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This week, actress Florence Pugh revealed in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar that she had recently broken up with her partner of four years, Scrubs star Zach Braff. The pair had kept their relationship reasonably low-key, aside from a couple of Instagram pictures, in large part thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown. They seem to have ended on good terms with no drama and the pair will promote the film they made together, A Good Person, when it is released next year.
By the standards of celebrity romance scandals, the Braff/Pugh pairing was never exactly Kimye, and yet it elicited intense and alarming responses from the media and Pugh’s own fans.
To put it bluntly, the seeming majority of Florence Pugh’s fans did not like her with Zach Braff. They found the 21-year age gap between the pair of them unsettling or even problematic. He was constantly portrayed as being way out of her league or a drag on her blossoming career. Many a victory gif was shared on Twitter when the news broke, with the prevailing tone being one of giddy relief over the split. This was a curiously rare instance where the internet lambasted the male side of a celebrity romance rather than the woman (consider the likes of Olivia Wilde, Angelina Jolie, and Zawe Ashton.)