Florence Pugh Regrets Horror Film: "I Needed the Money"

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents Florence Pugh Regrets Horror Film: "I Needed the Money".

Florence Pugh belongs to Hollywood's top tier today – from "Black Widow" to "We Live in Time". But before the Briton made the A-list, she took roles she would prefer to forget in hindsight. She's now speaking unusually openly about a Netflix horror film from 2018.

"Malevolent – Und das Böse existiert doch" ("Malevolent – The Evil Exists After All") is the film for which Pugh stood in front of the camera at the time. The story about paranormal investigators who encounter real evil in a haunted castle quickly disappeared into obscurity after its release – with critics and audiences alike. It was directed by Icelandic filmmaker Olaf de Fleur Johannesson.

What Pugh now reveals in hindsight about her motivations is as honest as it is unusual in the dream factory: It wasn't the love of the genre, not the script, not the crew. It was simply the fee.

Pugh's Confession: "I Needed the Money"

In an interview picked up by the US industry site Comic Book Movie and quoted by Promiflash citing Moviepilot, Pugh is surprisingly self-critical. About "Malevolent" she says:

That's probably the only film I would rather never have made. I think everyone has a film like that.

When asked about her reasons, she becomes even more explicit:

I think it was simply a film I made because I was younger and I needed the money.

It's rare in Hollywood for an actress of her caliber to speak so openly about a pure pay-the-bills role. Usually the filmography is polished in hindsight, unwanted outliers vanish from interviews. Pugh does the opposite – and wins sympathy for it.

What "Malevolent" Reveals About Pugh's Early Days

When "Malevolent" landed directly on Netflix in 2018, Pugh was in her early twenties and just one year away from her breakthrough. In 2019 she brought out "Midsommar" – the role that earned her an Oscar nomination and international fame. Today she stars alongside Harry Styles, Dwayne Johnson, and Andrew Garfield.

"Malevolent" was exactly what many young actresses take on when the next rent payment is due: a low-budget genre film without much of a reputation, but with a paycheck. The fact that Pugh would prefer to erase the film from her filmography today says less about her abilities at the time than about the reality at the lower end of the Hollywood food chain. Even those who make it to the top started at the bottom – and not every role was a labor of love.