Florence Pugh has played characters that never shy away from making life difficult for everyone around them, and East of Eden gives her the biggest challenge of all time: Cathy Ames, perhaps the most infamous character in John Steinbeck’s novel, with all the baggage that comes with playing somebody readers have spent decades calling cruel.

Zoe Kazan’s adaptation gives Cathy far more room than the 1955 film ever could, and Pugh uses that space to make her feel like a person rather than the cruel character she is. You may despise what Cathy does, but dismissing her outright becomes much harder once Pugh gets hold of the role.

And that is the fun of watching her, really: Pugh has built a career around characters who are a hard pill to swallow, and the minute you think you understood them a bit, they change colour.

So if Cathy Ames has sent you down a Florence Pugh rabbit hole, Netflix has four films waiting to entertain you with more such characters.

Florence Pugh movies to binge if you loved her in East of Eden

The Wonder (Sebastián Lelio, 2022)

Cathy Ames has already shown you what Florence Pugh can do with a woman who doesn’t fit in the perfect mould, and The Wonder gives her another role with plenty to push against. Pugh plays Lib Wright, a Nightingale nurse sent to 1862 Ireland to watch over Anna O’Donnell, an 11-year-old girl whose family insists she has gone months without food. The village calls it a miracle, naturally, and then Lib comes and takes one look at the child’s health, and, well… she is not buying it.

Pugh studied the history of Nightingale nurses for the role, but something to keep in mind here is Lib is carrying baggage of her own because she has lost a daughter, and that grief sticks her into the case. Once she starts questioning what everyone around Anna wants to believe, things start getting thorny pretty fast. Sebastian Lelio adapts Emma Donoghue’s novel into a story about belief colliding, and after Cathy, seeing Pugh take on another woman trapped inside somebody else’s idea of who she should be feels bang on.