Lucy Boynton arrives at the 76th annual Golden Globe Awards. Photo / AP
Lucy Boynton arrives at the 76th annual Golden Globe Awards. Photo / AP
Lucy Boynton has been acting since she was 12, but it was her role in the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody at 24 that changed her career. Now she's channelling her inner diva in a hotly anticipated Netflix series. Louis Wise meets a woman on a mission.
If you want proof ofgrace under pressure, look at Lucy Boynton's performance in Bohemian Rhapsody. In last year's award-drenched Freddie Mercury biopic she played Mary Austin, Mercury's closest friend and the woman for whom he wrote the song Love of My Life, with aplomb. But the real performance was getting through the film at all. Huge hit though it eventually was, the production was a notorious mess, culminating in a last-minute change of director. In fact, there were times when it seemed the film — and all of Boynton's hard work — would never see the light of day. "There were a few teary phone calls to my mother," she says with pronounced understatement.
But see the light of day it did. Released last year, it won four Oscars this year (more than any other film at the ceremony) and made a star of 25-year-old Boynton in her first big movie role. Though you would struggle to call her an ingenue: she was in her first film at the age of 12, when she played the young Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter — Renée Zellweger was the older one — and since then there have been roles in Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express and as a young addict opposite Naomi Watts in the Netflix thriller series Gypsy.
Boynton arrives for our shoot early, alone, with no publicist or agent in tow, as if she's still determined to keep things low-key. But her appearances on the red carpet for Bohemian Rhapsody made the wider world start paying attention to the New York-born, London-raised actress. There has been a series of adroit dress choices, most notably a glittering gold Celine column at January's Golden Globes and a powder-pink Prada gown to May's Met Gala, which she attended with her boyfriend (and Bo Rap co-star), Rami Malek.
Malek won the best actor Oscar for his turn as Mercury, and he thanked Boynton profusely from the podium ("Lucy Boynton, you are the heart of this film, you are beyond immensely talented, you have captured my heart. Thank you so much"), in front of 30m viewers in the US alone. He did the same the month before when he won the Screen Actors Guild award. "It's weird sharing those moments," she says shyly. "Because that, especially, felt like a very intimate one."
Lucy Boynton with boyfriend and Bohemian Rhapsody co-star Rami Malek at the Oscars. Photo / AP
As we drink tea in a garden overlooking the Thames, I am struck by Boynton's almost unnerving composure. The wheels of her career were turning even before her role in Miss Potter. Her favourite film as a child was My Girl and, she says, "I became consumed by the fact that [its star, 10-year-old] Anna Chlumsky was the same age when she filmed My Girl that I was when I was watching it. That was a real wake-up call. It was like, 'OK, great, how do I do it?' " She sighs. "I watched that film every day for a summer."
She relays this with a tiny eye roll. Her attitude seems to be a clear mix of American go-getting and British self-deprecation, something reflected in her accent, which roams back and forth across the Atlantic, and in her style. In a neat little powder-blue coat with matching pumps, she looks part King's Road, part Edie Sedgwick.
Bagging the Miss Potter job "kind of ruined" her, she says, because it was so much fun. "It was like going up the Faraway Tree — there's no coming down!" The only problem was, she then went through the "awkward phase of braces and bad skin", and several years of unsuccessful auditions. Her parents, if always supportive of her ambitions, asked her to take a break to focus on her studies. When she started trying again "from scratch", in her late teens, she was ready. "It made me question, how much do I want it? How much do I actually need it?" And how much does she need it? "I think I really need it. I don't know what kind of person I would be if I didn't have this outlet."
You would assume this is something she has in common with Malek, who is known for being similarly intense. However, like Malek, she is also intensely discreet. Many questions about him are countered with a helpless smile or a cheeky shrug.
"I think I'm inherently a private person," she says. She does smile that the two have "a lot" in common, "and we're also very different people as well". There are no qualms about the age gap (he is 13 years older) — "No, we're just people" — and both share a scepticism about social media, although she often posts on her Instagram account (784,000 followers and counting). "It's half great, half the worst thing ever," she says. The couple bonded as the chaotic making of Bohemian Rhapsody progressed (what she calls, deadpan, its "hiccups"); in fact Malek was, she says, vital to making the show go on. "He took it upon himself, for me at least, to be the leader on set every day." And, I'd assume, it was, among other things, quite attractive to see him take control? Silence. Smile. Shrug. I'd also assume that having to act out a relationship encourages intimacy. "I'm sure on a lot of projects, yes, but on this one it was more the rollercoaster we were all going through that brought us together."
Lucy Boynton at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Photo / AP
Boynton was born in New York, the second daughter of two British journalists (her father was the travel editor of the Telegraph Media Group, her mother was a travel writer), but they moved back to London when she was four. She still considers London home, even if she mostly lives now "out of two suitcases" between London, New York and LA. "I feel painfully British," she says. "Awkward. Dry humour. Eyes down. Don't talk to people in elevators." She doesn't call them "lifts" any more, though.
She was picked by Ryan Murphy, the man behind Glee, Pose and American Horror Story, to star in his new Netflix drama, The Politician. She plays the designer-label-wearing ice princess Astrid in a dark comedy about the inner politics of an affluent Californian high school, a bonkers saga that also has Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Lange and Bette Midler in its cast. Astrid has the same stiff-upper-lip composure as Boynton, but precious little modesty. Can we just call her a bitch? "I think she plays up to the bitch factor," says Boynton. Astrid's parents, she says, have taught her "the weirdly positive message of 'You are absolutely powerful and present and you own your space', and I think she's run with that a little too fearlessly. But it was something I really loved about her. After a day, or a week, of playing her, I would go home and still carry that confidence and presence that I think I sometimes forget, and don't do in my life."
Boynton certainly seems more quiet and cautious. She says she is more of a natural observer. She regrets that the private girls' school she attended in London wasn't more forceful in pushing her to assert herself. "That kind of school is a prime opportunity to encourage girls to feel bold in their presence and place in the world," she says. "But we weren't taught that. Everything we learnt was in terms of men, with the assumption that we would have male bosses. And you realise later how awful that is, and how detrimental that is to a girl's self-worth." Mind you, she adds: "I'm also grateful for how flexible they were in allowing me to go out and work. I'm also here because of them."
As our interview draws to a close, talk turns to Boynton's hobbies. She is a keen reader, cultivated by her mother paying her 75p as a child for every book she finished. "I tried to get away with the skinniest ones so that the money would pile up," she laughs. She prefers fiction to non-fiction, and "slightly more abstract, weirder stuff", a fact borne out by her turning up today with a novella by the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, known as much for her beauty and glamour as her uncompromising modernist style. Recently Boynton was papped with a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Despite all this bookishness, though, she is quite emphatic when I ask whether she wished she'd gone to university. "No, not at all," she says immediately, explaining that she had to persuade her parents — a lot. "I had to be very eloquent and astute in my argument." Not for the first time, she shows the clarity and conviction of, well, a top-rate politician.
The Politician will be available on Netflix from September 27.
