The Mail on Sunday

Bohemian Rhapsody star Lucy: How I felt when Rami Malek told the world he loved me

- By Padraic Flanagan

SHE has been acting since she was 12, won worldwide fame with her first big movie role and melted the heart of a Hollywood A-lister.

But Bohemian Rhapsody star Lucy Boynton tells You magazine today that despite her skyrocketi­ng career and romance with Rami Malek, she has struggled with low self-confidence.

Born in New York but raised in South London, 28-year-old Lucy says having two British journalist­s as parents should have helped prepare her for life in the spotlight.

‘Hearing about interviews with actors from Mum made me slightly less intimidate­d,’ she says. ‘But I forget it all as soon as I walk into one because I get so nervous.’

She credits the award-winning Freddie Mercury biopic – playing his closest friend Mary Austin, for whom he wrote Love Of My Life – for boosting her confidence.

With that movie, she’s hit the big time – romantical­ly as well as in her career. In his Oscars acceptance speech for best actor in 2019, Malek, 40, who played Mercury, said: ‘Lucy Boynton, you are the

heart of this film, you are beyond immensely talented, you have captured my heart. Thank you so much.’

She tells You magazine: ‘It sounds so silly but I was really unaware of the public element of that. You’re just absorbing, millisecon­d by millisecon­d, what is happening, and then suddenly you hear the applause and you realise it’s been a public moment, which is slightly strange.’

She adds: ‘From Bohemian Rhapsody I learned that people want to talk to you about what’s going on. It can be really intimidati­ng, but I try to remember that everyone… is winging it.

‘I’ve grown up in a very creative environmen­t… that doesn’t follow a specific structure, and that has been freeing, because when my job hasn’t followed a specific path there’s been no panic.’

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