Harper’s Bazaar – Does anyone else want one?” Florence Pugh calls out from behind the kitchen island where she has been mixing martinis. She is dressed a little absurdly, and very formally, for a kitchen, in a clinging vermilion Alexander McQueen dress and heels—an ensemble she has put on for the sake of a Vogue video crew that is having her demonstrate some of her favorite recipes: a vodka martini with a twist in a chilled glass and a cherry tomato crostini with lots of garlic and a bit of chopped chile pepper. She has made sure to cut up the baguette before she gets started on the drinks (not her preferred sequencing) so that the slices have a chance to toast in the oven. The flat of the carving knife descends on a clove of garlic; it doesn’t stand a chance. A rogue cherry tomato rolls off the cutting board; she leans over the counter and spears it with the tip of her knife. This is a woman at home in a kitchen, even one illuminated by set lights and framed by a boom mic.

Pugh at 26 is the kind of actor—thrillingly talented, coming off a series of stunning performances, and with compelling projects ahead of her—who is not just supremely comfortable in her skin, but also charmingly game. Perhaps it’s more precise to say she is the kind of person who exudes a let’s-go gameness. Give her a cocktail to make and she will fix you one too. If the cooking demo films through lunch, she’ll make sure the entire room gets a taste of what she’s making.

“Anyone?” she asks, offering the martini again. I slip outside the room for a moment, and when I return, a few chilled glasses have found their way into the hands of those on the other side of the camera. When the video wraps, she changes into black jeans, chunky Naked Wolfe boots, and a white T-shirt with an image of a grinning tongue-out mouth at the breast—a bit of Bon Iver merch she’s had for years. She is about to depart when she realizes she hasn’t sufficiently thanked the crew. “Thank you, thank you,” she says, rushing back in.

Once we are settled in a car, rounding the southern tip of Manhattan on the FDR Drive, she confides that she’s never cooked without music—Kate Bush, Spanish musician Rita Payés, Glass Animals—the volume on full blast. “When I do ‘Cooking With Flo’ ”—the friendly, improvisational cooking demonstrations she has posted on Instagram for the past few years—“I just have a fun time,” she says, laughing. “I’ve never done it with, like, 25 people looking at me, saying, ‘Do the thing!’ ”

The skies are ominous, but our destination is fortunately indoors: a Brooklyn weaving studio called Loop of the Loom where we can indulge in a different type of hands-on creativity. There we will be instructed in the art of Saori, a weaving style founded by a midcentury Japanese housewife that embraces the imperfections of cloth made by hand. The idea is to let our instincts lead us, and emerge, perhaps, slightly more enlightened, with appreciation for all that makes us unique. “After one hour,” the owner, Yukako, had told me, “you will be a new person.”