INTERNATIONAL DESK — Netflix viewers may be loving East of Eden, but Florence Pugh has been keeping her distance from the reviews. The actress says she was so personally invested in the adaptation that seeing the public reaction felt like too much to handle.
Speaking at a For Your Consideration event for the series on Friday, Pugh admitted she avoided looking at the response — even as the show quickly found an audience after its release last month. “I can’t look at it, I can’t,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. The process of making this was so long and it had so many of my sticky fingerprints all over it — I was so nervous to release it because I was just going to be so sad if people didn’t understand it or didn’t like it.
It was so much of my life and so much of me as a performer that I put into it that I just didn’t want to look. So I’m glad I didn’t but apparently people like it!” Pugh stars in and executive produces the limited series, adapted from John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel. Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist also star, while Zoe Kazan serves as writer and co-showrunner.
Kazan was equally taken aback by the response, saying, “It’s very overwhelming,” before describing how relieved she felt that audiences had connected with the literary period drama. For Pugh, the experience has also strengthened her desire to stay involved behind the scenes. “I want to keep producing, I want to keep being a part of projects from the beginning,” she said.