The Hollywood Reporter revealed that after the filming of the folk-horror film Midsommar, Florence Pugh suffered from approximately six months of depression. Pugh portrayed Dani, a complex character struggling with mental illness and subjected to a series of harrowing events. She said both the filming and the months that followed were difficult, as the role forced her into an emotional place she had never experienced. Pugh stated, “I think it made me sad for like six months after that and I didn’t know why I was depressed.”

During the three months of filming, to authentically portray Dani, Pugh made herself imagine deeply disturbing scenarios—including imagining the deaths of her family members—and said that “each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do.”

That same month, Pugh went on to begin filming Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. She explained that while she was filming Little Women—a much lighter production—she had to come to terms with the full extent of what had mentally happened to her. Little Women ended filming in late December of 2018. Pugh recalled arriving home for Christmas in an emotional state and thinking, “Oh—I think that’s from Midsommar, and I didn’t deal with it, and I probably shouldn’t do that again.”

Notably, Midsommar went on to win the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Screenplay and received widespread critical acclaim, and while Pugh remains proud of her work in the film, she also acknowledged her personal need for better self-protection going forward. She said, “I don’t think I’d be able to do this without going there all the way and putting myself in all of those characters … I’ve given too much, and I’ve been broken for a long while afterwards.”