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Before we even start our interview,
Lucy Boynton is apologizing. Not only
is she sorry for delaying our chat by one day, but also for taking an urgent (and very short) personal call midway through.
LUCY BOYNTON
Full look by Miu Miu.
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Both interruptions are so minor that they don’t even make a blip in the day-to-day rescheduling customary to modern life, but the kindness and genuine consideration emanating from across the pond stops me in my tracks. The fact that Boyn- ton is so lovely in real life makes her frequent portrayals of ice queens all the more dazzling. They couldn’t be further from Boynton’s real-life character.
The 29-year-old actress is calling from her home in London, where she’s cozied up reading through scripts for potential future roles. “It’s always quite a terrifying but exciting time to re-centre yourself to what you want,” she says. It’s a rare moment of calm in a career that’s delivered several stellar performances in the past two years alone. In 2022, Boynton starred in a remake of the Cold War spy drama The Ipcress File, and Why Didn’t They ask Evans?, an adapta- tion of an Agatha Christie mystery. Earlier this year, she starred in the gothic thriller The Cold Blue Eye, alongside Christian Bale and Gillian Anderson. “Post COVID, I hit the ground running and didn’t stop,” she says. She’s grateful for the pause.
Boynton is, however, excited to be promoting Chevalier, the upcoming film that tells the lit- tle-known story of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a virtuoso violinist and composer who was a conductor in the French royal court. Reduced to “Black Mozart” in the annals of history, Bologne (played by Kelvin Harrison Jr.) was in fact an extraordinary figure who rose to the heights of French society despite the racism of the ancien regime, and was later nearly destroyed by it. In the film, Boynton portrays famed queen Marie Antoinette, who fawns over Bologne before ultimately betraying him over the objections of others.
Boynton is no stranger to playing unlikable characters—take mean girl Astrid Sloan in Netflix’s The Politician for example—but Marie Antoinette’s role in history and in Bologne’s story posed a special challenge. “It was really inter- esting because I did have a strong preconceived
idea of her and I felt a bit sheepish when I was diving into research, realizing that I hadn’t really challenged that,” she says. “So, I really did start to put down all that I thought I knew about her and start from scratch.” She researched by read- ing copious biographies on the queen, but taking each with a grain of salt—every author has their own bias, she says. “[My] experience with the film—and I hope the audience is impacted in this way as well—acts as a reminder to really challenge history as it’s been presented, because it has always had an author and a very singular one at that.”
By the time Boynton was ready to shoot, gone were the “Let them eat cake” stereotypes. What she was left with was a complex historical figure with flaws, but who took blame far more than her husband, Louis XVI, who held the power in their marriage and their reign. “I [felt] frustrated with that historical misogyny, and yet in our film, she is the villain. Her behaviour is deplorable.
I didn’t want to try to portray it in a way that elicited empathy,” she says. “You see her side of things, but I really wanted to show the vulgarity of her actions and [her] convenient allyship. In the context of our film, she’s remorseless because she will do anything to save herself.”
As with most period pieces, costumes played
a big part in preparing Boynton for her role. “For Marie Antoinette, the contrast between
the colours and scale of those costumes with the corsetry, which is so limiting—it’s this contra- diction between wanting to take up space and have attention drawn to you while actually being incredibly restrained.” Elsewhere, Boynton has used period costumes to mine for her characters’ perspectives. The 1960s era costumes in The Ipcress File, for instance, gave her an insight into how youth was used as currency at the time. “There was such a rumble from young people and young women wanting things to be different and then demanding it,” she says. Her charac- ter, Jean Courtney, takes a page out of Audrey Hepburn’s book in chic, brightly hued suits that were game-changing at the time.
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