Florence Pugh gives her whole body to her performance in “We Live in Time,” and, yes, that includes her real hair.
Out in theaters nationwide now, director John Crowley’s film centers on Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Pugh), a young couple who meets when she accidentally runs him over with her car. Despite playing fast and loose with the “cute” part of that meet-cute, the two fall in love and the film follows their life together over the next several years.
Of course, we don’t follow that life chronologically; as the title suggests, the movie jumps around in time to major moments for the couple. According to Crowley, the movie was never going to be told in a linear fashion. “There was one period in the editing room where Justine [Wright] and I, my editor, we stretched it into a linear shape to see and it just didn’t work anyway,” he told TheWrap.
One of the movie’s key moments is when Almut is diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer. Following the diagnosis, she opts to shave her head long before she starts losing her hair. And, yes, Pugh really shaved her head for the role.
“For any actor taking a role like this, it is completely important that you see her head and we see her shaving it — it was just always a no-brainer,” Pugh told British Vogue about the decision to commit so fully.
And, just like she really cut her hair herself on-screen in “A Good Person,” Pugh really had her head shaved on-screen by co-star Garfield in “We Live in Time.” In fact, Tobias and Almut made the shaving a family affair, including their young daughter.
According to Crowley, it was important to everyone involved to actually make the scene joyous, rather than a sad one, because “it wasn’t a film about decline.” The filmmaker further noted that everyone in the scene knew the moment should be “fun” above all else.
“Of course, the subtext is devastating, and that will sort of take care of itself. You don’t need to play that,” he explained. “What you want to do is show three people creating memories of doing something with a degree of, kind of, courage. And it is, you know, testimony to Florence and Andrew’s generosity, not just with each other, but with Grace [Delaney], who played Ella, that they made that child feel so comfortable on set all the time and they were in the playful zone with her from the second she walked on set.”
“So she was gloriously unselfconscious and didn’t necessarily need a huge amount of context-setting from me,” Crowley continued. “She understood what was going on with the scene and why mommy’s hair was being cut, but that it wasn’t a sad thing, it was a fun thing. She just jumped in on that tone, and that’s what’s rather touching about all of it.”
Of course, because Pugh’s head was actually being shaved, Crowley and his actors had to get the scene exactly right on the first take — and that required a lot of moving shots, especially since they only used one camera.
“We just had to make sure the camera worked, because we were only going to get one go at that hair coming off,” Crowley recalled with a laugh.
“We Live in Time” is now in theaters everywhere.
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