At this point, Oscar-nominated star Florence Pugh is probably just as known for her passion for food as she is for her impressive acting career.
Over the 2020 lockdown, Florence kept her followers entertained with her Cooking With Flo Instagram videos, where she would rustle up tasty-looking meals from her kitchen.
A self-proclaimed foodie, the actor has always been vocal about her love of “chopping, chatting, and cooking,” and when British presenter Nick Grimshaw caught wind of this, he was sure to slide into her DMs to invite her onto his food-based podcast.
Needless to say, Florence jumped at the chance, and her episode of Dish with Nick and his cohost, Michelin-star chef Angela Hartnett, was released Wednesday.
As expected, Florence did not disappoint, and she proved her love of food — as well as her good manners — early in the show.
If you didn’t know, on Dish the guests eat a meal that has been prepared by Angela as they chat, and it was only right that this week’s episode was a traditional Christmas dinner.
With Florence being hosted in Nick’s actual London home, he suffered a bit of a kitchen nightmare when he dropped the entire dish of Brussels sprouts all over his kitchen floor.
On the podcast, all three stars can be heard gasping in shock, with Nick shouting, “Ahhh, I dropped the sprouts!” while Florence repeated, “Five seconds!” in reference to the so-called five-second rule that food is still good to eat if it is on the floor for under five seconds.
But Nick struggled with both the amount and the temperature of the vegetables, defeatedly saying, “Oh no, no. There’s too many. No, there’s too many.” A beeping noise then censored explicit language as he added, “Oh they’re so hot! No!”
Clearly feeling bad about his mishap, he sheepishly said to Angela, “I’m so sorry, Ange. They were so hot.”
But Florence was determined to try to make the host feel a bit better, and in a video of the moment that was posted to Nick’s Instagram, she can be seen leaping out of her seat to help.
Getting down on her hands and knees, she gathered the sprouts as she insisted, “Put them back on the plate, I’ll have those!” Proving that she was serious about the offer, she added, “Pass my plate, pass my plate. I’ll have these, I’ll actually have these. I don’t care! I actually don’t care.”
She then admitted, “I ate them directly off the floor.”
And once the issue had been resolved, Florence also couldn’t help teasing Nick over his reaction to the accident — claiming that he appeared to register that he was about to drop them but didn’t do anything to prevent it from happening.
“By the way, when you dropped that, you squealed with the dropping and then continued to drop them,” she joked. “Like, you committed, but in a really annoying way.”
Nick took the jab in good humor, and the rest of the meal went ahead without a hitch — with Florence even sharing some anecdotes from her prestigious acting career along the way.
Opening up about set life, Florence admitted that during breaks from filming, she prefers to rest while surrounded by the crew rather than retreating to her trailer. She explained, “I actually will sleep best in a room full of people that are setting up for the next shot. I just like being around it."
“Like, I could go back to my trailer and have a 10-minute kip, or if they’re just setting up, like, I love bed scenes,” she continued. “Oh my god, they are the best. You need to lie in the bed as they set up and see what you’re going to do in the bed.”
“And then they say, ‘Florence, do you want to go back to your trailer? Do you want to go back to your room?’” she went on. “I always say no, and I just stay there like a good little bean because then they don’t need anyone to come in and help light. I just lie there and I have a full-on kip, and that’s when I sleep my best. Everybody’s just pottering about, and it’s that relaxing thing.”
But sometimes Florence takes the comfort a little too far, with the star admitting that when filming her second-ever movie, Lady Macbeth, she ended up falling asleep when she was supposed to be working.
“I’d done a whole setup where they’ve done all the lighting, and they were ready to shoot and I was still in sleeping mode, obviously,” Florence explained. “The scene was that I would be asleep, and then after some time I would wake up, and then the action for the sunrise, or whatever, would happen.”
“So Will [Oldroyd], the director, was like, ‘OK, Florence, in your own time, you’re obviously going to be sleeping, and then you wake up in your own time, and we’ll just be filming you waking up,’” Florence said, laughing. “I’m like, ‘OK, yeah, got it,’ so I close my eyes, fall asleep, they’re filming, and then eventually part of my brain is like, ‘Oh shit, oh shit!’ and I wake up in a startle!”
But ever the professional, Florence managed to style it out by pretending that the delay in waking up had been an artistic choice. She said, “I’m acting waking up; he [the director] calls cut and comes over like, “Yeah, good, good… So I think next time we’ll just shorten the sleeping bit.’”
