Haley Lu Richardson, who graced us with her presence being part of the season two cast of the HBO miniseries The White Lotus, has had a prominent film career. She had a supporting role in Edge of Seventeen only for her breakout role to be in the independent drama Columbia and a starring role in the romantic drama Five Feet Apart alongside Cole Sprouse which Richardson says changed her the most out of any role. However, one role that could have taken even more of a toll on her would have been the lead in Ari Aster’s Midsommar if she didn’t turn down the audition. Although she recently explained why it was the right decision for her at the time.
You may remember Midsommar with leading lady Florence Pugh’s character traveling with her boyfriend and friends to Sweden for a midsummer festival only to discover they’re among a sinister cult. Unpregnant star Haley Lu Richardson spoke to Backstage’s In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast about how her “one that got away” role was for the lead in Ari Aster’s Midsommar that she passed on due to turning down the horror film’s audition.
I had actually done Split, I think, a year or two before. And I was like, I don't want to do another disturbing movie right now.
The Gotham Independent Film Award nominee continued saying that she didn’t want to be, yet again, “going around and crying at these disturbing things” and ended up not taking the meeting. She did play an intense role in M. Night Shyamalan's twisted and terrifying movie Split where she and her friends get abducted by a man with multiple personalities into an underground facility trying to find a way to break out. Even if it’s all just pretend, actors still have to mentally prepare themselves to get into character and portray the overwhelming emotions their characters are feeling. So it’s understandable that after just doing Split that she didn’t want to repeat the process of keeping herself terrified.
The main lead in Midsommar may have been a role that had gotten away, but Haley Lu Richardson said she had no regrets about turning it down as she believed everything happened for a reason. Not to mention, she felt that Florence Pugh pulled off a great performance. In a way, Richardson would have been right about the mental anguish she would have had to endure. Florence Pugh once explained how the role took a toll on her in putting herself in “shit situations” to better bring out the trauma her character went through after losing her family to a murder-suicide carbon monoxide poisoning.
And we can’t forget about that Florence Pugh's intense yet iconic crying scene, where the Black Widow star and the rest of the girls in the cult crying, screaming, and heaving with each other that brought them further connected. Pugh explained that even once the cameras were off, everyone was still crying with each other due to how emotionally draining the experience was. So, something tells me that anything The White Lotus star experienced filming Split would have been ten times more extreme if she took on the Midsommar role.
While Haley Lu Richardson turned down Midsommar, she didn’t need to be in that movie to achieve success. She plans on starring and executive-producing the upcoming Netflix movie Love at First Sight based on the best-selling novel The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. Until then, you can watch Richardson in season two of The White Lotus on your HBO Max subscription. Plus, if you’re curious about seeing Midsommar, then you can watch this folk horror film on your Paramount+ subscription.
