It wasn’t some great moment in the theater that inspired British actress Lucy Boynton. It was the Stones, the Beatles and country music.
“I was born in New York and grew up my first five years there and have this image of my dad coming home from the office, a man in a suit, and the Beatles playing. I grew up with my dad being such a music enthusiast, so I grew up with Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones and country music with the sense of that feeling you get when you hear a piece of music that ignites a feeling in you,” she says.
“Acting is a place that you can do something with those feelings. So the second I found somewhere to put all that, it felt very organic. It makes this whole acting work feel like less pretend.”
As a kid she continued to pretend, snatching her first role when she was only 11. The film was “Miss Potter” and Boynton’s parents figured she would not land the part, and that would be the end of that. Not so.
“I’d been reading Beatrix Potter books my whole life, and to get to exist in that space and with a director like Chris Noonan who was so nurturing and made the whole thing fun but also really thorough – it was a real acting job rather than trying to make it ‘kid-friendly,’” she recalls.
“He really introduced me to what it (acting) was going to be, and having tasted that for the first time at 11, there was no going back. It was like stepping through to Narnia and you're never going to unsee those things, unfeel those things.”
She has continued to feel those things and is best known for her role in “Bohemian Rhapsody” which starred Rami Malek as rock star Freddie Mercury. Since then tabloids have linked her and Malek as a couple, but she says, “I get very shy talking about that side of my life. That movie came after ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ (in which she played Countess Elena Andrenyi) which was the first big studio film I’d done with Fox. But ‘Bohemian’ was a very difficult experience — not the smoothest sailing at all times — but I think it was a really fantastic education because at the center of that story was Freddie Mercury and Queen and the passion that everyone had for telling his story made everyone — even through the difficult days — deliver to their greatest capacity and greatest effort.”
Boynton’s publicist won’t allow her to say whether she’d like to marry and have a family someday, but she is free to talk about her struggling years. “I was in my late teens, early 20s,” she remembers. “I was still able to live at home with my parents, that alleviates me at least having to just ingest only peanut butter,” she laughs.
“It was difficult, but I’m so aware of how much I love this and what’s going on now that I forgot there was a period of time where everyone around me was saying, ‘Are you sure? Because this seems to be a rinky-dink setup, is it going to work out for you?’ I was absolutely adamant that I would keep trying and crossing my fingers.”
Evidently crossing her fingers worked for Boynton because she’s everywhere you look today. She’s starring in “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” the Agatha Christie puzzler streaming on BritBox. She’s executing the spy thriller, “The Ipcress File,” on Prime Video and soon she dons the powdered wig of Marie Antoinette in “Chevalier” and co-stars in the gothic mystery “The Pale Blue Eye” with Christian Bale.
In spite of flying high at 28, Boynton remembers when things weren’t so rosy. “I had many years of hundreds of auditions and not getting them,” she says. “It was agonizing then because you feel you're doing something wrong. But now I'm incredibly grateful because I think it was a period that taught me what element I need in this job, why I need it, and what I get out of it, what I can offer it, what I want to be able to offer it. It was really an educational period of time and one that had I not needed this job, I'm sure I would’ve walked away from and found something else. But the fact that I pushed through and kept trying to get better and learn, and learn from the last one, shows that I really want to be here and will work diligently to do so.”
There have been times where she felt “uncomfortable” in her choices, she says. “It’s an environment where you have to be very vulnerable and very porous, and I think young women have to start creating boundaries and barriers for themselves that in other industries perhaps you don’t have to,” she says.
“It’s a strange job, but I love it so much that it just takes one brilliant script, or one enticing character to really hook me back in.”
Tim Allen returns to the tool shed
“Tool Time” has a whole new meaning for Tim Allen who’s back on TV with his old partner, Richard Karn, and woodworker April Wilkerson in a show about — you guessed it — tools. The History Channel will be buzzing with chain saws, routers, jack hammers and ramsets when “More Power” premieres Thursday.
The series will take the DIY’ers out into the field where they’ll meet the folk who operate the most powerful tools of our time (and I don’t mean the Internet). They’ll cover the history of tools and Allen will invite some of these craftsmen into his shop to improvise special equipment that he thinks he needs.
Allen, the do-it-all fixer, confesses he’s not an expert at home improvement. “I like taking stuff apart. I'm pretty good,” he says.
“I've got a big shop, and I'm actually in my shop at my house. Oddly enough, I'm very confused about plumbing. I don't know what it is about plumbing. We just had our big sink plug up and found a bunch of — a wad of something in there. I don't understand plumbing because the fixtures are going backwards. I really appreciate plumbers on every level. But plumbing is my big problem.”
Peacock offers the next chapter of 'Downton'
If you haven’t had enough of the snooty Crawleys, Peacock has a treat for you. Streaming now is “Downton Abbey: a New Era” as well as previous episodes and a one-hour special, in addition to the movie.
The next chapter of the doings at Downton features the original cast and is written by the series’ creator, Julian Fellowes. Fellowes, who started as an actor, tells me he thinks that the ability to write and to actor are often gifts.
“You can sometimes teach someone to write better if they’ve got the essential ingredients of storytelling or whatever it is. But it’s rather like acting: you can give people technique and you can help them with period drama and the classics, and you can make them not afraid of the classical texts and this that and the other, but you're not really teaching them how to act. Either they can do it or they can’t do it. And on the whole — naming no names — there are wonderfully brilliant singers and people with terrific brains and great personalities who try as they might cannot act. Then some girl they find as a waitress is given a job and breaks your heart.”
Bell rings true as renegade
Actress Catherine Bell has put away the magic of the “Good Witch” to portray a real-life character in Lifetime’s “Jailbreak Lovers,” which premieres Saturday. The tale “ripped from the headlines” follows a law-abiding, church-going woman who falls madly in love with a prison inmate, 20 years her junior, portrayed by Tom Stevens.
Though she never met the real Toby Dorr, Bell says she pored over interviews and articles about her. “This is a crazy world,” says Bell. “It’s something that, hopefully, most people will never experience. And then there’s that other, the concept of: ‘What were you thinking?’ Why would somebody do that?
“So, hopefully, they get a little taste of that with what Tom and I did, just how they fell in love and what led to this crazy idea that they might get away with running away together.”
They did run away together (she smuggled him out in a dog crate) and were eventually caught. Dorr has written a book about her experience. But for Bell, who was so adored for 10 seasons as Lt. Col. Sarah MacKenzie from “JAG,” says it was a kick to play such an unusual character.
“It was ... just a great realization that I can do this sort of a role, which was so different for me, and being able to trust in (Tom) and just making that happen. It was so magical,” she says
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