In a new Vanity Fair cover story, Florence Pugh is explaining why she refused to let fear—or a loss of followers—stop her from supporting Palestine.
Pugh, an Oscar-nominated actress, estimates she lost hundreds of thousands of social media followers after making her views known. Last September, she attended the Together for Palestine event, where she said onstage, “Silence in the face of such suffering is not neutrality, it is complicity, and empathy should not be this hard and it should have never been this hard.”
She told Vanity Fair that she still doesn’t understand why it took so long for others to speak up. “I don’t know why it took so long for people to start talking and for people to actually feel sympathy,” she said. But fear, she added, was never part of the equation: “No, I was never scared of it.”
According to Pugh, the widespread silence actually made her more determined. “Weirdly, because so many people actively weren’t, that made me even more confused—and kind of probably even more in the right to talk about it,” she said. Vanity Fair noted that her team never advised her to stay quiet on the subject, and Pugh was grateful to those who helped her attend the event despite her Avengers: Doomsday production schedule.
Even so, Pugh remains deeply affected by the ongoing suffering. “It’s still happening, though,” she said. “Babies are still dying. Mothers are still in pain. It’s really horrible to be watching such pain when so much of our lives just seem to be moving forward. I think that’s what I’ve found so difficult about social media as well: How can I say I’m having a really good time when literally one scroll up, I’m looking at a baby that’s motherless and fatherless?”