Florence Pugh isn’t willing to talk about her romantic relationships anymore.
During an appearance on “The Louis Theroux Podcast” on Monday, the “Don’t Worry Darling” actor named her three-year relationship with Zach Braff as the reason why she keeps certain topics off-limits with the public now.
Pugh said that there was an “insane amount of abuse being hurled at my relationship just because there was an age gap.”
Pugh, now 29, and Braff, 50, have a 21-year age difference.
“With relationships and with romance in this world, it doesn’t matter how much you speak on it, or how little you speak on it ― people don’t care. They want a story,” Pugh explained.
“They sort of want a reality show. And so, it doesn’t really matter how much you say you love someone or how much they make you happy. If they don’t like them and it doesn’t fit that image that they want of you ― they don’t care. And I think that hurt me.”
The “Dune 2” actor said that the online abuse “got to the point where it was just really horrible to see someone that you are with receiving that” kind of hate.
“And it was never at me, it was only at him,” she said. “And I think I just needed to kind of just check everyone, and so I made a video. And it got a lot of love and lots of people were supportive, which was great. And I think people do, online, need to be reminded that we’re real.”
Pugh added that she “stood up for him and I stood up for me just being allowed to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do.”
Despite making the video, she shared that “the more you expose, the more you’re allowing people to have comment on it.”
She continued, “And if they don’t know, they can’t really make comment on it. That being said, I think I’ll always defend people that I love. I will always stand up for them.”
Pugh has said in the past that she only went public about her relationship with Braff because people got “nasty.”
“I had to be public in the past because people were bullying me and bullying my partner,” Pugh said in an interview with British Vogue in 2024. “Mine and Zach’s relationship was actually quite private until it was nasty, and I could see the toll that it was taking on him and us and our families. And that’s when I spoke out.”
The “Midsommar” star previously speculated as to why certain people didn’t approve of her with the “Garden State” director, as the two “weren’t in anyone’s faces,” really.
“It was just that people didn’t like it,” she said. “They imagined me with someone younger and someone in blockbusters. I think young relationships in Hollywood are so easily twisted because they add to the gossip sites.”