Florence Pugh: I Lost Hundreds of Thousands of Followers — SkimNews
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- Florence Pugh told Vanity Fair she has likely lost hundreds of thousands of social media followers over the last few years because of her outspoken support for Palestine.
- Pugh said she was "never scared" to speak publicly on the issue and was "confused" by Hollywood's silence, remarking that other celebrities' reluctance made her "even more in the right to talk about it."
- At the September Together for Palestine fundraising concert, Pugh told the crowd that "silence in the face of such suffering is not neutrality. It is complicity," according to the article.
- Per Vanity Fair, nobody on Pugh's team advised her to stay quiet on Palestine, and she expressed gratitude to those who helped her make it to the event despite it conflicting with production on "Avengers: Doomsday."
- The Together for Palestine event raised more than $2 million for humanitarian organizations and featured a bill including Gorillaz, Brian Eno, PinkPantheress, Bastille, James Blake, and Sampha.
- Pugh also described the dissonance of scrolling between Gaza footage of "motherless and fatherless" babies and her own social media highlights, saying "empathy should not be this hard."
Why it matters: Pugh's profile gives a rare on-the-record account from a major Hollywood star quantifying the personal cost — six-figure follower loss — of breaking industry silence on Gaza, while also noting her team did not counsel restraint, a detail that contrasts with the widespread corporate pattern of advising stars to avoid the topic.
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