"I questioned if we needed a voice like hers right now," Lucy Boynton said on "Salon Talks." In a career studded with period dramas and a whole lot of corsets — "Too many corsets" — she says, the English actor was a little hesitant to take on the ultimate bewigged and bejeweled figure of western history, Marie Antoinette, for the new movie "Chevalier." "I had a really specific preconceived idea of her," she admitted during our conversation. "Then was kind of ashamed that I had had this narrow view of her and this very misunderstood view of her."
In director Stephen Williams' biopic of Joseph Bologne, the enigmatic 18th-century artist sometimes referred to as the Black Mozart, the French queen gets a more complicated — but not revisionist — treatment as we see the effects of her patronage on the young musician and composer. For Boynton, it was a chance to explore "a much darker side" of the woman behind the "Let them eat cake" myth. The darkness is something that appeals to Boynton, who's carved a niche for herself as a period piece horror star in projects like "The Pale Blue Eye" and "I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House."
