Florence Pugh can't make movies like Midsommar again as she put herself through psychological pain

Florence Pugh can no longer play roles like Dani in 'Midsommar' as she feels as though she "abused myself in the places that I got myself to go".

The 29-year-old actress portrayed the protagonist in Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film. Dani is a American student who is traumatised after her mentally ill sister Terri kills their parents and then herself via carbon monoxide poisoning.

As Dani struggles to accept what happened, she and her distant boyfriend Christian and their two friends, Mark and Josh, are invited by Swedish student Pelle to attend a nine-day midsummer festival at his ancestral commune, the Harga, in the rural Halsingland region of Sweden.

But the trip turns into a nightmare when it becomes apparent the commune have invited them for sinister purposes as guests go missing and Dani is forced into taking hallucinogenic mushrooms, manipulated over her deceased parents and and forced to decide whether Christian lives or dies after being crowned the commune's May Queen.

Florence doesn't think she has the mental capacity to play parts like that again because she felt "broken for a long while afterwards".

Appearing on the 'Reign with Josh Smith' podcast, she said: “There have been some roles where I’ve given too much and I’ve been broken for a long while afterwards.

“Like when I did ‘Midsommar', I definitely felt like I abused myself in the places that I got myself to go.

“The nature of figuring these things out is you need to go, ‘Alright, well, I can’t do that again because that was too much.'

“But then I look at that performance and I’m really proud of what I did, and I’m proud of what came out of me. I don’t regret it. But, yeah, there’s definitely things that you have to respect about yourself.”