Florence Pugh on How Zoe Kazan ‘East of Eden’ Collaboration Helped Boost Her Confidence

When Zoe Kazan set out to adapt East of Eden into what would become the seven-episode Netflix limited series, she only had one actress in mind for the central role of Cathy Ames: Florence Pugh.

“I didn’t have a backup,” Kazan previously told Netflix. “I didn’t have another person that I thought would be just as good. She is the exact right person to play Cathy.”

Elaborating on what it was about Pugh that stood out, Kazan said the actress embodied how John Steinbeck described the character in the novel.

“The way that Cathy Ames is described in the book is kind of doll-like but with something icy or steely underneath,” Kazan told The Hollywood Reporter at East of Eden‘s New York premiere Wednesday night. “And I felt in Florence this mix of a very feminine presentation with, in a Jungian sense not in a gender sense, of masculinity to her soul. That she had a lot of raw emotion and agency and action, which is very Cathy to me.”

Kazan was also struck by Pugh’s performance in 2019’s Midsommar.

“I feel like that performance announced a generational talent,” she said. “I think she’s a genius. It was very clear to me that, even though that character is very different from Cathy, if she can do that magic trick of a performance, she can do this.”

Kazan sought to center Cathy’s perspective and understand more of the motivations behind the complicated antihero. Pugh also serves as an executive producer on East of Eden, taking on a central role in the creation of the series since she was brought on in 2020.

Pugh “felt very honored” when Kazan approached her.

“I couldn’t believe that she was wanting to cast me,” Pugh told THR on the East of Eden premiere red carpet.

Beyond that, though, being able to help shape the adaptation through the executive producer role, Pugh said, helped boost her confidence.

“She really wanted me to be a part of the process; she wanted to create it with me. And that was just huge,” Pugh said. “At that time in my career and in my life, I was being given an opportunity that was a massive moment for me to step up and to lead in a different way. Those moments in people’s careers are the beginning of feeling truly confident about yourself. This project has meant a lot to me.”

Pugh also wrote about her long journey with East of Eden on Instagram, saying of Kazan, “Zoe Kazan has poured her heart and soul into this project, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without her. She was my protector, my work wife, my cheerleader, my confidence. She created something so epic we all wanted to work on it.”

In East of Eden‘s stellar reviews (the limited series boasts an 85 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes), Pugh in particular is praised for her performance.

In his review of East of Eden for THR, chief TV critic Dan Fienberg writes that Pugh, “tears into one of fiction’s great and confounding antagonists, a woman so determined and determinedly wicked that she makes Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair look like a Girl Scout. … Having Pugh playing a character who is, by her very nature, hesitant to reveal her truth is an interesting choice that puts the onus on everybody around her who doesn’t recognize what is so obvious to viewers. Cathy is scary when she lies, but she’s scarier when she tells the truth, with an unobscured honesty that is purely Pugh-ian. She’s so good that even in the second half of the series, when Cathy ages past the point at which Pugh is convincing, it still works.”

Esquire calls Pugh’s performance a “career best,” with USA Today saying that she makes the show a “must see.”