Florence Pugh Recalls ‘Insane Amount of Abuse’ She Received For Zach Braff Relationship

“I’ll always defend people that I love, I will always stand up for them,” Pugh said of her relationships, recalling the time she had to “check” her followers for their comments while dating Braff.

Florence Pugh is opening up about her former relationship with Zach Braff.

The 29-year-old actress appeared on The Louis Theroux Podcast, where she recalled navigating the backlash from the public surrounding their 21 year age gap.

“With relationships and with romance in this world, it doesn’t matter how much you speak on it or how little you speak on it, people don’t care,” Pugh said.

She continued: “They want a story. They sort of want a reality show, and so it doesn’t really matter how much you say you love someone or how much they make you happy, if they don’t like them and it doesn’t fit that image that they want of you, they don’t care.”

After going through the scrutiny during her relationship with Braff, 50, from 2019 to 2022, she vowed not to speak to the press about her relationships “anymore.”

“People will probably want to know a little bit more,” she shared on the podcast. “I think you have to just ask yourself, the more you expose, the more you’re allowing people to have comment on it. If they don’t know, they can’t really make comment on it.”

She found that once the couple went public with their relationship they became victim to “insane amount of abuse.”

“[The abuse was] being hurled at my relationship just because there was an age gap,” she said.

“I’ll always defend people that I love, I will always stand up for them,” she said. “If there needs to be a reset and a bit of a smack on the wrist, I will do that because it’s not fair that so much of your life gets to have jabs.”

Pugh didn’t sit back and allow for the abuse to continue, she called it out. When she posted a video in 2020, celebrating the Scrubs star’s birthday, Pugh received a vast amount of hurtful comments.

“Within about eight minutes of the photo being posted, I had about 70 percent of the comments hurling abuse and being horrid — basically bullying someone on my page,” Pugh said. “It is the first time in my entire Instagram life that I’ve had to turn off the comments on my page. I’ve never been an Instagram page that encourages that. I’ve never been an Instagram page that likes that toxic vibe.”

She added: “I stood up for it and I stood up for him and I stood up for me just being allowed to do whatever the f–k I wanted to do,” the Don’t Worry Darling star said. “That did actually change a few people’s minds. I actually had a few people in the public eye reach out to me and say, ‘I didn’t think of it like that. And thank you for saying that.'”

She told Theroux that her response was a way to “check” her followers.

“It got to the point where it was just really horrible to see someone that you are with receiving that, and it was never at me, it was only at him,” she said. “And I think I just needed to kind of just check everyone, and so I made a video and it got a lot of love and lots of people were supportive, which was great. I do think people online need to be reminded that we’re real.”