Florence Pugh says she doesn't want to be reduced to her sex scenes with Harry Styles

Florence Pugh is not about to be defined by any man -- not Zach Braff and certainly not Harry Styles. Florence opened up to Harper's Bazaar about her quiet split with Zach Braff, her insistence that people NOT ask her about her intimate scenes with Harry Styles and her proud nipple moment in Rome this summer.

Florence's latest film, Don’t Worry Darling, is set to premiere in September, and her famous co-stars include pop star Harry Styles and actor/director Olivia Wilde, who began a romantic relationship in the midst of making the film. When the trailer was released earlier this year, featuring Florence and Harry engaged in some scandalous states of undress, it sent Styles stans into a frenzy, and even moreso was some vitriol directed at Olivia Wilde, simply for dating him.

According to the Midsommar star, she finds all of that anger misguided.

“When it’s reduced to your sex scenes, or to watch the most famous man in the world go down on someone, it’s not why we do it. It’s not why I’m in this industry,” Florence says.

She continued, “Obviously, the nature of hiring the most famous pop star in the world, you’re going to have conversations like that. That’s just not what I’m going to be discussing because [this movie is] bigger and better than that. And the people who made it are bigger and better than that.”

Pugh also got into her thoughts on the celebrity machine that seems to swirl around her at every moment. 

Talking candidly about paparazzi and the public’s seemingly unending fascination with her personal life, the 26-year-old got vulnerable with news about her relationship with Garden State actor/director Zach Braff. Namely: they called it quits earlier this year.

“We’ve been trying to do this separation without the world knowing, because it’s been a relationship that everybody has an opinion on,” she tells the outlet.

That “opinion” she is referring to might be the backlash the Scrubs actor received for dating Florence who is nearly half his age. He is currently 47, she is 26, and dating rumours first arose in 2019 when she was just 23. The Little Women star had previously taken to Instagram to clap back at those who claimed Zach was “grooming” her and that their relationship was an abuse of power. 

She said in 2020, in part, “ I do not need you to tell me who I should and should not love and I would never in my life tell anyone who they can and cannot love. It is not your place.”Anyone have a problem with that? If they do, Pugh says they can unfollow her and problem solved.”

Now, in telling Harper’s Bazaar about their breakup, she bitterly admits, “We just felt something like this would really do us the benefit of not having millions of people telling us how happy they are that we’re not together. So we’ve done that.”

She then added, forlornly, “I automatically get a lumpy throat when I talk about it.”

The outlet notes that the exes collaborated on a new movie, once again written by Zach, called A Good Person, “about a young woman who has to pick up the pieces of her life after a sudden tragedy.”

“The movie that we made together genuinely was probably one of my most favorite experiences,” she says. “It felt like a very natural and easy thing to do.”

Her interview also touched on the intrusive celebrity media machine that attempts to invade her privacy, she claims.

“Whenever I feel like that line has been crossed in my life, whether it’s paparazzi taking private moments, or moments that aren’t even real, or gossip channels that encourage members of the public to share private moments of famous people walking down the street, I think it’s incredibly wrong,” she said.

“I don’t think that people, just because they have this job, that every aspect of their life should be watched and written about. We haven’t signed up for a reality TV show,” she added.

It’s obvious at this point that Florence is not to be triffled with and as she puts it, she gets that gumption from her grandmother. Back in July, she told critics to “grow up” over the hullabaloo of her visible nipples when she wore a pink Valentino gown to a Rome fashion show. Showing her granny the pictures was par for the course for the Pugh family.

“I went to see my gran, and she goes, ‘So what’s all of this business about your nipples then?’ ” she revealed, adding that she showed her granny the photographs of her wearing the dress. “She gasped. Because the dress was so beautiful.”