Oxford-born star Florence Pugh opens up to Gemma Dunn about her new film centred on a young woman in the depths of opioid addiction.
Writing about America’s opioid crisis has been on Zach Braff’s radar for a good two decades.
The protagonist in his Sky Original drama film, A Good Person, is Allison, a young woman whose world falls apart when she survives a fatal car accident, whilst in recovery for an opioid addiction and unresolved grief.
Twenty-seven-year-old Florence Pugh takes on Allison and serves as a producer alongside her former boyfriend Braff.
Following the unimaginable tragedy, she forms an unlikely friendship with her would-be father-in-law, Daniel (played by Morgan Freeman) which gives her a fighting chance to put her life back together.
Pugh said: “Zach wrote the script during the beginning of the (Covid-19) pandemic; he would go down and write in the office and would come back, like five hours later, having mustered up some new scene,” Pugh remembers, having lived with the Scrubs star at the time, before their relationship ended last year.
She continued: “I wasn’t allowed to touch it, read it, or even just look at anything until it was finished.
“But we would talk through things, and we would plan where things would go, which was really helpful.”
“And then when I received the script, the whole joy is that you get to fill in the gaps as an actor, you get to fill out this role, which was already pretty much me.
"It was written for me, so it sounded like me.”
As for producing, she said: “It was my first stab at it and I loved it.
"I just felt really relieved as it was something that I’d been wanting to do or had kind of been doing on previous projects without really knowing, and I had fun with it.
"So that was great.”
In order to prepare for the part, Pugh spoke to numerous people who had suffered with opioid addiction; a widespread catastrophe that is reportedly taking the lives of more than 100,000 Americans each year.
She said: “I spent time with an ex-addict who is now an AA sponsor and leads groups for young people.
“So it was really helpful just understanding the physicalities and the pain. What goes through their minds. What the actual struggle is about. You can’t make a movie like this without actually doing the work.”
“I think the best way to sum it up is (addiction) doesn’t choose. It can happen to anyone.
“I think the worst thing to imagine is that this happens to a specific type of person, from a specific type of family.
“People get prescribed things, and their life can change. It could be that you actually were in pain, and you did come from an awful accident – it affects everyone.”
The New Jersey native Braff confirmed he wrote the role with "Florence in mind."
He said “She was the lead from the get-go. And then when I finally did show it to her, and she liked it, she gave me some really valuable notes.”
The 47-year-old actor and filmmaker first learnt of the issue when he finished college in 1998, recalling, “a young woman, who I knew from high school, told me what her job was, and she was a pharmaceutical rep".
“She described how she got all this data from the doctors, and if she got them to increase their prescriptions for whatever she was selling, she got a bonus."
“And if they did enough, they got a golf weekend.
“I remember thinking: ‘This is messed up, like, this is how it works. And this is legal.’
"Now cut to this preposterously insane opioid crisis we have in the United States, and everyone is figuring out how it was done.
"This is what the Sackler family (pharmaceutical company founders) did to our country and the world. It’s always stuck with me.
“I read a few books about it, and I just always found it fascinating and wanted to write about it because I was sort of angry.
"I wanted to tell a very personal human story about one woman and what it did to her life.”
Fast forward 25 years, Golden-Globe nominee, Braff has done just that, detailing the opioid epidemic – one of the worst public health disasters affecting the US today – in his brand-new directorial, A Good Person.
It’s no secret that Pugh favours intense roles (which often require lots of crying), having previously stated she has “never picked a role unless I’ve been scared of it”.
Take her portrayal of the desolate Dani Ardor in horror epic Midsommar, for example, or her Oscar-nominated performance in period drama adaptation Little Women; Don’t Worry Darling; or her convincing turn as a nurse in Sebastian Lelio’s arrestingly strange film, The Wonder.
Though Braff admits he was keen to inject some light into proceedings in this instance, reasoning.
He said: “The times in my life when I’ve been in really depressed states and dealing with grief, I was so grateful for someone making a joke and the belly laugh that is so necessary to have a relief from it.
“I also find as a filmmaker, if you give the audience too much drama, it just feels too maudlin. It’s hard to digest it.
“So what I tried to do was infuse it with humour, just to the point that when it feels quite intense, there’s a release.”
Celeste O’Connor, Molly Shannon, Toby Onwumere and Zoe Lister-Jones also feature.
A Good Person is in cinemas from Friday March 24, and on Sky Cinema from Friday April 28.
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