When Lucy Boynton landed the role of Freddie Mercury’s girlfriend in Bohemian Rhapsody, she faced a nigh-on impossible challenge: not to let her character be overshadowed by perhaps the most charismatic showman who has ever lived.
If anyone could do it, Boynton could. The then-23-year-old had already made an impression as an aspiring model in the coming-of-age film Sing Street (2016), and as Countess Adrenyi in the Agatha Christie adaptation Murder on the Orient Express (2017), but the stakes here were higher, the hype around this long-delayed biopic of the Queen frontman having only grown in the many years it took to come to fruition. Her performance was, ahem, a kind of magic.
She captures the extraordinary, unwavering devotion Mary shows Freddie, whom she first meets when she is working in a clothes store and finds him inadvertently browsing the women’s section. “I don’t think it should really matter, do you?”, she says, her eyes fixing him with a burning look of love.
The film was an enormous success. Costing $52m (£41m), it made close to $1bn (£792m) worldwide and went on to win four Oscars.
Today, talking to me in the library of an upscale central London hotel, Boynton puts the film’s popularity down to its central character, who was played by her ex, Rami Malek (they met while filming, and were together until 2023). “Freddie was such a magnetic, infectiously joyous person in what he put out to audiences,” explains the 31-year-old. “And then you discover that what someone is going through behind closed doors can often be quite different to their public persona.”
However, “what Freddie gave people was such a sense of joy and electricity and ‘f**k preconceived notions – this is who I really am, and as soon as you catch up to that, I’m going to be something different’. He showed the thrill of being a shape-shifter. And I think that does give any audience such a sense of possibility and freedom.”
Those positive vibes continued long after the movie’s release. A lot of young queer people felt emboldened to approach Boynton and share their own experiences. “It was very affecting,” she recalls. “Bohemian Rhapsody did really strike a chord in terms of identity and having those conversations with families. That was something that I hadn’t expected, but it was incredibly rewarding.”
Boynton, dressed in a pleated, houndstooth-check two-piece, makes for engaging company. The daughter of two journalists, she has a way with words and a slow-burning sense of humour.
Now, she’s portraying another real-life character – Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in this country, in ITV’s A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story. A woman who had risen to the glamorous job of nightclub manager after overcoming hideous abuse from her father and a series of brutal partners, Ellis was convicted 70 years ago of murdering her lover, a feckless racing driver called David Blakely (Laurie Davidson).
The story has already been memorably recounted in Dance with a Stranger, which starred a hypnotic Miranda Richardson as Ellis. That was 40 years ago, though, and the new version tells the story much more through Ellis’s eyes. Written by Kelly Jones (Des), this arresting four-part drama puts the crime in context, showing the appalling abuse she suffered at Blakely’s hands over several years. A vicious and exceedingly weak man, he would frequently resort to violence. He once punched her in the stomach with such force that it triggered a miscarriage.
Even though nowadays Ellis would surely not have been convicted of murder because of Blakely’s obvious coercive control, the legal system was far more misogynistic – and classist – in those days.
“Ruth was made an example of because of everything that she represented as a single, financially independent woman,” says Boynton, who as Ellis displays that rare ability to meld steeliness with vulnerability. “The authorities did not want her to be the poster woman of possibility. So many people wrote to their MPs at the time, but they were just ignored. Ruth was used as a political chess piece.
“The court wasn’t allowed to discuss Blakely’s abuse,” she continues, “because it was seen as inappropriate to talk about the ugly behaviour of someone of his social standing.”
Blakely was a well-connected former public schoolboy. “Psychologists diagnosed Ruth as hysterical while she sat there knowing that the men in her life were the ones who were volatile and erratic and violent. All of that was left out in court. And so, there was no defence. Even in 1955, it was a tremendous miscarriage of justice. Had Blakely been held accountable for his actions, there would be no Ruth Ellis case to talk about.”
Boynton’s performance avoids the stereotype of a blonde femme fatale with a gun in her hand. Instead, she turns Ellis into a three-dimensional, warts-and-all human being.
“I really just wanted this to humanise Ruth because the public impression of her at the time was so coloured by the media reporting of her. It’s not always favourable. It shows her quite starkly. I do find it interesting when I’m asked how likable I think she was. I’m quite stunned by that question because I hope this is an exercise in understanding that you don’t have to like a person to think they don’t deserve capital punishment.”
Despite Ellis’s crime, many regard her as a feminist icon. “The way she behaved was in such direct rebellion to the way a woman was told that she ought to behave,” Boynton observes. “That’s the epitome of being a feminist – challenging authority, challenging the way that you are told you ought to be. Ruth didn’t try to be rebellious. She just thought that women deserved more. She wanted more, and therefore she thought she’d go after this big, bright life for herself. That’s remarkable considering her childhood and everything that she was born into.”
Boynton, who was born in New York but grew up in south London, knew from a very early age that she wanted to be an actor. She says she was hooked from the moment “I played Boulder Number One in a school assembly. After that, it was a real promotion to play a person.”
Next came Lucy in a school production of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. “I remember taking it really seriously. My mother cut my hair in the kitchen with kitchen scissors. I found a dress that I’d had all my life. We dyed it, and I would wear it around the house all the time. I had found out what I wanted to do, and I have never really wavered since then.” At 12, Boynton was spotted in a school production by an agent and was cast as the young Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter (the older version was played by Renée Zellweger). Since then, the roles haven’t stopped coming.
There was the one that got away, though. A couple of years ago, Boynton was supposed to play the singer Marianne Faithfull, who died earlier this year. But it was never filmed. Boynton did, though, meet Faithfull at Paris Fashion Week in 2020. She recalls the singer looking her up and down while contemplating, “Can she do this?” Fortunately, Faithfull declared: “Yeah, OK.”
“She was so f**king cool,” says Boynton. “She was just everything that you hoped she would be – and more. She had such mischievous confidence. She was just unedited and gritty and moxie and all the other good words.”
The biopic of Faithfull, who was often pigeonholed in a very sexist way as merely “Mick Jagger’s girlfriend”, was eventually shelved because of the pandemic and “creative differences”.
Still, that meant Boynton was spared the huge amount of smoking needed to replicate the gravelly timbre of Faithfull’s later singing. “The Method required for that!”
Next, Boynton stars in a film produced by the Duplass Brothers, See You When I See You. “It’s based on a man’s memoir about his younger sister taking her own life and the repercussions on the family thereafter.”
But despite packing in so much, she says she never forgets where it all began. “You’d better believe that I still think frequently about my days as Boulder Number One.”
‘A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story’ starts on ITV at 9pm on Wednesday
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