Florence Pugh has revealed in a new fragrance interview that her mum sometimes creates bespoke perfumes for her film characters, including a historically researched scent made for Amy March in Little Women. The Oscar-nominated actor said fragrance is the final thing she applies before going on set, using smell to help separate herself from the women she plays.
The revelation comes as the Oscar-nominated Little Women, Midsommar and Black Widow star fronts Max Mara Le Parfum, the Italian fashion house's first fragrance. Pugh said her unusually sensitive sense of smell has shaped both her personal life and her acting process, with her mum occasionally stepping in to formulate period-appropriate scents when a role is set in another era.
Her Mum Turns the Garden Into a Beauty Cabinet
Pugh described her mum as a 'potion maker' who grows plants in her garden before boiling them down into homemade balms, creams and ointments. The family ritual goes beyond perfume: her mum has also made skincare for Pugh's sister's babies, tailoring what she creates to whatever someone needs at the time.
'I choose different perfumes for the characters that I play, and sometimes she makes them,' Pugh said in a new fragrance interview published on 25 August. For period projects, she explained, her mum can go further by creating a perfume designed to be 'technically accurate' to the era rather than simply choosing something from a modern fragrance counter.
That makes scent part of Pugh's costume even when audiences can never detect it. The actor has said each character gets a different perfume and that she puts it on only after she is dressed, treating fragrance as the last layer that helps complete the transformation before cameras roll.
Amy March Got Her Own Historically Inspired Scent
Pugh gave one particularly fitting example from Greta Gerwig's 2019 adaptation of Little Women, in which she played Amy March. The performance earned Pugh her first Academy Award nomination, but behind the scenes, her version of the youngest March sister apparently came with an invisible accessory made by her mum.
'My mom actually made me a perfume for Little Women,' Pugh said, explaining that the blend was built around Amy's lifestyle and what the character could realistically buy or trade for. She described the result as 'really sophisticated, floral, and beautiful', adding that the scent made her love Amy even more.
The detail offers a new look at how Pugh builds characters who can otherwise feel worlds apart, from Amy's 19th-century ambition to Marvel assassin Yelena Belova. Rather than using one signature fragrance across every set, Pugh has said she works out what each woman would smell like and searches for a scent that belongs to that character alone.
Fragrance Has Followed Pugh Since Childhood
Pugh's attachment to perfume started long before film sets. She recalled watching her mum apply fragrance, studying where she sprayed it and being allowed a little on her own wrist before family dinners, a ritual that made her feel grown-up and confident.
That history now overlaps neatly with her latest fashion role. Max Mara describes Le Parfum as an 'invisible coat', with musky woods, tuberose, sandalwood, cedarwood and vanilla forming a floral woody scent inspired by the house's famous outerwear. Pugh, who fronts the campaign, has similarly described fragrance as an 'invisible DNA' that follows her on set, on press tours and at home.
For an actor whose transformations can involve corsets, superhero suits and radically different hair, the most personal part of the process may be the one viewers never see. In Pugh's case, becoming someone else can begin with a bottle made at home.
