Florence Pugh says ‘We Live in Time’ is the hardest film she’s done

NEW YORK — For Florence Pugh, there’s a fail-safe way to bring the waterworks.
“Anything to do with animals makes my heart completely melt, whether it’s a dog or a horse or a pig,” Pugh, 28, says, playing with a stress ball at the end of a long bout of interviews. “I watched ‘Babe’ the other day and was just weeping.” (The first “Babe,” she clarifies, not the deranged 1998 sequel: “A terrifying movie. So scary!”)
Now, the British actress has a bona fide tearjerker of her own: “We Live in Time,” which opens in New York and Los Angeles Friday before expanding to theaters nationwide Oct. 18. The life-affirming romance follows Almut (Pugh), a gourmet chef who falls in love with Tobias (Andrew Garfield), a recently divorced cereal salesman, after she accidentally hits him with her car. The film captures life’s highs and lows ― giving birth, wedding planning, terminal illness ― but all with a touch of humor and absurdity.
“Florence and Andrew were like amazing gymnasts spinning between different tones,” says director John Crowley (“Brooklyn”). In life, people find humor “in those tougher moments. That’s certainly been my experience with it.”  
Garfield, 41, says he wasn’t seeking work when he first got pitched the project. His mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2019, and soon after the pandemic, he spent months promoting his Oscar- and Emmy-nominated turns in “tick, tick… BOOM!” and “Under the Banner of Heaven,” respectively.
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“I was taking a break and some time to myself,” Garfield recalls. “But when I read the script, I was like, ‘Oh, this feels like what I’m living through. I feel like this could be a part of the healing process.’ It didn’t feel like work; it became a vehicle for me to explore what life was all about now, after living for 40 years. I realized there’s more life to live, and I want to do it well.”
Pugh saw the film as an opportunity to tell a story about “the most human of things,” having spent much of her time onscreen with superheroes (“Black Widow”), scientists (“Oppenheimer”) and Swedish cults (“Midsommar”).
“I hadn’t done a love story or something with this type of grief,” she says, calling it “harder” than any movie she’d done before. “There was nothing to hide behind. I was playing someone who’s probably quite close to friends I know, or even parts of me, so there’s just so much more rawness to it.”
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The movie drops in on Tobias and Almut’s most intimate moments, from passionate sex scenes to emotionally bruising arguments. As a result, Garfield and Pugh were tasked with believably depicting a years-long relationship in just two months of shooting. The actors became fast friends, Pugh says, because “we were both really turned on by the idea of being in that world as intensely as the other.”
Adds Garfield: “Sometimes one of us is in the mood for joy, and the other is like, ‘No, I really want to talk to you about my deepest, darkest things.’ We could meet each other in those high and low places, which is rare and beautiful. We want to have meaningful conversations, but we also want to laugh and have fun and be dumb and stupid.”
They’ve gotten a kick out of the many “We Live in Time” horse memes, inspired by a haggard carousel pony that’s glimpsed briefly in the film. (Garfield is partial to “The Godfather” meme, featuring the severed head of said horse.) An avid foodie who posts impromptu cooking videos on Instagram, Pugh was also delighted by the chance to portray a chef onscreen.
“I got to go and watch how a Michelin-star restaurant would run and how the kitchen operates, which was truly super exciting to me,” Pugh says. She’s still in touch with the head chef, so “I probably could reach out and say, ‘Hey, could you teach me how to make sushi from scratch?’”
The timing of the movie’s release is momentous for Pugh, an Oscar nominee for Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women.” It hits theaters on October 11, which is 10 years to the day after she attended her first premiere, for 2014’s “The Falling,” her professional acting debut.
“Oh, my God, wow! That’s cool. That’s actually quite lovely to know,” Pugh exclaims. Looking back on that night, “I felt like I was walking on clouds; I just gave myself butterflies thinking about it. But I also kept thinking at some point that someone’s going to tell me to leave, like, ‘Oh, no, it doesn’t work. Let’s (re-cast with) somebody else.’ Starting anything in this world feels so big and shiny and hard. You’re just like, ‘I hope what I’m doing is correct.’”
Garfield made his film debut in 2007’s “Boy A,” also directed by Crowley. Back then, “I had no expectations for a career,” he says. “I imagined I’d have to supplement my life with a bunch of other jobs like cater-waitering, and I was absolutely comfortable with that.”
Now, nearly two decades later, “I feel really humbled and moved. We have to pinch ourselves so often to remember that we are so ridiculously lucky.”