50 THE CUT AUGUST SEPTEMBER ,
After Malek was named Best Actor at the Oscars, he kissed
Boynton passionately. Then he kissed her again. And again. “Lucy
Boynton, you’re the heart of this film,” he said in his acceptance
speech. “You have captured my heart.” At the time, she felt weirdly
calm, which she attributes to the handful of CBD candies she ate
before the ceremony. Then, she says, “I blacked out.” Despite her
reticence about celebrity coupledom, Boynton can’t help but look
back fondly on this unwitting rom-com moment, which became
one of the Oscars’ viral clips. “Him winning for his performance
was like winning for the tip of the iceberg of everything he had
done,” she says, blushing. “You kind of forget that there are hun-
dreds of other people in the room.”I
nthe politician,Boynton plays Astrid, a coiffed prep-
school princess who runs for class president against an
aspiring statesman played by Ben Platt. “Usually, my char-
acters are quietly seething or eternally pleasant,” she adds.
“Astrid walks into a room and she’s not afraid to have her
opinion heard. It has helped me get more confident.”
Astrid is a character who is constantly being judged on her
looks. Yet in Murphy and his co-creators’ hands, the part is wink-
ingly camp: She’s not just a pretty girl but a commentary on what
it means to be pretty in a world that values appearance above all
else. I ask Boynton when she was first aware that she was going
to be offered roles for which being beautiful was a prerequisite.
“Never!” she gasps, evincing a rare lack of self-awareness. “I have
only seen that with Astrid because she’s a bit of a mean girl, and
I’ve grown up seeing those girls fit a certain description.”
“She’s part of a culture where she is a top dog because she’s rich
and smart and beautiful and tough, but it doesn’t make her ful-
filled,” says co-creator Brad Falchuk (whose wife, Gwyneth Paltrow,
plays Platt’s character’s mom). After Boynton auditioned, Falchuk
says, he instantly knew whom to cast as her parents: “It was like
the light came above—I knew we needed Dylan McDermott and
January Jones.” Boynton is a hugeMadMenfan, and she was
intimidated when she heard she would be playing
Jones’s daughter. “One of the more difficult days on set
was when [January] turns me around in the mirror
and has to give me this speech about ‘Imagine you’re
not as pretty as you think you are.’ Our director was
like, ‘Imagine she’s this really beautiful woman who
you feel so inferior to.’ And I was like,Umm, I don’t
have to pretend!”
Recently, Boynton left the world of Queen behind
and began paying tribute to Astrid, showing up toThe
Politicianpress events in an array of bow-like pink
dresses and girlish florals. “I think it can be difficult for actors that
love acting who then all of a sudden have to promote something,
and it’s that confusing thing ofAm I being myself right now?It’s
not the part they signed up for,” says her stylist Leith Clark. “I
think the clothes make her get excited about where she’s going.”
For some women in Hollywood, “Who are you wearing?” is
practically an offensive phrase. A few years ago, celebrities like
Reese Witherspoon and Amy Poehler even promoted the
#askhermore initiative to encourage journalists to pose more-
substantive questions. I ask Boynton if she ever finds the focus on
her clothes demeaning. “Maybe when you’re on a red carpet and
they’re yelling at you to stand a certain way, because I don’t hear
men getting that,” she says. But mostly she finds it liberating. “We
have a sense of humor about it all. Yes, it gets photographed, but
it’s very much our thing,” she says, referring to her close-knit team.
“It’s not for anyone else but us.” ■DAVID WEBB
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