pretty and the Northumberland setting beguiling, this is far from a romantic period drama. The film, which goes on UK general release on Friday, has shocked and impressed in equal measure since its Toronto premiere last September.
What is more, Pugh will prove an unconventional leading lady. She might look innocent, even demure, on the posters in her blue crinoline gown, but she is packing more than a punch in this version of Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtensk District, the story that went on to inspire a popular 1932 opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. “You just don’t expect this storyline to come out of that era,” Pugh told the Observer. “Usually it is all about the man, so it has surprised people, I think, to see a young woman causing so much havoc. She goes well beyond what we expect to see in such a film, although we go along with her, and that is shocking too. I like that.”
Pugh’s performance has already earned her bouquets from the critics. The Hollywood Reporter said she had “clear star quality” and her “heart-shaped face and aura of mischief” recalled the young Christina Ricci. “Holding her own opposite some experienced stage veterans, she plots a confident path through a subtle performance that is mostly just below the surface, all sly glances and subversive innuendo.”
For Variety’s critic, Pugh is “a whirl of petulance and more mature anger, of confusion and seductive self-possession”. “Pugh folds these contradictions into one composed, consistent characterisation, her smoothly expressive face giving us all the text between the lines of her spare dialogue.”
Seen in 2015 as a schoolgirl in Carol Morley’s highly rated psychological drama The Falling, Pugh’s next step will be as unorthodox as her gun-toting Lady Macbeth. She is playing Paige, the Norwich-raised international wrestler, in Stephen Merchant’s new film, Fighting With My Family, and had to learn how to wrestle to play the part. “I like a part that is feisty and kick-ass; someone who ‘rules it’. That is my calling,” Pugh said. “I have more or less finished filming now, although I have another day to do in Los Angeles later this month. Playing Paige, I felt I had to train to wrestle. I don’t think you can make a film like that and then say, ‘actually, I don’t want to do that scene’. So I took it very seriously.”
In 2015 Pugh made a TV pilot, Studio City, in California and she has also appeared in the detective drama Marcella on ITV. Last year, she made a Liam Neeson thriller, The Commuter, alongside Vera Farmiga, Elizabeth McGovern and Sam Neill, due to be released early next year. But it is her role in the low-budget Lady Macbeth that earned her the breakthrough artist’s award at December’s Evening Standard awards. The screenplay is by playwright Alice Birch, and it is the film directing debut for stage director William Oldroyd, acclaimed for productions at the Young Vic in London and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“He has a great way of directing. He shared it all,” said Pugh. “I think he will stay with film now for a while, because he has got such amazing buzz around him.”
Oldroyd and Birch considered changing the title, Pugh said, which comes from a line in the Leskov story that compares the heroine to Shakespeare’s Scottish termagant. “In the end, they decided to call it the same thing because, if you are doing a story that has been done on stage as well, you don’t want to cut off your version from that root.”
The role appealed to her, she said, because Katherine is so central to the action. “I like a role where some of the character’s motivations are confusing or at least interesting,” she said. “I am very much ready for it to come out now. It has had an amazing run on the festival circuit for not quite a year and so I find it hard to remember that only festival audiences have seen it so far. It will be interesting to see what the wider audience thinks. I wonder whether they will think Katherine is mad. It is certainly not a romcom, but there are romantic bits, and it is a thriller and comic, too, in places.”
Leskov’s story was first published in Dostoevsky’s literary journal, Epoch, and was set on a provincial estate in tsarist Russia. Transferred to the British countryside, it tells of a teenage bride, sold by her father and deprived of her liberty, until she meets a handsome groom on the estate.
Pugh grew up in Oxfordshire after a period living in southern Spain as a small child. Her father, Clinton, is a restaurateur and her mother, Deborah, was a dancer. Of her three siblings, only her youngest sister, Rafaela, is not yet acting professionally. Her brother, Toby Sebastian, has a part in Game of Thrones, and her elder sister, Arabella, is working as an actor in London.
She auditioned for The Falling while at school in Oxford. “I wanted to go to drama school but when I got the part in Falling, I got an agent, so it seemed a good idea to work. I always did a lot of singing and dancing so I am glad it worked out that way. I would like to study stage acting at some point though.”
