“I bit the head off a live cow” – Florence Pugh reveals early struggles to get noticed in auditions

Florence Pugh is one of the hottest stars in both Britain and Hollywood at the moment, but her early days in the acting profession were a struggle just to get noticed, as she reveals in a candid new interview.

“I once bit the head of a live cow,” she laughed, perhaps a little embarrassed at the memory.

“It was for a small part in a BBC drama, there were a lot of girls there, I knew I had to stand out. The part was for a rock star who had some, you know, issues. The other girls were ranting and raving, so I thought I’d try something different, you know, something memorable.

“I excused myself and went and got a cow from a nearby field. When it was my turn, I brought the cow in with me, read some of the dialogue and then bit the head off the animal.

“Problem was, it turns out that biting the head off a cow isn’t as easy as you might think. It’s quite big, the neck is really chewy. I was hoping that I’d just snap the head off, but it didn’t work. So, I had to chew through the beast’s neck. It took about ten minutes, the cow was going mad and mooing, there was blood all over me, all over the director. It was pretty cringy. Needless to say, I didn’t get the part.”

Biting the head off a cow wasn’t the only extreme measure Florence took to get noticed.

“Oh god no, I tried all sorts of things,” she went on.

“Learning ancient Sumerian, travelling forward in time, setting the audition room on fire, becoming bassist in the Bangles, burying myself alive, hovering six inches above the ground, changing my name to Barry, transmuting base metal into pure gold, and going on a killing spree.

“You’ve got to stand out.”

Florence Pugh will star in Doris later this year, the story of a young woman the late nineteenth century who bites the head off a cow in protest against society’s repression.