The Marvelous Florence Pugh

I have, by virtue of my years in the worlds of fashion and publishing, had plenty of occasions to sit in restaurants with all kinds of very famous people. I cannot remember a single one who was received as warmly as Florence Pugh was at The Benjamin Hollywood on an early Friday in April. To put it another way, I have never in my life gotten better—or more rapturously friendly—service in the entire city of Los Angeles. The 29-year-old actress strode into the oak-lined, windowless restaurant on a shaft of setting sunlight in a two-piece navy silk ensemble, backlit like the action-movie heroine she currently is (she's reprising her role in the Marvel universe as Yelena Belova for Thunderbolts*—we'll get to that in a minute), and greeted everyone with a massive grin followed by a charmingly decisive order: Grey Goose martini, dry as a bone, twist. "I've been thinking about that all day," she smiles. Did she twinkle? I've read about movie stars twinkling before. This may have been my first taste of it.

Pugh—fresh from a day of filming promotional content for Thunderbolts* with the expertly glowing glam to prove it—warned me early that she couldn't say much about the production, whose details (including that pesky titular asterisk) have been kept tightly under wraps in advance of its May premiere. I warned her that Disney wouldn't let me see it beforehand, so I wouldn't know what to ask her anyway. She let loose her famous laugh, a sort of gloriously husky, deep belly shaker. Her martini in its frosted glass was delivered by our beaming waitress. "Our bartender says this is the best martini he's ever made," she says. "No way," Pugh replies warmly. "My friends are going to be so jealous." She snapped a picture of it for a group text: "We have a little martini crew." She'd actually been to The Benjamin a few nights prior with friends and said they'd had the burger and sampled several house martinis. (The most popular is Ben's Martini: gin, vermouth, lemon oil, its own pile of potato chips.) For the record, I don't think her repeated patronage is why our waitress, rhapsodically attentive, lingered—or why the barback later came over to catch up.

Pugh lived here in Los Angeles for a few years. Still, when she arrives, she rolls down the window in the car to smell the city, the sunshine and jasmine and smog. "L.A. always makes my heart go," she says, but these days, it's London that is home. It's where she was able to live her dream, "to have a place and have a local pub and have friends nearby." But as her roles have ratcheted up in visibility, the increased recognition has made the UK capital a bit less comfortable. She says the one-two punch of her Oscar nomination for Little Women and her introduction into the Marvel universe completely changed her reception in the film industry: "It was like I entered a completely different career. Once those two things happened, it's like I walked through a door, and everybody spoke to me differently. And it's not that my work had changed or what I could provide had changed. It was just that there was a whole different way of approaching me—almost like I didn't need to explain my corner anymore. It was like, 'No, no, we got it.'"

Before, her fans all knew her from different things; they all had their separate corners of the room. Now, all those groups in the corners fill the space. That kind of mass appeal means people notice when and where she goes, who she's with, and what they're doing while they're there, which makes going out at all a decision that can't be taken as lightly as one might like. As a result, "I feel like I don't get the most out of the city that I live in. … It feels more and more like it's not my place," she says. Pugh thinks she'll eventually settle somewhere a little slower-paced, a bit more pastoral. "That's probably on the cards at some point," she smiles, "to have a bit of dirt outside."

The four Pugh siblings grew up in Oxford, England, to a dancer mother and a restaurateur father. Big personalities abounded, and the kids were all creatively inclined: Florence remembers realizing that she was going to be an actor when she was 6 years old. "I distinctly remember knowing that I was going to be it—knowing it wasn't 'Oh, one day I might…' or 'One day, I hope….' I remember knowing and thinking and imagining my future as an adult when I was tiny and knowing that I would be doing this," she says. Her family was in full support. Her older brother Toby, an actor and musician, began acting before Florence did, so she got to see how it really worked. "Auditions, auditions, auditions, auditions, and you rarely hear much back," she says. "That was a really important thing that I got to witness before I even stepped into it: Oh yeah, I'm going to have to be okay with a lot of rejection." Her older sister Arabella is a vocal coach at the University of Liverpool, and her younger sister Raffie, "who also can sing and can dance, has decided to do something completely left field. She's basically training to be a captain of massive ships—deep-sea ships. [It's] a predominantly male field, and she's like, 'Yeah, I can shatter 'em.'" It's one of the hardest things to study, and Pugh tells me with evident pride, "She's amazing."

It's not quite piloting deep-sea ships, I say, but her filmography is pretty impressive. Even before you factor in the Marvel of it all, it's a murderer's row of auteurs and interesting, chewy roles: Midsommar, The Wonder, Don't Worry Darling, Oppenheimer, Dune: Part Two, We Live in Time. She doesn't shy away from indies, which has made her beloved across the industry (and clearly in this restaurant), and she uses her body on-screen in a way that always manages to feel unique and resonant and honest—the famed chin-crinkling "ugly cry" twist of her mouth from Midsommar and Little Women and, most recently, the scene where Andrew Garfield (really) shaved her head for last year's weeper, We Live in Time. ("I was terrified 'cause we didn't know how it would look until it happened. Can you imagine if I'd had an egg?!" she cackles.) "I feel like I've always had a good understanding of what makes me tick," she says now about how she selects her roles. "In my mind, I definitely have a clock of understanding what I know I still have to show and when I want to show it. So I know of things and characters and ways that I want to perform for like the next 10 to 15 years. It's just about finding the right one that I can associate that with." It's those unexpected indie projects that she says "keep your brain active."

She feels lucky to have begun her career when she did. For one thing, she managed to neatly avoid the worst of social media hysteria. "I was on Instagram, but it wasn't really used as it is now. … I literally posted absolute shit," she says. "Not embarrassing stuff thankfully, but more like, 'Oh, my friend with a beanie all the way down her face.' It wasn't anything special, and I actually even remember when a stranger liked one of my pictures. I was like, 'Ew, stranger danger. Who's that? Why are you liking that, @Nick123ILikeSocks or whatever it was?" (Her IG follower count today is 9.4 million. That's a lot of strangers.)