Florence Pugh in A Good Person
(Picture: Twitter)The first trailer for Zach Braff’s new film A Good Person, which will star Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman, has just been released.
The film will tell the story of Pugh’s character Allison, whose life starts to unravel when she is involved in a fatal car accident, for which she feels responsible.
“The woman that died was about to be my sister-in-law,” says Allison’s voice over a slow-motion sequence of the crash.
The one-minute-45-second trailer opens by introducing the viewer to the happy relationship between Allison and Nathan, with Nathan (who is played by Chinaza Uche) gazing fondly at Allison at a party. Then the camera flashes to the crash – Nathan is in the car alongside Allison and another woman – and then to Freeman’s character Daniel’s face as he receives the devastating telephone call about his child.
The trailer stays purposefully ambiguous – after that point, it isn’t clear what has happened to Nathan. In the subsequent scenes Allison looks much changed: she’s cut her hair and looks unkempt; then she is furiously cycling down the road. There looks like there is a scene where she tries to overdose on pills and in another she is attending a help meeting. These difficult scenes are dispersed with tender moments between Allison and Daniel. By the looks of it, A Good Person is going to be a real tear-jerker.
On Wednesday, Sky Cinema Tweeted the first photo of Pugh in the film, with a caption that said, “@florencepugh as you’ve never seen her before.” It added that A Good Person will be “a story of loss and hope”.
.@florencepugh as you’ve never seen her before in #AGoodPerson
— Sky Cinema (@SkyCinema) December 14, 2022
A story of loss and hope directed by @zachbraff. Coming to Sky Cinema in 2023 pic.twitter.com/NB4QvAZuqd
Braff had apparently written A Good Person with Pugh in mind and he sang her praises in an interview with Collider in March. He said: “Florence Pugh’s performance in the movie, I know I’m biased, but it’s the most miraculous thing you will ever see. I’m not overselling it. It’s a dramedy. It’s her going toe-to-toe with Morgan Freeman.”
He also complimented Freeman, saying, “You haven’t seen Morgan like this in years” before returning to Pugh: “I know that anything Florence does is incredible. People say she’s maybe the best actress of her generation. I think she’s one of the best actresses working. This performance she gives is unbelievable.”
A Good Person is not Braff’s first foray into directing by any means. The actor has been working behind the camera since 1997, when he directed the short Lionel on a Sunday. Most recently he has directed episodes of the American sports comedy-drama show Ted Lasso and the 2021-released Amazon Prime anthology series Solos, which also starred Freeman.
Much of Braff’s past film work, including his 2004 directorial feature-length debut Garden State, which is about a man who returns home to New Jersey to attend his mother’s funeral, and 2014’s Wish I Was Here, which is about a struggling actor, have leant heavily into the indie genre. Critic Mark Kermode reviewed Wish I Was Here, saying, the film “sounds awful, but it’s actually quite likeable in an indulgent indie-spirited way”. Braff also directed Pugh in the 2019 11-minute short In the Time it Takes to Get There.
In this year’s October issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK, Pugh spoke about working with Braff on A Good Person. She said: “The movie we made together was probably one of my favourite experiences... It felt like a very natural and easy thing to do.”
She added: “I feel like I am now getting into this groove in my career, where I’m knowing what I can take, what I give, and what I will not accept any more.”
Braff and Pugh dated for approximately three years, with Pugh confirming in the Bazaar interview that the duo had called it quits earlier this year.
The relationship had created a mountain of interest as Pugh and Braff had a 21-year age gap. In the Harper’s Bazaar interview Pugh said: “We’ve been trying to do this separation without the world knowing, because it’s been a relationship that everybody has an opinion on... We just felt something like this would really do us the benefit of not having millions of people telling us how happy they are that we’re not together. So, we’ve done that.”
Pugh has arguably been one of this year’s most talked about actors: in July, she wore a semi-sheer pink Valentino Haute Couture gown to the Italian fashion house’s fashion show which caused a wave of backlash. The actor revealed her nipples and she was subsequently humiliated for having smaller breasts.
In response, on an Instagram post, Pugh said: “Listen, I knew when I wore that incredible Valentino dress that there was no way there wouldn’t be a commentary on it. Whether it be negative or positive, we all knew what we were doing. I was excited to wear it, not a wink of me was nervous. I wasn’t before, during or even now after.
“What’s been interesting to watch and witness is just how easy it is for men to totally destroy a woman’s body, publicly, proudly, for everyone to see. You even do it with your job titles and work emails in your bio..?”
But the gossip didn’t stop there, as in August, during the press tour for Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling (which also starred Harry Styles, Gemma Chan and Chris Pine) it was reported that there had been filming tensions between Pugh and Wilde which culminated in Pugh missing some of the film’s promotion. For example, she did not attend the film’s New York premiere. At the time, the actor was also filming for Dune: Part Two so some news reports speculated that this could also be a reason that Pugh was not in New York.
This year Pugh also starred in Sebastián Lelio’s (the director who made the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman) period drama The Wonder, which the Standard described as a “tense tale” in which “Florence Pugh is a miracle”.
This year, Morgan Freeman starred in two thrillers. The first was Paradise Highway, which also starred Juliette Binoche and Frank Grillo (Avengers: Endgame) and told the story of a truck driver who agrees to smuggle a girl across state lines while a dogged FBI agent (Freeman) tracks them. The second was the widely panned November-released The Minute You Wake Up Dead, about a stockbroker who gets entangled in a murder.
