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Netflix’s Outlaw King might look like a bro-fest about Robert the Bruce, but one young actress almost walks away with the film. Florence Pugh plays Robert’s wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, a beautiful, loyal noblewoman with fire in her soul. Outlaw King is just the latest big project to put Pugh front-and-center. In just the last few months, she’s held her own opposite Sir Anthony Hopkins in Prime Video’s lavish adaptation of King Lear and gone ghost-hunting in Netflix’s Malevolent. However, Florence Pugh’s biggest breakthrough moment might come in a few week’s time. She’s starring opposite Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon in AMC’s The Little Drummer Girl.
Florence Pugh was born and raised in Oxford, England (though Wikipedia informs me that she also spent part of her childhood in Andalusia, Spain). Pugh first started picking up acting roles while she was still in school. She starred opposite Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams in 2014’s The Falling. Ironically, Pugh has another weird connection to the world of Westeros. Her brother is actor Toby Sebastian, who played the doomed Dornish Prince Trystane Martell.
Industry insiders first took notice of Pugh when she starred in the thrilling 2016 indie Lady Macbeth. In the film, Pugh plays a young woman trying to break free within the confines of an awful marriage to an older man. Since then, Pugh has been racking up big roles in projects like Outlaw King, The Little Drummer Girl, and the currently-in-production Little Women. (Pugh will be Amy March.)
When Decider met up with Pugh this summer at TCA, she admitted that she was in a weird, “really wonderful” moment in her career because people who have seen her work have been “very complimentary,” but most audiences haven’t gotten a chance to see her in action quite yet. She’s making the most of this time by soaking up what she can from co-stars and projects. She specifically pointed to her experiences working on King Lear as “golden.”
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“Everyday was golden. I just shut up. I watched. I learned. I looked at them. I admired them. I loved them. I was in a really lucky spot where I was hanging out with Emma Thompson and Emily Watson during the #MeToo movement. And I was with two of the most intelligent, powerful, gorgeous, real women that I’ve looked up to since I was tiny,” Pugh said. “It was such an inspiring moment for me to be with them whilst all of that was happening because it was like, ‘Yeah, this is what it’s about. These are the women who are going to take us forward.’ That was untouchable.”
You can catch Florence Pugh in Outlaw King when it debuts on Netflix tomorrow, November 9.
