Florence Pugh & Zach Braff Secretly Split After 3 Years Together Earlier This Year

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Zach Braff and Florence Pugh broke up – and nobody knew about it until Florence, 26, confirmed it in Harper’s Bazaar’s September 2022 issue. “We’ve been trying to do this separation without the world knowing, because it’s been a relationship that everybody has an opinion on,” she told the publication. “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.”

Florence and Zach, 47, began dating in 2019 — after working together on his short film, In The Time It Takes to Get There — and broke up earlier in 2022. The couple was initially linked in 2018 when the Scrubs alum began “liking” her social media pictures, but they didn’t go public until a year later. In May 2022, Florence was photographed getting cozy next to Will Poulter on a beach, and while she would deny she and Will were dating, it didn’t stop people from talking about a possible Braff breakup.

The Black Widow star explained the secrecy behind the split and why she wasn’t really into sharing every minutia of her life with the public. “Whenever I feel like that line has been crossed in my life, whether it’s paparazzi taking private moments, or moments that aren’t even real, or gossip channels that encourage members of the public to share private moments of famous people walking down the street, I think it’s incredibly wrong,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “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.”

Before the breakup, she and Zach collaborated on A Good Person, a film that’s out next year. It’s about a young woman who has to pick up the pieces of her life following a sudden tragedy. Zach wrote the script with Florence in mind. “The movie that we made together genuinely was probably one of my most favorite experiences,” she adds. “It felt like a very natural and easy thing to do.”

Florence said that A Good Person also helped bring some professional clarity. “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 anymore,” she told Harper’s. She will be in The Wonder, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, and Dune: Part Two. “Being on these last few movies with some of the greats has been truly a wonderful way to kick myself back into the mode of ‘This is what you want to do.'”