‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Star Florence Pugh Shares Emotional Message on Palestine: “It’s Really Horrible”

Florence Pugh has spent the past year juggling some of the biggest opportunities of her career, from blockbuster franchise work to prestige television, all while navigating the strange rhythm of promoting her projects on social media. That balancing act has clearly weighed on her, and her latest major interview makes that tension impossible to ignore.

The actress has never been shy about using her platform for causes she cares about, often stepping outside the usual celebrity script of staying carefully neutral. That willingness to speak plainly has become something of a throughline in her public life over the past two years, long before this week’s headlines.

Now, in a new cover story for Vanity Fair, Pugh has opened up about how difficult it has become to reconcile her public life with the ongoing suffering in Gaza. Reflecting on the disconnect between her own everyday experiences and what she sees online, she described the emotional toll of scrolling past devastating images in between ordinary moments.

“It’s still happening. 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?” Pugh said, in comments Vanity Fair published as part of its new cover feature.

Pugh’s latest remarks build directly on public statements she has made over the past year and a half. In April 2025, she was among the signatories of a letter addressed to U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, calling on the government to end what the letter described as its complicity in the crisis in Gaza.

That advocacy continued in September 2025, when Pugh took the stage at the Together for Palestine fundraiser at OVO Arena Wembley in London, introduced by fellow actor Riz Ahmed. Addressing the crowd directly, she said “silence in the face of such suffering is not neutrality. It is complicity,” adding that “empathy should not be this hard and it should have never been this hard,” in remarks captured during the event.

The new Vanity Fair feature arrives as part of the magazine’s broader October 2026 issue, which celebrates a range of figures across entertainment, business and culture. For Pugh specifically, the timing lines up with a particularly packed stretch of her career.

She’s currently promoting her upcoming Netflix series ‘East of Eden,’ while also preparing to return as Yelena Belova in December’s ‘Avengers: Doomsday.’ Her résumé over the past several years has ranged from ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Dune: Part Two’ to voice work in ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,’ making her one of the more in-demand names in Hollywood regardless of genre.

That range has also made her outspokenness harder for fans and critics to overlook. Unlike some peers who avoid political subjects entirely during press cycles, Pugh has repeatedly chosen to address Gaza directly when given the platform, even as she promotes some of the biggest franchise projects in the industry.

Her comments in the new interview suggest that tension isn’t something she’s found an easy way to resolve, and that the discomfort itself has become part of how she thinks about fame and visibility. For an actress whose career has increasingly straddled blockbuster spectacle and personal candor, that kind of honesty appears to be very much by design.

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