I don’t think I’ll ever get over my experience watching the Midsommar ending for the first (and only) time. I felt so incredibly unsettled as the Ari Aster horror movie unfolded into a cult-y nightmare all during a sunny Swedish midsommar festival. However, it also introduced me to the incredible talent that is Florence Pugh, so no regrets. Now, I’ve just learned that the actress actually took her grandparents to go see it back when it was in theaters, and I can’t get enough of how they reacted.
Florence Pugh is always involving her family in her career, and it’s the sweetest thing. Just last week, she made sure to get her whole team together at a special screening for Thunderbolts*, including her granny, and it was adorable. But as Pugh recently recalled, she also took her grandparents to Midsommar. As she tells it:
I took my gran and my grandad to watch Midsommar in the cinemas. It wasn’t even a premiere, I just took them to our local view. And I remember afterwards, my granddad going, ‘Welp, I wouldn’t have watched it if you weren’t in it.’ I’m like, ‘Not surprised.’ He was like, ‘You were brilliant, absolutely brilliant, darling.’
Midsommar is such a dark watch, I have steered away from watching it since 2019, and I was absolutely obsessed with it when it came out. There’s absolutely no way I could sit in a theater next to my grandparents or parents without getting incredibly stressed out. I totally get it, though. Florence Pugh’s grandparents wanted to be supportive and see the film she worked hard on, and hey, they were pretty lovely with their responses, all things considered. As Pugh continued on Late Night with Seth Meyers:
The bit that was just so — I remember going like, ‘Oh my God, I forgot about that’ is when there’s a naked body splayed over, like, breathing organisms. And I was like, ‘How am I supposed to explain this to my grandparents?’
So much happens in Midsommar that makes it so inappropriate for elders – unless they are big horror fans, of course. Multiple people throw themselves off a huge cliff, there’s a really awkward sex scene towards the end, oh, and the part where she watches her boyfriend burn alive in a suit of bear skin? It’s wild! Florence Pugh also has a different view on the final scene than the director, but no matter how you slice it, it’s got messed-up imagery.
Pugh also said this about why she took them:
I think I just worked so hard on it, and I knew the performance that I’d given, and I knew how impactful that time shooting it was that I was like, ‘Well, of course, my family will want to see that.’ And then you watch it with all the people that you’ve taken, and you’re like, [mouths] ‘Oh, fuck.’
This is such a great story. You just don’t think about the family of the actor in a movie like Midsommar, and how things go when she wants to show off her work, but there you have it. The Ari Aster movie was a very technical film that required a lot of precision out of the actors, so it makes a lot of sense that she would want to show it to her close family. Earlier this year, Pugh also spoke to the movie being a bit “too much” on her wellbeing, but she remains “proud” of being part of it.
Thankfully for the actress and her family, her new movie Thunderbolts* is a lot more family-friendly. It’s in theaters now.