In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Don’t Worry Darling actor Florence Pugh revealed that she and Zach Braff quietly broke up earlier this year after three years together. “We’ve been trying to do this separation without the world knowing, because it’s been a relationship that everybody has an opinion on,” said Pugh, 26, whose 21-year age gap with the actor-director has often been subject to intense criticism and scrutiny. “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. I automatically get a lumpy throat when I talk about it.”
Pugh and Braff started dating in 2019, shortly after Pugh appeared in Braff’s short film, In the Time It Takes to Get There. Though the two largely kept a low profile, Pugh routinely defended their age gap from online critics. “I’ve always found it funny, how I can be good enough for people to watch my work, and support my work, and pay for tickets, and I’m old enough to be an adult and pay taxes, but I’m not old enough to know who I should and should not have sex with,” Pugh said during a 2020 appearance on the Sue Perkins: An Hour or So With… podcast, adding, “Once again, [it’s] making a young woman feel like shit for no reason.” In a 2021 interview with the Sunday Times, she addressed hateful comments she received after posting a 46th-birthday tribute to Braff on Instagram. “I think it bugs people that it’s not who they expected,” Pugh said at the time. “But it’s my life and I’m not doing anything to please people or to make it a better headline or story. I want to also be a person!”
In her Bazaar interview, Pugh reiterated her discomfort with the public scrutiny she faces as a young female actor. “I don’t think that people, just because they have this job, that every aspect of their life should be watched and written about. We haven’t signed up for a reality TV show,” she said. Prior to the breakup, Pugh and Braff worked together on Braff’s upcoming film, A Good Person. “That movie we made together was probably one of my most favorite experiences,” Pugh said. “It was such a natural and easy thing to do.”