Florence Pugh Wishes You Cared Less About Her Harry Styles Sex Scenes

Sex sells, right? Don’t Worry Darling (aka the movie set where actor Harry Styles met director Olivia Wilde) will come out on Sept. 23, and ahead of its release, production company New Line Cinema has dropped two trailers containing snippets of mega-steamy scenes. The clips appear to feature Styles’ character, Jack, going down on Florence Pugh’s character, Alice, and no, fans literally cannot stop talking about it. But Pugh kinda wishes they would. In a new interview, Pugh explained why she wishes people cared less about her sex scenes, and her quotes about it make a lot of sense.

“When it’s reduced to your sex scenes, or to watch the most famous man in the world go down on someone, it’s not why we do it. It’s not why I’m in this industry,” Pugh said in her Harper’s Bazaar September issue cover story, which hit the internet on Aug. 16. “Obviously, the nature of hiring the most famous pop star in the world, you’re going to have conversations like that. That’s just not what I’m going to be discussing because [this movie is] bigger and better than that. And the people who made it are bigger and better than that.”

While sex is obviously present in Don't Worry Darling, it’s not the focus of the film. Instead, the movie explores a 1950s utopian housing community in which the husbands work for something mysterious called The Victory Project and the wives stay home. But something is definitely afoot, and Pugh’s character Alice starts to get suspicious. The trailers show some pretty messed-up stuff, like Chris Pine’s character Frank (secretly?) watching Jack and Alice hook up, a woman smashing her head into a mirror, Alice suffocating herself with Saran wrap, and more.

Pugh isn’t the only person who’d rather have less fanfare around the sex scenes. Back in December 2021, Wilde told Vogue she wants viewers to “realize how rarely they see female hunger, and specifically this type of female pleasure.” Very cool — except there might be just one problem. Is the sex depicted in the film truly consensual?

There’s a theory that the wives in the movie are actually living in a simulation (because Wilde once said she was partly inspired by The Matrix, which also features characters in such circumstances). If that theory is true, Pugh’s character is actually being manipulated and can’t give consent.

On Twitter, some people have expressed disappointment in the movie (and its marketing) for depicting these scenes. “As someone with sexual trauma, the way @oliviawilde and other members of the movie crew are handling don’t worry darling is extremely triggering. coercion, deception, and being effectively unconscious during sex scenes cannot in any world be marketed as female pleasure; it is rape,” one Twitter user wrote on Aug. 15.

Wilde has yet to respond to the concerns, although she did post and delete an Aug. 15 Instagram Story celebrating the film’s sex scenes.

Hopefully, the film’s release this fall will bring some clarity — and some peace of mind.