Florence Pugh (Oxford, 29) has admitted the reason why she no longer speaks publicly about her love life: troll. In 2019, the British actress was in a relationship with actor Zach Braff (New Jersey, 50 years old) and they received a lot of negative comments due to their 21 year age difference. And that harassment online It was a difficult time for the then couple, which is why the interpreter no longer talks about it. “In this world, with relationships and romance, it doesn’t matter if you talk about it a lot or a little, people don’t care. They want a story,” Pugh said in an interview with THE Louis Theroux podcast. “They want to reality show, so it doesn’t matter how much you say you love someone or how happy they make you; If they don’t like it and it doesn’t fit their image of you, they don’t care.”
The love story of the actress from films like Little Women OR Don’t worry dear with Braff, who became famous in the 2000s for the series scrubsit lasted from 2019 to 2022. When the couple went public with their relationship, Pugh has now said she received “a reasonable amount of insults just because of the age difference.” In particular, he recalls one time when he uploaded a photo of himself to his Instagram, where he now has 10 million followers, to celebrate his birthday: “Within eight minutes of posting the photo, about 70% of the comments were insults and horrible comments. Basically, they were harassing someone on my networks,” he says. “This is the first time in my entire Instagram career that I have had to disable comments. I have never been an Instagram account that encourages this type of behavior. I have never liked that toxic environment.”
The actress continues the interview by saying that after that event she decided to upload a video to talk to her followers. In it he says: “I will not allow this behavior on my behalf. I’m 24, I’ve been working since I was 17 and I’ve been an adult since I was 18, I don’t need to be told who I can or can’t love and I wouldn’t tell anyone, it’s not their job. I don’t know since when cyberbullying shot fashionable AND Cold. If you don’t like it, unfollow me.”
“I stood up for him, I stood up for him and I stood up for me to be allowed to do what I wanted, and that changed some people’s minds,” he tells the host. “I got to a point where it was horrible to see someone close to me get something like that, and it was never against me, just against him. I think I needed to make sure everyone was well informed, so I made a video that got a lot of support, which was great. I think it’s important to remind people on the internet that we’re real.”
That wasn’t the only time Pugh faced criticism. In 2022, she received negative comments about her body after wearing a dress in which her breasts were visible. Also on her Instagram she writes: “It’s not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last, that a woman hears about what’s wrong with her body from a crowd of strangers, what’s worrying is how vulgar some men can be.” She added: “Many of you have aggressively wanted to let me know how disappointed you are with my ‘small boobs’ or how embarrassed I should be for having a ‘flat chest’. I have lived in my body for a long time. I am fully aware of the size of my chest and I am not afraid of it.”
Pugh and Braff ended the relationship very discreetly and without explaining the reasons. “We tried to make this separation happen without the world knowing, because it was a relationship that everyone had an opinion on,” she told the magazine in 2022. Harper’s BAZAAR. The breakup was very difficult because of everything they had to go through in the relationship. The actress told in podcasts The pain was so bad that he ended up self-harming. “I was constantly hurting myself. I was cutting things and ripping huge chunks out of my hands. I never did that again. My body was in total panic. I was hurting myself to take care of myself, which is funny, my body was crying out for help. I think it was more and more obvious that something was wrong,” he admits.
It took a lot of work on the part of the interpreter to overcome that episode and not only with his followers, but also with his loved ones. “I think for a long time I didn’t expose that part of my life, even to my friends. And obviously then you find yourself in a hole or chaos.” However, Pugh admits that she has a partner and feels “very good”, although obviously she will not reveal the identity of her partner.
