Florence Pugh grew up around hustlers; she doesn’t believe in fairy tales. But there have been moments in her life when she felt like a character in a book. This happened once when she was 9 or 10, and working in the garden with her mother in Oxford. Pugh had a respiratory illness that kept her out of school for long stretches of time. At home, when she wasn’t studying or attempting cartwheels in the yard, she would help her mother with chores around the house, or in the garden, turning up weeds and tamping down bulbs.

One day, Pugh’s mother, a dance teacher, decided that they should read “The Secret Garden,” which tells the story of a sickly girl, a lonely house and a magical garden. For a long time after that, Pugh felt like her life, too, might be magic. It seemed almost as if she had slipped through the book’s pages, or perhaps crawled out from them.

Over the last two years, as an actress now living in London, Pugh, 24, has had that fairy tale feeling again, and then again, and again. “It’s weird what’s happening,” she was careful to note, over tea on a wet recent morning in Greenwich Village. And yet it was, in fact, all happening.