This article has been updated by Rory O'Connor.
Usually an actor needs at least a few small parts in films to allow them to get used to working on the big screen, before they reveal who they are and what they can do. Not Florence Pugh.
Ever since appearing on the scene as the co-lead in The Falling in 2014 — a role Pugh played when she was still in school, and one that led stunned reviewers at the time to pre-emptively declare her a star — Pugh has looked destined for Hollywood stardom. Now, just over a decade on from that breakout role, she’s more than delivered on that promise — appearing in highly acclaimed dramas, enormous commercial hits and some of the biggest franchises around.
In 2026, she’s set to appear in all three of those things, with a role in Zoe Kazan’s limited series adaptation of East of Eden — in which she’s set to play Cathy, the book’s fascinating antagonist — arriving just a few months before Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three. With all that good stuff on the horizon, it feels like a good time to take a look back over her career thus far and round up her best roles — which I’ve arranged below in ascending order. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Don’t Worry Darling (2022)
I mean, let’s be honest: Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling was basically a hot mess. So much so, in fact, that even the delirious fallout that took place around its Venice Film Festival unveiling — allegedly due in some part to Wilde and Harry Styles’ on-set romance — still couldn’t distract critics from how all over the place it was.
Regardless of that, nobody had a bad word to say about Pugh’s central performance in what was an interesting but ultimately misjudged attempt to update The Stepford Wives for the age of the manosphere. In truth, along with Chris Pine, Pugh was one of the only people to come away with their reputations enhanced.
We Live in Time (2024)
With Andrew Garfield and Pugh in the lead roles and a cinemagoing public craving for the next great British rom com (something in the vein of About Time and One Day, please?), everything seemed to be in just the right place for We Live in Time to be an instant classic — but then it wasn't.
Unfortunately, the characters, despite the performances, were just a little too unrelatable and the plot a little too far-fetched, and not in a good way. And yet, this is a quality looking film and, if you are a fan of these two actors, it more than passes the time.
Oppenheimer (2023)
In 2023, Pugh made a brief but important appearance in Christopher Nolan’s all-conquering Oppenheimer — a role of limited screentime, perhaps, but a significant part nonetheless in what was one of the most important Hollywood productions of the last decade.
Nolan’s biopic on the godfather of the atomic bomb is naturally closer to what he achieved with Dunkirk than his Batman movies, but even at close to three hours it's a brilliant example of history as entertainment done right.
The Falling (2014)
As we mentioned above, Pugh got her first big break in The Falling, a woozy, allegorical drama about a fainting outbreak in a 1960s English girls’ school. At the time, it seemed likely that her co-lead, Maisie Williams, looked destined for an A-list career, having dazzled fans and critics with her precocious performances as Arya Stark over the first few seasons of Game of Thrones — but as it turned out, Pugh has gone on to be more the more successful of the two.
Regardless, if you're a fan of either one of them (and appreciate spooky girls school films like Picnic at Hanging Rock) it’s well worth going back to check this one out.
Dune Part: Two (2023)
Building on the momentum of Oppenheimer, 2024 turned out to be another landmark year for the actress — thanks partially to We Live in Time but mostly because of her supporting turn in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, a movie that took everything that worked with its monolithic predecessor and turned up the dials.
As the daughter of the emperor — the princess who Paul Atreidis is duty-bound to marry — Pugh doesn’t exactly get an enormous amount of screentime, but she’s a memorable presence throughout and more than sets up the character for what will likely be a much juicier role in Part Three.
The Wonder (2022)
For all that, Pugh’s best work as an actress has tended to come in films that are beguiling and enveloping to the point of being overwhelming, preferably with an element of folk horror. In Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder, a tale full of religious fervour and creeping dread, she plays an English nurse who visits Ireland to witness an alleged miracle — and gives a small miracle of a performance herself.
Released between Black Widow and Oppenheimer, this movie perhaps went a little under the radar, but if you appreciate her in movies like Falling and Midsommar, we recommend seeking it out.
Lady Macbeth (2016)
Back in the early days of her career, Pugh followed up The Falling with an even stronger turn in Lady Macbeth, a hard-as-nails domestic drama set in Northumberland in 1865. Not a Shakespeare story, per se, and arguably more brutal and shocking than anything the Bard ever came up with, the film is powered by Pugh's performance as a woman who escapes her loveless marriage and nightmarish home life by resorting to violence and much else besides.
It’s a remarkable performance in a movie that requires complete conviction from its lead actress — and needless to say, Pugh never wavers.
Fighting with My Family (2019)
After Lady Macbeth, Pugh started popping up all over the place. First in the post-Taken Liam Neeson thriller The Commuter, and then in the historical drama Outlaw King — if to varying degrees of success. She made a swift return to form, however, by topping the bill in Fighting with My Family, Stephen Merchant’s true-life comedy drama about a British wrestler, Saraya Bevis, who makes it as a WWE star at the expense of her supposedly more talented brother.
Along with showcasing her potential action chops, the film provided another platform for Pugh to play a young woman defying expectations, and this time in a palatable mainstream crowd-pleaser — one that set her on the way for some of the biggest roles out there.
Black Widow & Thunderbolts* (2021 & 2025)
Indeed, just two years after Merchant's film, Pugh was fighting with her family again — this time as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe opposite Scarlett Johansson in Black Widow, one of the best of the post-Endgame MCU movies. For the film, she played Natasha Romonov’s sister, and fellow recovering assassin, Yelena — a role she is so charismatic in that you almost don’t need to concern yourself with her Russian accent.
We’ve paired this one up with her even better performance in Thunderbolts* last year — a superhero team-up movie in which she was undoubtedly the central character and emotional core. Look out for her as Yelena when she reprises the role in Avengers: Doomsday later this year.
Little Women (2019)
If I had to choose, I’d say the role that really convinced me that Pugh was going to be a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood was the performance she gave alongside Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan and, most significantly, Meryl Streep in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.
Helmed by the future Barbie director, Pugh more than held her own alongside the most decorated actor in history and even stole some of the scenes she shared with Saoirse Ronan. For her efforts, she went on to earn her first nomination at the Academy Awards — and a richly deserved one at that.
Midsommar (2019)
Our choice of the best Florence Pugh movie goes some way beyond mere dread. Pugh takes the lead in Hereditary director Ari Aster’s Midsommar, a simply unforgettable nightmare of a film in which she plays Dani, a traumatised American student whose visit to a rural Swedish commune turns into a symphony of psychological unease and horrifically imaginative violence, as the countryside gathering reveals itself to be a crazed cult.
The film, which is a fine example of how horror movies need not always happen at night, is full of unforgettable sequences, but it's Pugh’s face in the final shot that really stays with you after the credits roll – another reminder, if one was needed, that when it comes to being an A-list film actor, Pugh is here to stay.
