Florence Pugh is frustrated that the sex scene shown in the first Don't Worry Darling trailer has overshadowed the rest of the Warner Bros. and Olivia Wilde movie.
Based on the Don't Worry Darling trailer, the Warner Bros. film appears to be tackling issues of patriarchy and mid-century misogyny. In this context, the hyper-focus on the movie’s sex scene between Alice and her potentially abusive husband Jack, played by Harry Styles, is particularly distasteful.
In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, Pugh laments the media’s reaction to the first Don’t Worry Darling trailer, which shows Style’s character performing oral sex on Pugh's character. “When [a film is] reduced to your sex scenes, or to watch the most famous man in the world go down on someone, it’s not why we do it. It’s not why I’m in this industry,” Pugh said in the interview. “Obviously, the nature of hiring the most famous pop star in the world, you’re going to have conversations like that. That’s just not what I’m going to be discussing because [this movie is] bigger and better than that. And the people who made it are bigger and better than that.”
The criticism is especially pointed when considering the serious topic of the movie. Don't Worry Darling is a psychological thriller that shows a young married couple living in a gilded vision of a 1950s utopia. They move to a company-owned town where all the men work on the mysterious “Victory Project” and all the women are left with little else but chores, shopping, and twiddling their thumbs. Eventually, when a woman goes missing, Alice (Florence Pugh) starts to realize that not everything is as rosy as it seems.
Pugh had her breakthrough roles in Midsommar and Little Women, which were both released in 2019. In the past three years, she has become a highly in-demand actress, with six films releasing in the next year alone. These include Don't Worry Darling, the Netflix drama The Wonder, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, A Good Person with her then-boyfriend Zach Braff, Christopher Nolan's biopic Oppenheimer, and Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two.
So, while Yelena Belova from Black Widow may be Pugh's most famous role, she's certainly demonstrated her range with several challenging and enticing roles outside of the MCU.
Don't Worry Darling releases in theaters on September 23, 2022.
Source: Harper's Bazaar