Lucy Boynton Isn’t Afraid of the Darkness

For a person of such delicate, ethereal beauty as Lucy Boynton, with her wide blue eyes and fluttering lashes, darkness suits her surprisingly well. One of two daughters of a pair of British journalists, the actor—star of the recent BritBox miniseries A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story—grew up surrounded by books. “I’m in this job because acting feels like the physical manifestation of reading a book and getting completely consumed by it,” she explains. “The gothic genre does stay with me—in order to capture a reader and transport them to a different era, the description is going to be much more vivid. There is something very romantic about being in that headspace.”

Boynton has participated in her share of period dramas, gothic or not, from her very first role in the 2006 film Miss Potter, about the early life of storybook writer Beatrix Potter, to the Netflix murder mystery The Pale Blue Eye, a fictional prequel to the working life of Edgar Allen Poe. She starred in the beloved 2016 film Sing Street, a nostalgic, coming-of-age homage to the eighties alternative music scene, and acted alongside Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury’s wife in the Oscar-winning biographical musical drama Bohemian Rhapsody. Today, sitting at home surrounded by books in a turtleneck dotted with jack-o-lanterns, her tiny dog Maude asleep in her lap, she says she’s begun her first few film projects as producer. “It’s really exciting to be working on something from the genesis,” she says. “As an actor, you jump in years after. So it’s been a whole education, but I’m really loving it.” It seems only natural they are book adaptations. She doesn’t elaborate on the forthcoming projects, but she does name Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson as two sources of personal inspiration for her work, whose books she describes as “drenched in that kind of gothic, slightly haunting, but with a sense of humor and knowing.”

As a child growing up in London, where she currently lives, Boynton says she always loved movies and playacting. “I was really thrilled when I found out I didn’t have to wait to be an adult to do it properly,” she reflects. An eleven-year-old Anna Chlumsky displaying a full spectrum of emotional scope as Vada in My Girl nudged a young Boynton to this realization. So did the working actress drama teacher who taught her in school; Boynton says she approached the subject with a seriousness that’s often lacking in scholastic creative departments. That year, Boynton acted in her first theatrical role in a school production of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, followed quickly by Chris Noonan’s Miss Potter. The start of her career, she says, could not have been a more “ethereal and gentle introduction. There was no going back after.”

It’s been almost twenty years since that first film and Boynton as proven herself to be the kind of actor who can take your breath away if you’re paying attention. “My mum is just eternally disappointed when I do horror roles. She’s like, ‘Why can’t you do something lovely?’ As I do another film where someone is decapitated,” she laughs. But Boynton appears to thrive in depicting a kind of enigmatic, literary character—women with quiet power, beauty, and internal worlds of mystery. “In horror, there’s always some deeper backstory or something to dig into with a character,” she explains. “These girls are so complex and the characters around them can’t understand and are fearful of them. There’s something so satisfying sitting in that.”

As Ruth Ellis, Boynton steps into the role of a real person who fits this description: the last woman to be executed in Britain. The four-hour miniseries is gripping: the tragic true story of a 28-year-old woman who is charged for killing her lover, is subsequently accused, hanged, and posthumously changes the laws of justice in Britain for good. “It seems to be a trend with our society that the cost of learning is so painfully expensive,” Boynton says.

Based on Carol Ann Lee’s biography A Fine Day for a Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story, the drama pieces together Ellis’s life leading up to the murder of David Blakely, the trial, and what followed. Boynton’s interpretation of Ellis, which she prepared for with extensive research into existing records, photos, and interviews from friends and family, and Lee’s book, shows her as a proud, intuitive, resolute woman with more innate softness than she cares to show the world. Unmarried, with children born out of wedlock, and involved in affairs with men “above her class,” Ellis was antithetical to what was deemed acceptable for women of the time. “There’s such depth and scope to the social context Lee provides,” Boynton explains. “Understanding the fifties, the misogyny of the era, but also the class system that people were really clutching to post-war.” As John Bickford, the solicitor assigned to defend Ellis in court says to her at one point, “You represent everything they fear.”

Boynton shows us Ellis as a person who really understands people’s characters and can see beneath any facade. It’s what makes her good at her job as “the youngest bar manager in London.” But she is practical to a fault, aware of how she is perceived, and unwilling to waste any energy trying to change anyone’s mind. “I knew throughout the research process that I had a very clear goal and I was kind of circling that, getting closer and closer,” Boynton says. “With this series, we actually get to live with her and live with her in those moments when she’s alone.” Thanks to Boynton’s subtle but intensely emotional performance, we feel Ellis’s pain in a very real way. “There was so much to say,” she reflects. “There’s so much analysis around the trial that hasn’t been made public that is so shocking. So much happened to her in such a short space of time.”

After wrapping A Cruel Love, Boynton dove straight back into the darkness. “I was hoping to do something light after this, but instead I did a film called See You When I See You,” she says, “which is a really beautiful but devastating adaptation of Adam Cayton-Holland’s memoir detailing life after his sister’s suicide.” Directed by Jay Duplass, the film’s release is not yet set, but in the meantime, Boynton is focused on her upcoming book adaptations and keeping her creative machine well-oiled by reading as much as she can, with regular trips to the bookstore. It is, as she says, “heaven.”

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story is now streaming on BritBox.