Florence Pugh insisted on cutting her own hair in new film ‘A Good Person’

Florence Pugh brings a profound sense of realism to characters that are works of fiction.

But when preparing to shoot her latest film A Good Person, Pugh’s approach was a little too real for the film’s producers and director Zach Braff.

“In the movie, your character cuts her own hair, and I heard that you actually said ‘I’ll cut my own hair’,” Jimmy Fallon put forth when Pugh appeared on a recent episode of The Tonight Show. 

“It was my idea,” she confirmed in the interview. “I was like ‘Zach, I think I should chop my hair off at the beginning of the movie,’ and he was like ‘cool, that’s not going to work’.”

Braff’s main concern was continuity; “how do we do the shooting in order?” he asked Pugh, who, very unbothered, insisted that Braff would “figure it out”. 

After Braff approached the film’s producers and explained Pugh’s intentions “they were like ‘Zach this is insane, she can’t do this, this is not helpful at all’,” Pugh told Fallon. 

“He came and spoke to me very tentatively and he was like ‘Florence we can’t do this we’re going to need to use a wig’, and I was like ‘you’ll figure it out’,” she reiterated. “And they figured it out! I did it!”

“[The hair is] supposed to be a bit shabby, but obviously… We were trying to shoot all of it in one take,” Pugh explained. “We couldn’t change the setup, so there was one portion for about half an hour where I had one really long strand of hair down to my hip and then the rest of it was this short like a unicorn, and it’s like the ultimate mullet.” 

In another interview with USA Today, Pugh explained that while “everyone [on set] was really anxious that it was the only take we'd have” she “found it really liberating.” 

“If anything, it was like the final key to unlocking this character,” she went on to say. “It took vanity out the window.”

The DIY beauty fail also became a way for Pugh to relate to her A Good Person character on a personal level: “for me, whenever I was particularly low as a teenager, I would do lots of quick fixes,” she told USA Today. 

“I would buy things like nail kits or scissors and go onto YouTube and find out how to do it,” she admitted. “I was just looking in any direction but the thing that was making me sad.”

Florence Pugh keeps it real all the time; she’s not afraid to cut her own hair, and she’s certainly not afraid of speaking on tough topics like body image and diet culture in Hollywood. 

Main image credit: @babskymakeup