Gemma Arterton talks to the Metro about wanting to spread her acting wings and take on less commercial roles as she aims to rid herself of being known as ‘that girl from Bond’, and why working in a pub was her best first job.

What did you get up to in Brazil?

It’s an initiative between Sky and the WWF to raise awareness of deforestation and to save a billion trees in three years. I went to the state of Acre. There’s a road being built and usually loggers get in and it leads to deforestation. It’s easy to deforest, it’s quick money, so this is about giving people other means to make a living by using the rainforest. They love the forest they live in and don’t want to chop it down but they’re so poor they often don’t have a choice. They’ve been changing the way they live as part of the campaign.

What did you see?

We met rubber tappers who trek for 90 minutes into the forest each day. They’ve done it all their lives. They collect the rubber and sell it to companies. One is an ethical trainer company. They’d never seen the finished products before. We showed them a pair of shoes made from their rubber – it was mind-blowing for them. It makes you think about when we get up and say: ‘I can’t be arsed to go to work.’ They go through all that.

What was going to Rada like?

Quite intimidating. I was 18 and there were lots of Oxford and Cambridge graduates and I felt I didn’t know what I was talking about. After a year of being there, I threw myself into it. It’s good to have that foundation. You have three years to try out stuff and be crap. If you’re doing a 100-seater in the West End, you need training or you can’t talk to the back row.

What role has had the biggest impact on your career?

Alice Creed [in the 2009 movie The Disappearance Of Alice Creed]. My career went down this commercial road for a while and I didn’t feel comfortable with it. Alice Creed flipped everything on its head and people stopped thinking of me as just ‘that girl from Bond’.

Are you trying to avoid commercial films?

I’m in a quandary because one film is being quite persistent but I keep saying no because it’s so commercial. It means you don’t have to worry about earning money for the rest of the year so you can go off and do theatre or help get smaller scripts made.

There are so many great scripts that can’t get made because they don’t have the money and then massive films that are made that are rubbish. It would be silly to rule out commercial films because they can be great fun but I have to think seriously before saying yes now because it’s a large portion of the year – not just making the film but doing three months of press and publicity. I like doing three months of theatre and then it’s all done.

You’re not in a hurry to play a superhero then?

No but I did a movie this year called Hansel And Gretel, which is quite flashy but the story is very indie. I do a lot of research now into who I’ll be working with and think carefully – which is a luxury. At first, you’re just grateful people want to work with you and you can pay off your student loan.

What’s the worst career advice you’ve had?

An actor once told me to stop being nice because then people don’t respect you. You get told to do lots of rubbish by people who think they know better than you – especially if you’re a woman.

What’s the worst job you’ve had?

I worked in a clothes shop in central London where women would flash their money at me and I’d have to dress them. I had to wear heels and wasn’t allowed to sit down all day. I worked in a pub in the evening, which was much more fun. If I were out of work I’d definitely work in a pub again – at least you can have a laugh.

By Andrew Williams

Sky Rainforest Rescue’s Amazon exhibition opens at Somerset House on November 2. www.sky.com/rainforestrescue

Source

Glamour Women of the Year – Film Actress Gemma Arterton. You’ve fallen for Gemma Arterton’s talent, and Hollywood’s pretty keen, too. Some actors wait their entire career to accumulate the diverse range of roles that Gemma has already notched up. Congrats, Gemma!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans: Glamour (UK) – July 2011, thanks to Lorna
- Scans: Metro (UK) – June 8, 2011, thanks to Lorna

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

Big thanks to Lorna and Elmira.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans > Sunday Telegraph Seven (UK) – March 27, 2011
- Scans > Empire (Russia) – February 2011
- Scans > Clippings From 2011
- Modeling > Tesco – Climate Week T-shirt

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

The longlist for this year’s Orange British Academy Film Awards was announced yesterday. Gemma Arterton is on it for her leading actress performances in Alice Creed and Tamara Drewe. Congratulations! The full nominations will be announced on Tuesday, January 18.

Andrea Riseborough (Rose) – Brighton Rock
Annette Bening (Nic) – The Kids Are All Right *
Carey Mulligan (Kathy) – Never Let Me Go *
Gemma Arterton (Alice) – The Disappearance Of Alice Creed
Gemma Arterton (Tamara Drewe) – Tamara Drewe
Hailee Steinfeld (Mattie Ross) – True Grit
Jennifer Lawrence (Ree) – Winter’s Bone
Julianne Moore (Jules) – The Kids Are All Right *
Michelle Williams (Cindy) – Blue Valentine *
Natalie Portman (Nina Sayers / The Swan Queen) – Black Swan *
Nicole Kidman (Becca) – Rabbit Hole
Noomi Rapace (Lisbeth Salander) – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Rosamund Pike (Miriam Grant-Panofsky) – Barney’s Version
Sally Hawkins (Rita O’Grady) – Made In Dagenham
Tilda Swinton (Emma Recchi) – I Am Love

* Denotes Chapter selection from Round One

Source

We Say: With Hollywood blockbusters (Clash Of the Titans, Prince Of Persia) a Brit com (Tamara Drewe) and the low-budget thrills of Alice Creed, no-one displayed more range in 2010. And there’s more to come…

You Say: “She’s clearly in demand for big Hollywood movies but still does stuff like The Disappearance of Alice Creed, which she was great in. I think she’s the most interesting actress out there right now.” Simon Clements, Newquay

She Says: “Thank you so much for this award. I’m very flattered – I saw the shortlist, so I know I was in very good company. I’m absolutely thrilled. This year’s been intense, but next year’s going to be… intenser! [Laughs] I’m attached to about nine projects but I’m not sure which one’s I’m allowed to talk about.

“But I’m aiming for even more diversity. Capa [biopic about the combat photographer Robert Capa] is confirmed, so I should be working with your hottest actor, Andy Garfield! [Garfield is lined up to play Capa, Arterton plays his partner, Gerda Taro, the first female photojournalist to cover the front lines of a war] and of course there’s Clash 2…

“And, fingers crossed, I’ll be working with Michael Winterbottom on London Fields and then there’s… actually, no, I better stop. You’re going to get me into trouble… But thanks for the award!”

Source

The gallery has been updated with DVD screencaps, including extras, of Gemma’s performance in The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Please note that the images do contain spoilers and mature content.

GALLERY LINKS:
DVD Screencaptures – Menus
DVD Screencaptures
DVD Screencaptures – Extended Scene: Alice Gets the Gun
DVD Screencaptures – Outtakes
DVD Screencaptures – Storyboard Comparison
DVD Screencaptures – Trailer
DVD Screencaptures – UK Trailer

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

Thanks to Elena!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010): Production Stills
- The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2010): Production Stills

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

GALLERY LINK:
- The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2010): DVD Screencaptures – Making Of

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

“I left RADA three years ago and never expected I would have a film career,” she says. “I always thought I would do theatre, and then it happened and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes’ to every job without thinking about it.

“You are grateful that you’re being considered and don’t want to seem rude by turning them down. As a Brit, we tend to think like that.”

Among the roles Arterton said yes to are Quantum of Solace Bond girl Strawberry Fields and leads in green screen blockbusters Prince of Persia and Clash of the Titans. High profile for sure, but not exactly challenging for the recent graduate.

“This year I have been able to think about what I want,” she says. “I’ve always just wanted to act and do things that are interesting and exciting. So now I have learned that the only power I have as an actress is the power of choice.

“I’m taking my time and reading scripts thoroughly. It doesn’t matter if it is big or small, or whether I have a large part or a small part and that is serving me well. And those films that I did like Tamara Drewe and The Disappearance of Alice Creed have actually transformed my career from here on. It’s going to be much more eclectic, intriguing films rather than all out action movies.”

In that vein, she recently played the decidedly non-glamorous lead in Alice Creed and the manipulative Tamara Drewe, a successful columnist who stirs things up in her childhood village in rural Dorset.

“They are not particularly attractive roles, in that Tamara Drewe is kind of a sex symbol but underneath it all she is an ugly character and isn’t necessarily appealing or someone you’d want to be with,” she says. “For me, as an actor, that is exciting because I want to work out why people who aren’t me, do things.

“The same with Alice Creed. She’s full-on, visceral and dirty inside and that, to me, is very attractive when I’m looking for a role.”

RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: October 22, 2010 3:59 p.m.

A few months after we’d met to discuss her turn as the title character in the twisty, terrific thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Arterton and I convened round two to talk over Tamara Drewe, director Stephen Frears’s adaptation of the celebrated graphic novel by Posy Simmonds. The actress once again plays the title character, a hotshot young newspaper columnist who stirs up a cauldron of lust, jealousy, gossip, regret, infidelity and not just a few mixed signals upon returning to her bucolic hometown in the English countryside. Artists vie for her affections, exes wonder what they’ve missed (especially since the nose job that turned ugly duckling Tamara into a brassy young swan) and a pair of teen girls conspire to destroy her life.

Part soap opera, part comedy of manners, and part decadent English romp, the film stands in fairly direct contrast to everything preceding it in Arterton’s last year, including Alice Creed and two studio tentpoles (Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time). She spoke recently about crossing the 2010 finish line, her costumed set experiments, her philosophy about screenwriting, and how she plans to follow up in 2011.

Well, here we are again. You’ve been on the nonstop publicity circuit; how are you holding up?
I’m fine. This is the last bit. You know, you do a movie — and I’ve done four moves this year — but then they have separate release dates. So you’re doing a junket in London, and then you’re over here. This is like the neverending film, Tamara Drewe: It went to Cannes, then it went to Toronto and now… Well, anyway.

But a couple months ago you were saying how proud you were of it!
Yeah, I am proud of it. I’m proud of the whole film, because when I first read it I wasn’t sure about it. I loved it; it’s always a good sign when you’re reading easily, when you don’t want it to end. But I wasn’t sure about how on Earth this was going to translate. I think if the wrong person directed it or the wrong cast were in it — or any element turned out wrong — it could have been the worst movie ever in the history of film. So I’m really proud of it for that in that respect. I honestly believe it’s underestimated, and that Stephen’s work on this film is completely subtle and brilliant. It’s such a tricky tone to get right, but he does. Also, I have such great memories of it; I had such a great time on it. Even if it wasn’t that great a movie, I’d still be proud of it.

As a member of that ensemble — playing the title character — obviously your performance went a long way to achieving that tone. How did you approach it?
Well, it was based on a cartoon, so the characters are kind of archetypal and could by quite caricatured. Each functions in a different way. The men are the archetypal men — the protector, the father, the lover — and then the girls are like this Greek chorus… You know? And my character was this weird character in the middle of it all. She’s the catalyst. But even though it’s called Tamara Drewe, it’s not like she’s the lead character. She’s just the one who creates this mess. She’s the root of the piece, but I didn’t know how I was going to root it. She’s quite flighty and flippant and promiscuous, obviously. So my big task was to contradict this frothiness and fun with her utter desperation and neediness and loneliness.

Stephen casts correctly and lets his actors do their jobs. He spends his time trying to make it all work rather than get the right performance out of somebody. He’s not trying to get you to a certain character; that’s your job. You’re responsible for that. He just reins in and guides it in a way.

How?
There were the scenes with me and Dominic [Cooper, who plays Tamara’s rock-drummer lover]. We were quite away from the rest of the film — all the drama that happens in the rest of the house. We didn’t see any of that, so we were quite fun and frivolous and playing around. Sometimes Stephen would tone it down a bit. That’s how he managed. It’s like spinning plates: He had to keep an eye on everything that was going on to get that perfect tone — which I’m still not exactly sure what it was.

How did the book influence the character? Did Stephen regard it as the bible or just a source.
Oh, hugely. Hugely. If someone’s given me this detailed character study, I’m going to use it. That was a godsend, actually. We did change certain elements of it, but we were quite faithful to things that were said, the way they dressed, they way they move. We even copied the landscape. But it was a godsend for Tamara. Tamara doesn’t have anyone she relates to in the piece. She doesn’t have any friends or anyone she can tell her inner thoughts to. In the book she does; she has thought bubbles and things like that. Luckily I could use that as a very, very detailed baseline, then use my own experiences and people I know. I based Tamara on someone I know as well, so it helped to work out her inner life. That’s the bit that’s very vague.

Your co-star Luke Evans said something interesting, which was that he believed there was a bit of your characters in all of you. Do you agree? What part of Tamara is in Gemma Arterton?
I think it’s not her character that I’m similar to. It’s probably the way she is with people. I think I’m most like her façade — not her inner soul, not that dark bit. All the things that came naturally were the charming, fun things — the sex-kitteny, bouncy, bubbly thing. But the inner world of Tamara is really desperate. She’s having this identity crisis and she has no confidence whatsoever. That was the interesting bit for me, because that was the bit I needed to work out to play her.

So the poster…
[Winces] Yes.

What do you think of the poster?
Well, there are a few posters, you know. The one in the UK doesn’t have the hot pants on it. The one in the UK is one of me looking mischievous with the boys in the background. For the rest of world they used this one. I always imagined what the poster would be; I always thought it would be the book cover, but with my face — like an illustrated me. But of course they don’t do that because then you wouldn’t know who’s in the film. I think it’s interesting that they chose that image, because that’s the Tamara Drewe who grabs everyone’s attention. She deliberately decides to wear those clothes; she walks through the fields barefoot and climbs over the stile knowing they’re all there. It’s an attention grabber — she does it for a reason. There’s an absolute reason. So it’s interesting that’s the attention grabber to get people to come and see the film.

But it’s actually deceiving. I’ve had friends who’ve seen it, and they were really shocked because they thought it was going to be some romcom — just from the trailer and the poster. And they’re deceived because it’s actually a lot darker. It just surprises them. That’s nice. But for me personally it’s just kind of weird seeing myself in those hot pants everywhere. Oh God. They always do that: Choose the sexy image to distribute.

But you look like a comic-book character — like a superheroine in a way.
Aww!

Did it resonate with you at all that way?
No! I was just hung up on the bloody hot pants.

It’s not like they can put pre-rhinoplasty Tamara on there. How did the idea of that physical change affect you personally or psychologically, both on- and off-camera?
It was interesting: When I did those scenes with the nose, I went on set with the nose, hair, school uniform, flat chest, nose… absolutely not sexy at all. I walked on set and I made myself a cup of tea. And someone told me I wasn’t allowed that because it was for people who were working on the film. I was amazed. I was kind of loving it, actually. And then I walked around; I said hello to Roger Allam, and he ignored me: “Who’s this weird schoolgirl who keeps coming up to me.” Then I talked to the stunt coordinator for a good hour about just anything, and he didn’t know it was me. At lunchtime he came up to me and said, “You know, it’s really good you got this gig playing Gemma’s younger self.” I couldn’t believe it. I said, “No, it’s me. It’s Gemma.” And he couldn’t believe it.

So it was weird. People related to me differently. I don’t know that’s because they didn’t know I’m an actress — people always treat you differently. The lead actress in a film gets pandered to and stuff. But it was interesting to me because I was so invisible on the set, and Tamara feels like that inside — like she’s nobody. And that’s why she has to make something of herself, and she does it in a way that she thinks is the successful way: Make yourself look beautiful, wear sexy clothes, be more confident… and it’s really false. She doesn’t do it well. She almost does it well, but ultimately it all falls away.

You’ve mentioned about this film that sometimes your character’s motivations weren’t always clear. Do you ever find yourself second-guessing the character — and thus the script and/or yourself — as shooting goes along?
Yeah. I think whether it’s resolved in the script or not, you have to revolve it in your head. With this next character I’m playing, famously nobody can pin her down. It’s a character that’s never been explained. Ibsen wrote it.

What’s the project?
It’s The Master Builder [at Almeida Theatre in London]. I’m playing Hilda Wangel, who’s this weird, ethereal woman. You never know if she’s a devil or angel, or what on Earth… She’s the only character in the whole piece who you have no idea why she’s there. So I have to work it out. That’s great, but you have to do a lot of work. I’ve done so many jobs where I have to make up a story just so I can believe in it and root it because it’s been underwritten. So I believe you’re right; sometimes you have to find a way to make it up or else you’re acting off of nothing. Though I felt like with Tamara, that was OK, because she was in chaos herself. I feel at the end of the film it’s still unresolved.

You’ve mentioned this dilemma before. Why would you do something that’s underwritten?
I think those roles exist that are so brilliantly written, but you have to really look for them. I don’t mind doing the extra work, but for me it just feels like a shame. I don’t know. There isn’t any reason a script shouldn’t be brilliant when you first start a project. The script should be brilliant. I’ve done projects where the script has changed so much that I never would have done it in the first place if it was going to turn out the way it has. My character’s been totally rewritten. There is no reason it should be like that. People have the whole of their lives to write scripts! When I did Alice Creed, for me that was a character that was so well-written and every last thing was thought through. J [Blakeson] was writing the script for four years; all of his passion went into it. It was perfect. We didn’t change a word. There is no reason it shouldn’t be like that. But time and time again you read a script that is incomplete. It’s been rushed or written so that a certain formula works.

But that’s OK. Successful movies are made like that. But for me, I’m looking for those scripts — and I’ve read a few now — where I go, “This is brilliant. They really care about these characters when they’re writing. Everything works well together.” But not every script is like that. And I’m not saying I wouldn’t play an underwritten character, either, because otherwise I’m excluding myself from lots of things.

You’ve taken this year to do a lot of publicity and promotion. Have you been working on anything else at all?
No. This year has been insane.

I guess this is work today, though.
Well, it’s the other side of it. It’s just as valuable, I suppose — and just as hard, if not harder. I did a play at the beginning of this year, and I’m just about to do another one I suppose, so that’s my therapy, I suppose, from all of the press and other extreme of acting. But I had four movies — and two of them were monster movies, so they needed a lot of time. Next year I won’t have anything coming out, and so that’s the year when I’ll do the other side of it — doing the craft and working, and nobody will see me for a year. Which is exciting for me! [Laughs] I feel like I’ve been overexposed.

Source

GALLERY LINK:
- Scans from 2010: Flaunt (USA) – November 2010

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

Gemma Arterton | Binding Truths
The London It-Girl Won’t Mince Words

A very amiable Gemma Arterton has just arrived and is disarmingly appraising my locket. “Beautiful,” she says, sitting down to order a coffee. We are in a French café on the King’s Road in London and the 24-year-old is early. Surprising for an actress, no? “Actually, I’ve just walked my husband to work,” she smiles. “He’s a sales manager at a fashion company near here.” In a beige t-shirt and black harem pants, but without a scrap of make-up, Arterton’s look is more fashionable London media-type than Hollywood starlet.
“It’s Victorian as well,” she says, letting me inspect her engagement ring in return. Star of this year’s Hollywood blockbusters Prince of Persia and Clash of the Titans, Arterton has recently married her Italian beau. At pains to keep details of the small Andalusian wedding and her new husband under wraps, she admits she’s learning Italian, or trying to.
“Oh, I just know stupid words, made-up words.” Curious, I ask her to expand. “Stefano [her husband] made up this word, ‘limanene,’ which is like little hands slapping you. Like this,” she leans across the table to demonstrate, quickly fluttering her hand in front of my face. “So, when someone’s been an idiot, you go, ‘li-ma-ne-ne,’” she says laughing, shaping the vowels Italian-style. A confident delivery and Queen’s English pronunciation betray theatre training at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and combined with her delicate looks, it’s of little surprise Arterton’s first big break was playing a British Bond girl in 2008’s Quantum of Solace.
Relaxed and in a good mood—“Look at the size of that coffee, it’s like a bowl!”—Arterton is keen to talk about her new movie The Disappearance of Alice Creed, in which she plays a kidnap victim. A small-budget British indie thriller, Alice Creed premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year to great acclaim, which was followed by packed out screenings with standing ovations, four-star reviews in the British press, and a Raindance nomination in the 2009 British Independent Film Awards.
“I’ve only really enjoyed two film jobs I’ve been on. Alice Creed was one,” she starts, adding that the other is UK indie Tamara Drewe, based on Posy Simmonds’ comic strip that ran serially in The Guardian. “Alice Creed was very gruelling for me. The first day of filming was me being kidnapped and kicked and my clothes cut off and I thought, ‘This is so unglamorous,’” she says. “But to be honest with you, anything beats coming off Prince of Persia.” Ah, that’s interesting, the lead in the Disney video game-inspired production wasn’t all that?
“Oh, it was so opposite to what I ever intended,” she says, to my surprise. “It was big, it was brash, it was Hollywood. I needed to shake all that off and get down and dirty and real with a script like Alice Creed that was tight and where everything was fully formed and was all about the acting. I needed to challenge myself. I’d started thinking, ‘Can I actually act?’” There is no question that Arterton can act; she pulls off the role of the kidnapped and abused Alice Creed with a simple, compelling authenticity. Did she get what she needed from the part?
“Honestly, on that job… I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience where I felt like I wasn’t sure if I was acting or not. In certain scenes, I was really quite petrified and in a state of real anxiety,” she says, pausing to sip her coffee. “You’re like, ‘Now have I gone beyond knowing what I’m doing?’ And then, when I watched the final thing, I was kind of dreading it, you know: the nudity, the violence…” She trails off. I step in and ask if there are rules for actresses and nudity.
“I thought there were rules, but there are no rules,” she says with conviction. “When I accepted Alice Creed my American agent said, ‘I don’t know…’ And I thought Disney wouldn’t want me to do it. I thought they’d have quite a lot of control over my career, but they didn’t at all, which was brilliant.”
So, she’s not too fussed about nudity, almost a given considering Alice Creed? “Well, it’s a load of bollocks really. I think it’s ridiculous that someone will get paid eighty grand, as one actress did, just to have a flash of boob. I think it’s gratuitous.” She warms to the theme, discussing her love for French cinema where sex and nudity aren’t frowned upon. “They embrace it. If Juliette Binoche gets her boobs out, nobody is going to write about it in The Sun. Whereas, if I get my boobs out, it’s like, ‘Gemma Arterton gets her boobs out in a film.’”
And here she speaks from experience. “There was one movie I don’t speak about very often where I was really taken advantage of: Three and Out. It was my first nudie role, and I had a sex scene. It ended up being published in The Daily Mirror. They couldn’t have got hold of the pictures through anyone but the film company,” she says, her brown eyes looking pained before adding a qualifying, “I think. To sell the film, you know.”
I am beginning to understand why she enjoyed her experience on Alice Creed so much, where she worked with a small team and a cast of just three. “On Alice Creed, I knew and trusted everyone implicitly. It was just like a play,” she says. “It was the first movie I’d done where I was valued as a woman in the film. I wasn’t that young girl. I was just as important as the other actors. Just as respected.” Presumably, this is in contrast to the blockbusters she’s been in, which she says are also less respectful of the scripts. “On one movie I signed up for, the script was actually quite good,” she says. “And then it got absolutely pissed on because they wanted to people-please. They’d show a rough cut to a test audience, who’d say, ‘But I want so-and-so to get together.’ You know, stuff like that, and before you know it, you’re in a film you’d never have signed up to do in the first place.”
I raise my eyebrows in question. Most actresses this early in their career wouldn’t have a bad word to say about such high profile movies, but then maybe she’s not like most actresses? “I don’t want to be a celebrity or a famous actress,” she says, taking a mouthful of porridge while I try to work out if she really means it. “I’ve been really worried about this year,” she says. “Everyone’s been saying, ‘Everything’s going to change.’ I had Sam Worthington [Avatar and Clash of the Titans] going, ‘Your life’s going to change.’ I don’t want my life to change. I have an amazing life.” She goes on to tell me that she never reads her own press anymore, having suffered negative comments about her apparently over-curvy figure. “You go out to a premiere, but the next day you get the criticism. I’ve been called fat or whatever. Most of the time it’s not true what’s written. It’s so petty and horrid and it really hurts you. I say that I’m like five months clean, five months clean of Googling myself.”
It’s starting to piece together, that despite her movie star looks, Arterton is a serious actress who, weighing up the highs and lows of celebrity—“It’s a choice. For me it’s not about being famous, it’s about being recognized for your talent”—is drawing the conclusion that it’s not for her. And while undoubtedly benefiting from the blockbuster exposure, she has neatly sidestepped into more soul-nurturing projects like a forthcoming theatre role in Ibsen’s The Master Builder in London’s West End, Alice Creed, and Tamara Drewe.
She is contracted for Clash of the Titans 2, naturally. But still, “Doing Alice Creed and Tamara Drewe has been life-changing. Of course, the risk is you won’t be in any more Hollywood movies because you’re too risky, which I don’t mind. Like, I really would not mind, it wouldn’t bother me at all. I would rather be doing small roles in theatre.” But rather than small roles, Gemma is being handed the kind of scripts most actresses could only dream of. “When I meet people, it isn’t for the sexy girl in shorts role anymore. All of a sudden I’m meeting people to play Courtney Love and Marianne Faithfull, or to play a fucked-up heroin addict. And then it’s not about your body, it’s about your ability.”
Suddenly our time is nearly up. The very able Arterton leans over to check the time on my mobile phone. She has a New York flight. So, when will we be seeing her next on screen? “I never like to talk about these things before they come to fruition,” she says. “But I’ve been offered two roles in amazing movies. Cool, strong females leads. One is a Michael Winterbottom film and the other is a Corsican saga by Luca Guadagnino. They’re not big in Hollywood, but they’re big to me,” she says with a smile. And that’s all that seems to genuinely matter to this amazing, and beautiful, actress. Buona fortuna, Gemma Arterton.

Many thanks to both Lorna and Elmira for their precious and much appreciated contributions!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010): SFX (UK) – November 2010
- Tamara Drewe (2010): Production Stills
- The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009): Times Playlist (UK) – October 2-8, 2010
- Scans from 2010: Clippings From 2010
- Scans from 2010: 7 Days (Russia) – May 24-30, 2010

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

Question (Q): In one of the reviews of the movie, one of the lines reads: “The movie’s success rises and falls with Gemma Arterton.”

Gemma Arterton (GA): Is that a good thing?!?

Q: So when you heard you got the role, was there a real burden that everything was based on you?

GA: But it’s not, I don’t agree that it is. Actually, I’ve only ever carried one thing. It was a TV show, ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles.’ It was pretty scary. But with ‘Tamara Drewe,’ I knew it was an ensemble thing. Even though it’s called ‘Tamara Drewe,’ she’s like the catalyst, the centerpiece. Everything else is going on around her. She’s not necessarily the lead character, or even the one you care about the most. She’s not the hero of the piece. So it didn’t feel like that at all. I don’t try to think about things in advance. I just try to get on with it.

Q: Did you know of the graphic novel?

GA: No, I was really ignorant. I had no idea of Posy’s (Simmonds, the novel’s author) work. Actually, that’s what did it for me. When I read the graphic novel, I was sold. For me, I don’t come from that world, so I couldn’t really relate to it. When I first read the script, I thought it was entertaining. But then when you see it visually, the way that the characters look, they actually exist, these characters. Especially when we were there in the countryside, filming. When (the character) Nicolas Hardiment (played by Roger Allam) drove past in the Land Rover, he was exactly the character. So yeah, I didn’t know her work, and have since read everything that she’s done. I’ve met Posy many times. She’s a fascinating woman. Obviously, she’s got this incredible eye. She observes everything, she’s very quiet. She just draws all the time. She even did a drawing of me as Tamara, which is amazing. She just observes character really well. She’d probably be a really good actor!

Q: Were you surprised by the resemble you bear to the character in the book?

GA: I don’t think I do look like the character in the book. That’s what Stephen (Frears, the movie’s director) said when I first met him. Actually, the casting director, Lissy Holm, was quite amazing, she always casts Stephen’s films. She did manage to get a cast that looked ridiculously like the characters. The ones I’m most amazed with are the two girls (Charlotte Christie, who played Casey Shaw, and Jessica Barden, who played Jody Long), who have kind of just come from nowhere. They had this big search for these girls. When they cast them, particularly Charlotte, she unbelievably looks like the character. We all sort of look like our characters. We all had a bit of the character in us.

Q: In the production notes, it said all the members of the cast knew which characters they were playing.

GA: Yeah, I think it’s true! Even in real life, when we all met, we had the right relationships. So for example, Luke Evans, who plays Andy Cobb, and I, we’re like best friends now. We have a very protective relationship of one another. My relationship with Roger was very strange, because of the content of our relationship in the film. But it worked. I think all that’s instinctive casting, and being careful of not just casting someone who’s right for the role, who’s going to work with the actors in the right way.

Q: Was your nose the only one that was cast in the film?

GA: Yeah! I think so. It’s funny, my nose. I’ve often had people who have asked me if I’ve had surgery on my nose because it’s quite small. So I ended up playing someone who had a nose job! The nose itself was quite fun to come up with. It started off being subtle. It’s actually ridiculously big and uncomfortable. It’s a joke, that’s the point. Actually, I still own the nose. It’s in my bathroom, with a picture of me wearing it, scowling, next to it.

Q: What’s it look when you go back to your hometown and you actually see people you knew when you were a teenager?

GA: It’s actually really sweet. Actually, there were actually a few successful people that came from my town, two brilliant directors. But no (other) actors. But they’re very proud. When I go home, it’s really sweet. I’m not really bombarded, because I’m not really well known. People are respectful of your privacy in the U.K. That’s when I drew on my own experience while playing Tamara. When you go back home, and the people that knew you from before, you can’t actually be anyone than who you really are, because you get found out. But otherwise it’s quite exposing. It feels like you’re being watched. When Tamara goes back, she brings back the London Tamara. Actually, that doesn’t work at all. People know that she’s being fake, that she’s not really being herself. She has this kind of crisis, because she doesn’t know what to do with herself. So there’s that pressure of “We know what you’re really like.” People from home always say that, “Don’t change!” They’re looking for change, they’re looking for you to have become this diva. But of course everybody has to change at some point in their lives.

Q: Have any of your former teachers been in contact with you?

GA: Yeah! Letters of support, it really is nice. They’re very supportive and proud.

Q: This past year, you’ve had a bit of everything. You’ve had a big-budget action movie, a couple of independents, a British independent, countryside romance. How have you felt, how has your experience been moving so quickly between those worlds?

GA: Well, I actually made these movies within three years, two-and-a-half years, but they all came out at the same time, I suppose. For me, it didn’t feel as though it was as frantic. At the same time, I did plays in between. That’s where my interest lies, actually. So over the past three years, I’ve been able to learn all these different aspects of acting, which you don’t learn at theater school, you can’t learn about it. Even though sometimes it’s been hard and it hasn’t been enjoyable, and other times it’s been amazing. Over the three years, I’ve had this intensive course. I kind of know what I want now, having experienced all these things. But it’s amazing how different a job can be when all you have to do is act. It’s amazing how different it can be. That’s why it’s exciting, this job. You just never know. You could do a massive movie, or a play, and it’s all about the acting and the relationships.

Q: You said you know what you want now. What do you want?

GA: It’s quite simply to do things that I’m passionate about, and that’s it, really. I think when I first left drama school, with a lot of student debt, I kind of just took anything. I really didn’t think about a career plan. I was very grateful for anything that came my way. I thought it would be rude to turn stuff down, because someone’s offering you a job. So I just used to take anything, and not think about it. Now, I can actually be selective. Also, you have to live with it for a long time. You have to promote it, and sit with it for about half-a-year. You have to like it, otherwise it’s hard. I find it very difficult to lie, considering I’m an actress. In real life, I’m awful at it. If I’m not passionate or feeling good about something I’ve done, and I find it very hard to promote it. Then I would have to lie all the time, and I would hate it. I want to do stuff I’m proud of.

Q: What was it like working with Stephen?

GA: When you meet these great directors, you think they’re going to be slave drivers or something. Stephen’s not like that at all. I mean, he cast me blind. He never saw anything I was in, he just cast me off of instinct. He wouldn’t even let me audition. He just met me and said “Yes, you should do it.” He’s like that as a director. He trusts his intuition, and works off of that, in the way he chooses scripts. He doesn’t have a game plan. He just says, “I want to do that one, so I’ll do that one.” It’s all very simple. It’s kind of interesting, and he kind of inspired me, actually, in the way he works. You get so bogged down with decision-making, and what’s the right thing to do. Well, it’s very simple, and “This feels right.” That’s how he works. He casts actors he knows will do the right job. He steers them in the right direction, and he’s not controlling. He trusts that I’m going to come up with something that’s interesting. He lets his cast do that. Then if it’s not right, he directs you. If it is right, he doesn’t! It’s very simple and refreshing. When you work with Stephen, there’s no fuss. The right fuss is put in the right place. There’s not fuss, which I haven’t experienced on other films. It’s unnecessary. It should be like that when you make a movie. It shouldn’t be difficult or stressful. If you get the right components, and the script is right, that’s the main thing. If the script is good, then why it be (fussy)? That’s the way Stephen is.

Q: You talked about being inspired by his instinctive way of working. Can you think of a particular scene where your instincts served you well?

GA: There’s one scene, it’s with me and Luke, where we shot it, and he finds out I’ve been sleeping with Nicolas. He asks, “Why are you doing that?” We actually shot it twice. We were doing it, and Stephen was directing me, and was like, “Can you cry at the end?” I said, “Okay, if you want that, I’ll cry at the end.” He’s so frank. The next day, he was like, “You were right, I was wrong. Go with your instinct, that’s what’s right.” But with my character, I’m not the right person to ask that question, because it’s not a comic character. With the girls, for example, watching him direct them was a different way of directing. He’d just see them do something, and say, “Oh, that’s really good.” He’d encourage them. With me, it was much more of an internal, emotional thing. It’s more the comedy stuff you see him doing his stuff.

Q: Well, Tamara really isn’t a sentimental person, so with the crying stuff, it probably would have been a little off.

GA: I think you’d go, “Oh, just shut up!: If she was too in your face, “Oh, my life is a mess,” you’d just go, “Yeah, it is.” You know it, because she does it herself. She;s the one responsible for it. There were moments we had to make the audience aware of the fact that she’s a bit of a mess. But it wasn’t to be done shoving it in their face. So there were moments in the movie where you’re in her world.

Q: She does cry when she sees Andy with the barmaid, so is that the moment she realizes she doesn’t love him?

GA: That’s the moment she realizes nobody loves her, and that’s why she cries. She just needs that all the time. I think she goes to see him because one guy’s messed her about, and then she goes to the one she knew always loved her. She then realizes that he doesn’t love her.

Q: Is that why she sleeps with Nicolas more than once?

GA: Yes. That, for me, was the big problem for Tamara. But I do understand why she slept with him more than once. She’s needy, she needs a man in her life, she wants to be protected, she wants to be cherished. Why she continues it, it occurred to me she’s a writer, and writes what’s autobiographical. After the first time, it’s exhilarating and really naughty. When she’s in bed with him, she thinks it’s exciting. She likes to be caught up in the drama of it. She creates her own drama, for artistic reasons, I think. So she gets caught up in it, and it goes out-of-control. She doesn’t have any control over herself. It’s kind of the wanky artist inside her, saying “I’m going to create my own drama.” I know people that do that, that manipulate people and lead people astray, so they can write an album. I know somebody that does that.

Q: The characters seem so complicated in the movie.

GA: I think that’s the great thing about this piece. If you watch it with a lazy eye, you see these characters that are having messy lives. But, if you really watch it really carefully, it’s got so many things going on. The characters are so complicated. Tamara, especially, is very complicated. It was the problem I had when I first read it. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do the project. In the screenplay and in the book, she’s not a likable character. She never redeems herself, I don’t think, and you don’t know why she does these things. At first, I didn’t want to play her. Then I realized that’s probably why I should play her. I wanted to figure out why somebody who’s not me would do these things.

Q: What did you discover?

GA: Well, there’s the obvious. Her major motivation in the piece is that she wants to be cherished. She wants somebody to cherish her. In many ways, she wants her work to be recognized and be loved. Sometimes, Stephen would say to me, “I just don’t get her.” I would say, “Neither do I.” A woman wrote this, and in a way, I think it’s a very modern telling of a woman, with all her imperfections. No character is black and white. I still don’t think I worked up Tamara Drewe. I don’t think you’re completely supposed to, she’s strange.

Q: In this movie, someone is impersonating someone else by e-mail. For many people in the public eye, other people make phony Facebook pages, pretending to be a celebrity. Have you ever encountered anything, where you heard someone was impersonating you?

GA: Yeah, loads! Apparently, there’s about 20 Gemma Artertons on Facebook. I’m not on it, because why do it to yourself? I don’t get it, why would you give everybody access to you? Actually, I got a letter the other day from a fan, asking “Why don’t you speak to me anymore on Facebook,” and I was like, “I never did.” There was one girl, who apparently found pictures of me. This was in the beginning of my career, and not many people knew me. She found pictures of me on holiday somehow, through somebody else’s page. She posted them and wrote “Look at me! I’m with my boyfriend…I’m having a great time, girls…be back soon!” I thought it was funny and silly and not worth worrying about, but I thought it was funny. Again, it’s very modern, this piece, dealing with things like that. There are new things, like Twitter, and I don’t get that.

Q: Can you talk about your new play?

GA: I actually start on Monday (October 4), which is scary because my head’s been in this. It’s the ‘Master Builder.’ It’s one of my favorite-ever plays, and it’s another character that’s completely mysterious and strange. I’m petrified, actually, of doing it. But it’s going to be a big challenge, which is good, because I’m going to need it. For me, I actually haven’t done any movies this year, I’ve just done plays. I’d be interested to see how I act in a movie next year, because I haven’t done one in ages. I’ve just done stage work. We’ll see how I progressed, or not!

Q: How do you get into the right mindset for the characters you play? Tamara seems so different from Alice Creed.

GA: I take elements of my own life, things I can relate to. I also base my characters on people I’ve met or seen out and about. Actually, Tamara Drewe is based on a friend of mine.

Q: Does she know?

GA: No, she doesn’t know. She’s probably seen it and said, “I bet that’s based on me!” She’s so like that. Very much so. I base them on people I’ve met. With Tamara, I wrote a book, a good four chapters of her book, which was really, really helpful for me. I’m not a writer, but when I was writing Tamara, it was actually quite good! It was funny and sad at the same time. Usually I do that, write some kind of journal or something. That helps me immediately snap into it.

Q: Do you write it before?

GA: It depends. Like with Tamara, when I was in it, I was writing her book. It just really depends.

Written by: Karen Benardello

Source

Her new film project is as intriguing as Arterton herself. In the film, which is a celluloid version of Posy Simmonds’ cult cartoon novel, Arterton plays the eponymous lead, a girl who leaves rural Dorset to seek fame as a journalist, only to return to her childhood home when her mother dies.

Central to the plot is Drewe’s reinvention of herself. As a schoolgirl, she was a dowdy, almost ugly, girl with a huge nose. Arterton had to wear a prosthetic nose and greasy hair. Her return as a beautiful femme fatale was as unexpected as it was electrifying, but through flashbacks we learn that the catalyst for her transformation from caterpillar to butterfly was a nose job that transformed her looks and bolstered her confidence.

There are uncanny echoes of Arterton’s own life in that plot line. Her cleaner mum Sally-Anne and her welder father Barry divorced when she was five, and her mother struggled as a single parent, bringing Arterton and her sister Hannah up on a Gravesend council estate. Things were so tight that as soon as she was able, Arterton helped out by working as a make-up girl at the weekends. It didn’t make for an outgoing, confident personality, and by her own admission she was something of a wallflower.

“I was a loser,” she says. “I was very bookish, very much into amateur dramatics. That’s how I started, which is the geekiest thing ever. I wasn’t really a hit with the guys, either. I was a bit sad and a bit desperate. I still feel like that inside, it’s funny.”

If that seems like an extraordinary description for a 24-year-old actress who has made 11 films in the first three years of her professional life and seems destined for stardom, it’s important to take a look at her early years. Arterton was a diligent, scholarly girl who did well at grammar school but had no idea what she wanted to do when she left. She did so well at a drama course that she was awarded a full grant to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada).

There she toughened up and became the confident woman she is today. She points to her spell as a karaoke hostess in what she says was “a gangster pub” in London as her own personal epiphany. “I had to become really very self-assured very quickly to survive,” she says. “Someone tried to whack me over the head with a crowbar one night because I wouldn’t serve him.

I was 18 and I remember saying, ‘Calm down and get out.’ That was really when I grew up.”

By the time she had finished at Rada she had completed her first paid role in Stephen Poliakoff’s film Capturing Mary, following that with her stage debut as Rosaline in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost at the Globe Theatre. Her exposure to the big time changed her in a range of subtle ways, but if she had arrived at Rada yearning for the glamour of a red carpet existence, she quickly enjoyed sufficient exposure to the limelight to know that “I just want to be able to walk along the street during the day and not get bothered”.

Arterton has always known her own mind. Yet she has also been prepared to compromise: despite having pledged never to marry after her parents divorced, in June she tied the knot with Daniel Craig’s body double, Italian Stefano Catelli, at a secret ceremony in Spain, citing the doctrine of love at first sight as her get-out clause from her previous antipathy to wedlock.

A young woman with a highly-developed social conscience and a determinedly feminist streak, she nevertheless reckons that “being a sex symbol is pretty cool”, which is handy considering that the two films in which she made her name were vehicles in which she wasn’t cast for her intellectual prowess.

Yet if her success in St Trinian’s, and her breakthrough performance in Bond film Quantum of Solace owed as much to her spectacularly curvy figure as it did to her grey cells, she has gone out of her way to ensure a high quotient of more cerebral and challenging roles.

For every St Trinian’s, Quantum of Solace, Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, there is a corresponding arthouse venture. She even managed to survive the critically-panned Three And Out, a British comedy in which she starred alongside Mackenzie Crook, while The Little Dog Laughed, a stage satire on Hollywood’s attitudes towards homosexuality, garnered her grudging respect.

As she says of her decision to beg for the lead role in the gritty film noir The Disappearance of Alice Creed, which involves her being hooded and strapped to a bed for the majority of the film, forced to urinate in a bucket: “I needed to do it for my own sanity as I was getting lost playing the girlfriend or the wishy-washy role. I needed to do something that was raw. The director didn’t want to see me because he thought, ‘She’s a Bond girl, she’s not going to be able to do the stuff she needs to do’ and that’s exactly why I wanted to see him.”

Arterton has a need to intellectualise everything she does, no matter how mundane. How many actresses, for instance, would ever see a Bond girl as a manifestation of women’s need for empowerment? There are, however, connections between her latest film, the Stephen Frears-directed Tamara Drewe and the role which she says defines her, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

After all, Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel is loosely based on Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.

“Hardy was very clever and knew women much better than we even know women, I think. Tess and Tamara Drewe are both out there doing things on their own, but while they are very, very different they are both downtrodden in a way. Tess sort of brings it on herself, but so does Tamara, even if she doesn’t really know why it happens and how she gets there.

“Tamara’s very flawed and that’s what makes her real. She wants to be successful, she wants to be loved, she wants to be beautiful and she’s compromised along the way and is not actually happy inside.”

Source

Tamera Drewe star Gemma Arterton walks her first red carpet
By Norman Wilner

Gemma Arterton is making up for lost time at the Toronto Film Festival.

Last year, she was unable to attend the TIFF premiere of her thriller The Disappearance Of Alice Creed because she was off shooting Stephen Frears’s pastoral comedy Tamara Drewe. But this year, Tamara Drewe is in the festival as a Special Presentation, meaning Arterton finally got to walk her first TIFF red carpet Sunday night (see pictures of her rolling into the party here).

“It was very civilized, actually,” she says, tucking her legs underneath her on a couch in the Intercontinental hotel. “Everybody here is very civilized and polite – they were being very sweet, and concerned about the fact that I might be chilly.”

An adaptation of a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds that was itself based on Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, Tamara Drewe casts Arterton as an ugly duckling turned glamorous journalist (something of a contradiction in terms, we know) whose return to her hometown has a seismic impact on the inhabitants of a local writer’s colony.

“I actually think Tamara is a modern-day Bathsheba,” Arterton says, referring to the character from Hardy’s book. “For some reason, you want to follow her; you’re charmed by her, but at the same time you say, ‘ach, you don’t deserve it, you’re spoiled and you’re a brat – you shouldn’t end up with the good guy in the end, and he’s a mug for actually loving you,’ you know? But there’s something charismatic and charming about her that makes you watch her.”

When we spoke earlier this summer on the occasion of Alice Creed’s theatrical release, Arterton told me she much preferred acting in that film to appearing in big-budget studio pictures like Clash Of The Titans and Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time. Tamara Drewe, she says, was another pleasure, since veteran director Frears (The Hit, Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen) challenged her in ways she didn’t see coming.

“Tamara is constantly doubting herself and feeling utterly insecure,” she explains, “and there were times when he would make me feel like that. There was one time in particular where I was doing a scene with Dominic (Cooper), and on that day (Frears) said to me, ‘Stop acting like you’re in Eastenders!’ Which is awful – it’s possibly the worst thing he could ever have said to me, and I was really upset.

“I said, ‘You can’t say that! What sort of direction is that?’ But obviously it worked, because I felt shit, and I was doubtful of myself and I was on the brink of tears. He does things like that – but you know, he’s incredible. He’s a master of what he does, and at first glance you don’t see the expertise of his direction. Maybe in somebody else’s hands, this would have turned into some dodgy episode of Midsomer Murders – it could have been a bit twee. But we care about the characters, and we enjoy it. He’s just a genius.”

Tamara Drewe is Arterton’s fourth feature to be released this year. When I ask her if she’s planning to take a break, she allows a shy smile.

“I’m just about to start rehearsals for a play, actually, in a few weeks,” she says. It’s Ibsen’s The Master Builder, starring Stephen Dillane in the title role; Arterton will play Hilde Wangel. “I think it’s going to be my most challenging role to date,” she says. “It’s my acting exercise for the year.”

This will be the second play Arterton has done this year; she made her West End debut earlier this winter in a production of Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed. But she’s not abandoning the movies just yet.

“Next year, I’m attached to about six projects,” she says. “They’re all really exciting – brilliant directors and brilliant material. If one of them comes off, I’ll be pleased.”

That might be a little tricky, with the recent closing of the UK Film Council, upon which so many British productions depended for funding. But Arterton is being an optimist about things.

“I just hope it all pulls through,” she says. “If not, as I said to Stephen last night, I’m just going to do really, really low-budget films, just to keep working. Films that are made for no money at all. I think that’s what needs to happen – a lot of money is spent on things, on people’s wages and things like that, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be that way. People that care really should do it for less money, I think. Alice Creed was made for a million – it can be done!”
Sep 14, 2010 at 11:56 AM

Source

* Storyboard featurettes
* Audio commentary with director J Blakeson
* Extended scenes with commentary

Source

GALLERY LINKS:
- The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009): Production Stills
- Events: Virgin Media Louder Lounge at the V Festival #1
- Events: Virgin Media Louder Lounge at the V Festival #2

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

Arterton, 24, may be best-known to North American audiences for those two blockbusters, but all that’s going to change with The Disappearance of Alice Creed, a grimy little thriller about a kidnapping that stars Arterton, Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston.

Arterton is not just another pretty face, and The Disappearance of Alice Creed, opening Friday, is proof.

In Toronto recently to promote the film, Arterton says, “With this one and the one at TIFF next month — it’s called Tamara Drewe — I feel like, ‘This is me!’ These are the films that, when I read the script, I think, ‘These are the movies I’d go to the cinema to see.’ ”

The Disappearance of Alice Creed is dark and surprising, and Arterton proves to be far less a victim than her kidnappers believe. That’s about all that can be said without spoiling the story, but the performances are riveting.

Arterton has nothing but praise for her two male co-stars.

“There’s something to be said about working class actors,” she says, “in that it hasn’t been handed to them on a plate, and they keep it real. All three of us come from very normal backgrounds, with normal things going on in our lives … It was a really down-to-Earth set. We had fun, and we didn’t take ourselves too seriously.”

The Kent-born Arterton is indeed a working class girl — her mother is a cleaner, her father a welder — and while she may not take herself too seriously, she is very serious about her work. The RADA grad has been working non-stop since she finished school three years ago. Actually, since before she finished — Arterton made her theatre debut (in Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe) before graduating, and also had a role in the BBC drama Capturing Mary while still at school. Her film debut came in St. Trinian’s, in 2007, and she’s been in a dozen movies since. And she made her West End debut this year in The Little Dog Laughed.

Moviegoers will see her next in Tamara Drewe, the story of an ugly duckling adolescent who becomes beautiful as a young adult. The impossibly beautiful Arterton as an ugly duckling?

“I have a prosthetic nose. They put a nose on me, and gave me a dodgy wig and an awful school uniform. It’s a black comedy. My husband gets freaked out when he sees that picture of me from the film,” she says, laughing.

Insofar as she thinks about her appearance, Arterton is just happy that she looks quite different in every film she makes. “When I was at RADA, I never considered myself the actress who was going to get the hot girl role, or whatever, because they always cast me against that. I used to play men, I played crack addicts, I played unattractive roles all the time. A friend said to me the other day, ‘Well, you’re a character actress, but people don’t see you as that at the moment.’ And I feel I am a character actress, and I’m really uncomfortable in the kind of, ah, beauty roles, in a way.”

She continues, “One of the reasons I did Alice Creed was that I’d just come off a movie where it felt like the most important thing was that I looked good. And I wasn’t interested in that in the least. It puts so many restrictions on you. I wanted to do something where I could eat,” she says, laughing. “And if I woke up with bad hair that it was better that I had bad hair! Alice Creed was liberating. Nobody was worrying about it and I could concentrate on acting, on the task at hand.”

By LIZ BRAUN

Source

GALLERY LINKS:
- Tamara Drewe (2010) > Related Clipping: Be (France) – July 9, 2010
- Scans From 2010: Envy (France) – July 8, 2010
- Scans From 2010: Nylon Guys (USA) – September 2010

Call her the Not-It Girl.

For the past few years, the English actress Gemma Arterton, 24, has been on a trajectory that Hello! magazine dreams are made of: graduation from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts; roles in a gritty Guy Ritchie movie (Rocknrolla) and a frothy Richard Curtis one (Pirate Radio); starring as Elizabeth Bennet and Tess (of the D’Urbervilles) on British TV. Then (drumroll), the break that every starlet fantasizes about: playing Bond girl Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace.

Arterton rolled in flagrante with Daniel Craig, and yes, it was good for her. Hollywood and its megabudgets came calling. In Clash of the Titans, she got both a death and a resurrection scene – setting her up for the sequel, which she’ll film next year. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, she intoned mystical prophecies like a pro. It appeared that a new It Girl had arisen.

Except for this small hitch: “I don’t want to be an It Girl,” Arterton said in an interview in Toronto last week. “I didn’t plan to be in those types of movies. I’d always seen myself as a character actress. I felt, God, I’ve got to do something about this, otherwise I’ll forever end up being Princess of Something. Or not forever – you don’t have much shelf life that way.” My guess is that Megan Fox, whom Arterton resembles a little (light eyes, dark hair, full mouth), would concur.

So when the script for her new drama, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, came her way, Arterton jumped. (It opens in select cities starting Friday.) It was the opposite of what she’d been doing. It’s a micro-budget indie from a first-time writer/director, J. Blakeson. Instead of sprawling, it’s claustrophobic: three characters, two sets, one taut set-up. Vic (Eddie Marsan, who played the raging driving instructor in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky) and Danny (Martin Compston) kidnap rich girl Alice (Arterton) and hold her for ransom in a sound-proofed house. But no one is exactly who they seem, so each plot twist adds a layer of complexity. And instead of playing princess, Alice is stripped naked and slapped around. She screams, she swears, her makeup smears. Her hair’s a mess.

Naturally, Arterton’s handlers tried to talk her out of it. “I had to put my foot down,” she said.

To whom? “To the powers that be,” she answered, laughing. “I’m not saying anything more! But Alice was exactly what I was looking for. I’d felt quite frustrated that I hadn’t actually acted for a while. This reminded me why I’m in it. I’d become quite jaded making those Hollywood movies.”

The setting for our interview was a kind of metaphor: We were at the Thompson Hotel, Toronto’s latest stab at Hollywood-style hipness. But bizarrely, we were stuck down in the barely finished basement, in an isolated, echo-y conference room. “Isn’t it nice – they’ve tried to make me comfortable by recreating the set of my movie,” Arterton joked. The betwixt-and-between-ness made me wonder how anyone gets loaded onto the It Girl conveyor belt, and how scary it is to step off.

“I’ve always been quite naive and wide-eyed about everything,” said Arterton, who grew up in Kent with a younger sister and their single mother, a cleaner. “I loved acting, but I didn’t expect to earn money from it. Especially for the first two years, I jumped on everything I was offered.

“Then Bond came along, which is just like, you’ve got to do it,” she continued. “Then with the other movies, people say, ‘You should really do this, this is an important movie.’ You think, ‘Oh, yeah.’ But it’s surprising who actually does go for these roles.” Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes headlined Clash of the Titans, after all, and Sir Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina starred in Prince of Persia for megaproducer Jerry Bruckheimer. “You think, ‘There must be some integrity in it.’ It’s weird when you’re surrounded by giants – massive names, the most successful people in the film industry – and I felt like nobody. It can be quite overwhelming.”

But after spending three hours in the makeup chair every morning, having hair extensions put in, being pressured into the gym to work on her arms – “and if I had a zit it was like the whole studio went into meltdown” – Arterton found herself wondering what she was doing there. “I’m so not into that,” she said. “It’s so boring. And I find it so uncomfortable when people say” – here she slips into a honking American accent – “‘You’re so hot! You’re so hot right now!’ ” She shakes her head. “It freaks me out, actually. Finally I realized I don’t have to do everything they offer. I can be selective. I don’t have to go the Hollywood route if I don’t want to. Not that I wouldn’t do another movie like that, because they are fun. It’s just, there are no rules.”

Doing Alice Creed, however, “felt like how it should be,” Arterton said. “Working with other people really intimately. Concentrating on the text. The thrill of doing good work, of transforming, and understanding the psychology of a character that you aren’t. Also it was so fun, because we were all in it for the right reason. There were no grand designs: It wasn’t going to become the biggest-selling movie of all time, it wasn’t going to win an Oscar. It was simply that we had to do it, for ourselves.”

It was the right move. The perception of Arterton has shifted. The roles she’s getting offered, and the directors offering them, have risen artistically. Her next film, Tamara Drewe (she’s the title character), is a comedy directed by Stephen Frears; it will premiere at TIFF and then open in October. This fall she’ll take the London stage in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, opposite Stephen Dillane. She’s got movies in development with directors Michael Winterbottom, Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love) and Alan Rickman.

“That’s the conveyor belt I want to be on,” Arterton said. “Actors are supposed to play people who are real, from real life. For me, it’s so important to stay in contact with what’s real, so you can use it. I think often in Hollywood, people are so surrounded by unreality. I live at home, in London” – with stuntman Stefano Catelli, whom she married in June – “and I don’t really hang around actors or live the life, so I can see what’s happening much easier than when you’re living in that bubble.”

She’s pretty clear-eyed about what’s happening now. “Of course, everybody’s like [American accent], ‘We’re so happy you did that movie, it’s fantastic!’ ” Arterton laughed, but she doesn’t care who takes credit for it. As long as she doesn’t have to be It.

Johanna Schneller
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail