I’ve scanned the German DVD cover and booklet of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and there’s a gorgeous new pic with Gemma and James McAvoy from last year’s Empire Awards.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008): DVD
- Photoshoots: Empire (2008)

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

Planeta Disney has released a new international poster for Disney’s big 2010 release — Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The poster is definitely stylistic graphically and is trying to push the film’s style across visually while trying to hint that the story is epic. It is also obvious from the poster’s style that the same team that did the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy are in full force.

In other news, I’ve added a beautiful new still from Tess.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010): Posters & Covers
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008): Production Stills

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

It seems like only David Tennant filmed St Trinian’s II today. There was no Gemma to be seen!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Evening Standard Magazine (2008)
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008): Production Stills
- Events: “The Boat That Rocked” World Premiere
- St Trinian’s II (2009): Daily Star Sunday (UK) – July 12, 2009 (These clippings don’t feature Gemma, but they show on-set pics of Sarah Harding, Tamsin Egerton and David Tennant)

I’ve updated this site’s sidebar and also Gemma’s filmography with absolutely all her past and upcoming projects, including a brand new page for Wuthering Heights.

I’ve also added new stills from Tess.

GALLERY LINK:
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008): Production Stills

She explained: “I went to drama school for three years and I kind of tried all these different methods and never really felt like I was getting anywhere.

“And then it was actually Tess that unlocked something in me. I became like a crying wreck – I couldn’t stop crying all the time. And then on the next film I did, Prince of Persia (with Jake Gyllenhaal), they kept saying to me, ‘Why are you crying all the time?’ I couldn’t get rid of Tess!”

Source: Mirror

GALLERY LINKS:
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Episode 2, capped by mrbnatural
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Episode 3, capped by mrbnatural
- Quantum of Solace: Promotional Photoshoot

Thanks to Hans Matheson Online for the news.

The winners will be announced at the BPG Awards lunch at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on Friday March 27, 2009.

Winners will be informed in advance and places at the lunch are by invitation only.

The Broadcasting Press Guild was founded in 1974 and has more than a hundred members – all journalists who specialise in writing and broadcasting about television, radio and the media in general. They include media correspondents, reviewers, previewers and feature writers from national newspapers, broadcasters and leading trade journals and websites. Details of previous BPG Awards winners can be found at http://www.broadcastingpressguild.org/awards.

Click here to vote for her!

Episode One is available for online viewing from January 5 to January 19, 2009.

Episode Two (which means the third and fourth episodes that aired in the UK combined) airs next Sunday.

PBS.org now has a website of sorts up for Tess as well.

While you’re at it, why not take the time to visit Hans Matheson Online (Alec D’Urberville) and Eddie Redmayne Online (Angel Clare), two wonderful fansites dedicated to Gemma’s co-stars in the series?

Last but not least, attention UK visitors: St Trinian’s will be showing on Sky Movies Premiere on Satuday, Jan. 10 at 8pm.

TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES. Sunday night at 9, WNET/Ch.13

PBS’ “Masterpiece Theater” kicked off 2008 with a Jane Austen festival.

It kicks off 2009 with a new two-night, four-hour miniseries of Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” which visually seems eerily similar to Austen. Yet it pokes into a far darker, more debilitating side of life for even the most buoyant and resilient of women in the 19th century.

What makes Tess Durbeyfield’s life difficult, happily, makes the drama rich for “Masterpiece” fans. The fact many will be familiar with the story makes this latest interpretation no less engrossing.

Gemma Arterton, most recently seen with a far different attitude as the latest Bond Girl, plays Tess traditionally and well. Abused and whipsawed by the customs of her day, which held that women were to blame for most of the terrible injustices inflicted upon them, she never wavers in her determination to make her life better, a goal that would also make the world better.

When she is raped and bears a child who lives only a few weeks, her father refuses to let her take the dying baby to the church for baptism, saying it would bring shame to the family.

When the child dies, the priest refuses to permit a Christian burial, since there had been no baptism.

Tess tells the priest that if that is how his church treats the eternal life of an innocent child, like a bureaucrat telling a customer she hadn’t filled out the proper form, she wants nothing further to do with him.

Like Austen’s heroines, Tess isn’t fighting for feminism as much as simple decency. Unlike Austen’s heroines, she has only the smallest chance to find it, because Hardy shares neither Austen’s faith in basic human goodness nor her optimism that living an honest, decent life is a ticket to happily ever after.

The sociable, striking Tess has no trouble meeting men. The problem lies in their flaws, which range from the self-delusion of the kind man she loves, Angel Clare (Eddie Redmayne), to the cruel arrogance of the phony aristocrat who regards her as a perk of his position, Alec (Hans Matheson).

Arterton captures both Tess’ uncertainty as each man’s nature emerges and her ultimate recognition of how she must respond.

“I have enough honor left, little as it is, not to lie,” she tells Alec. “You are just dust and ashes to me now.”

It took courage to deliver that speech in Tess’ day, and this production creates the context that makes her courage clear.

Literally and metaphorically, Tess walks what look like many of the same paths as Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. If they met, which would have been good for both of them and fascinating for us, they would have had much to talk about.

Source: New York Daily News

Release approx 13th January 2009

Price $34.98 – cheaper for members

Masterpiece Classic website

Promo videoclip fpr Masterpiece Theater on YouTube.

I’ve started adding DVD caps from the making of Tess to our gallery today. I’m not even close to be finished, so please be patient!

I’ve got great news to our American visitors! Tess Of The D’Urbervilles will come to US audiencess on PBS Masterpiece Theatre on Sunday January 4th and 10th, 2009.

In the meantime please visit Hans Matheson Online, a fabulous fansite dedicated to Gemma’s co-star in Tess.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles: DVD Screencaptures – Angels And Demons: The Making of Tess

The moment Gemma Arterton heard she’d be the new Bond girl is ingrained on her mind for ever. She was on a boat, just off the coast of Gibraltar, filming the comedy Three and Out with Mackenzie Crook. Dressed in full scuba-diving gear – what else would a prospective Bond girl be wearing? – Arterton answered her mobile phone to her agent, who immediately began humming the James Bond theme down the line; the role of Agent Fields in the 22nd 007 film, Quantum of Solace, was hers. So moved was Crook, he shed a tear for his co-star and uttered, “This is such a big moment in your life.”

Crook’s assessment has not been lost on the 22-year-old. Raised “in a house of women”, as she calls it, Bond was not a big influence on her childhood, yet she’s well aware of what it means. “It’s such an institution in Britain, and such an iconic thing to be involved in,” she says. “I’m so proud of it.” At 5ft 7in, with pale skin and a chirpy estuarine accent, she may not be typical Bond girl material. What’s more, how many Bond girls can claim to have been born with six fingers – on each hand? “It’s my little oddity that I’m really proud of,” she says. There’s something devil-may-care about her attitude that makes her perfect casting.

The last time I met Arterton was 18 months ago, when she had come to Cannes to promote St Trinian’s, the garish update of the film series in which she played the head girl of an anarchic private school. A total unknown, she was still in full costume after a promotional photo-shoot: black bob, crisp white blouse, pencil skirt, seamed stockings and killer high-heels. While she might’ve been looking “a little bit dominatrixy”, there was still a fresh-faced innocence to the girl who had left drama school to come to Cannes. “This is my first feature film, so it’s quite exciting,” she said, breathlessly. “The casting director said to me, ‘You don’t know what’s hit you yet.’ And I said, ‘No I don’t!’”

Since then, her rise in the industry has been nothing short of staggering. Even before Quantum of Solace hits the screens, Arterton has already this autumn appeared in Guy Ritchie’s gangster flick RocknRolla, and taken key roles in two primetime television dramas, Lost In Austen and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. With a forthcoming cameo in Richard Curtis’s pirate-radio comedy The Boat That Rocked, you’d think her life would be unmanageable by now. “It’s been kind of good,” she reflects. “I’ve been working, working, working, and not had time to do anything else. I don’t go out and go to parties and do all of that. That’s when you start feeling the change … I haven’t had the opportunity to really be around any fuss, so I don’t feel that different – just a bit more tired.”

Little wonder she’s feeling the strain. When we catch up again, Arterton has just finished a day’s filming at Pinewood Studios and is planning a less-than-glamorous evening at her gym in Muswell Hill. She’s midway through shooting Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a huge-scale adaptation of the popular Arabian Nights-style video game that will make Quantum of Solace look like a no-budget short.

So far, her anonymity has been preserved because she’s barely recognisable from one role to the next. As Thomas Hardy’s fated heroine Tess, she has chestnut-brown locks down to her waist; for Bond, she is a redhead. And Prince of Persia has forced her to darken her hair from its natural brunette colouring. “The other day, we were looking at pictures of my career so far – photo-shoots and things like that – and I wouldn’t even recognise myself! That’s handy because people don’t recognise you, which is really nice for me, as I like doing normal things.”

Quantum of Solace is set to change all that. Pairing her with Daniel Craig, now in full command of James Bond in what is his second outing, Arterton can claim her casting was destiny. “I was in the car on the way to the audition and the Bond theme tune ‘Nobody Does It Better’ came on the radio,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘This is a sign!’” Playing Agent Fields, Bond’s MI6 contact in Bolivia when he arrives to investigate a mysterious group called Quantum, she claims that the film is set to continue the reinvention of the franchise that 2006’s Casino Royale began. “It’s a lot more – I hate to say edgy but it is more edgy. It’s dirty and ragged. This one’s a desert movie with loads of scummy places. It’s not as crisp and slick.”

There’s no question, Arterton brims with the confidence of youth. You might even call her fearless. “I remember on my first day, everyone saying to me, ‘Are you nervous? Are you nervous?’ And I was going, ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ But I wasn’t. If Daniel had been wearing a tux that day, or said one of his catchphrases, I might’ve felt intimidated but he didn’t.” Still, she had to kiss Craig on that first day, “another surreal moment in my life” as she puts it. “At the time I can remember thinking: ‘What on Earth is going on? This is insane! If I phoned up my mates now they would be killing themselves laughing.’”

Curiously, she compares her character to both Bond’s lovelorn secretary Miss Moneypenny and Rosaline, the similarly “haughty” character she played in a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at The Globe that first convinced the Bond casting directors to offer her an audition.

“With the Bond films, the women are so unobtainable to a normal guy. I wanted to make her someone you could go down the pub with,” she says. “She’s not particularly hot. She’s just this girl that ends up sleeping with Bond. It’s not like she’s really saucy or anything. She’s normal looking and not glamorous. But it is funny – people always say, ‘Ah, you’re the Bond girl, you’re the Bond girl’, and I don’t feel like one at all!”

Perhaps this is just as well, given the so-called “curse of the Bond girl” that has often called time on the careers of those who play them. Arterton appears to have taken the whole experience in her stride, which includes acting opposite the series’ renowned regulars. “I probably should get a bit more star-struck but I never do,” she says. “I think it’s because I’ve got my head in the clouds. I just turn up and do it. I remember the day Judi Dench [who plays MI6 chief M] was on set. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s Judi Dench and now I’m going to act with her.’ I didn’t get that worried about it. I probably should get really nervous but I just enjoy working.”

Whatever Bond does for her, Prince of Persia is liable to do even more. Starring opposite Jake Gyllenhaal, she plays the Arabian princess Tamina in a sixth-century adventure she describes as “Indiana Jones meets Gladiator“. Arterton represents yet another astute casting choice by the über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who previously gave Keira Knightley her international breakthrough when he put her in Pirates of the Caribbean. How does she feel about the inevitable comparisons? “Well, Keira has done incredibly well,” she says, carefully. “I’d love to get the parts that she gets. If I’m being compared with her, who knows…?” She pauses for a second as a thought occurs. “It’s funny,” she says. “Especially with girls, people always want to put them in little brackets. I don’t belong in the same bracket as Keira. I’m completely different, from a very different background. I’m confident enough in my own ability to not worry about being compared with other people.”

Brought up on a Gravesend council estate, Arterton’s working-class roots – her father is a welder, her mother a cleaner – certainly differentiate her from Knightley. Raised with her younger sister Hannah, she went to a grammar school, which she left when she was 16. “I liked learning but I hated being confined in a space and being talked at,” she recalls. “That’s why I left.” She didn’t read much. “I was quite lazy,” she says. “I was too busy going ‘Argh!’ and being silly.” In truth, she sounds like a St Trinian’s misfit. “I was quite naughty at school,” she grins.

After her parents divorced, she and her sister remained with their mother. “She encouraged independence in us,” notes Arterton. “I think that’s really brilliant. She never tried to control us, and we’ve both ended up being really successful in what we wanted to do. She’s very free and creative, and it kind of rubs off.” Her mother’s side of the family all have “this arty-punk streak”, she says. “Her uncle was [the new-wave singer] Wreckless Eric so it’s all trickled into us. There’s something about being a punk rocker that stays with you even when you’re older.”

If punk flows through her veins, so does a restless desire to succeed. After leaving school, where she had first started acting, she went on to a sixth-form college to study the discipline more seriously. From there, she won a place at Rada but it didn’t stop there. Winning her first role, on the TV show Capturing Mary, while still a student, by the time she won the role in St Trinian’s there was little point in graduating. The industry was taking notice, as demonstrated when she took a cameo in RocknRolla. “We loved her,” says Guy Ritchie. “We thought she was class. She only came on set for a day, but we all thought there was something brewing there.”

While Arterton is well aware of the effect she has on men, if anything points to her potential, it’s that she appeals to women as well. Her TV work this autumn proves that. In the quirky Lost in Austen, she was charming as Pride and Prejudice’s heroine Elizabeth Bennett, who inadvertently swaps places with a modern girl, but it will be as Tess Durbeyfield that she will be long remembered.

She got the role during the middle of filming Quantum of Solace and literally jumped for joy, for this was her chance to prove she can really act. Understandably, she avoided watching Nastassja Kinski’s take on the character for the classic Roman Polanski film. “I wanted it to be my Tess,” she states, confidently. It’s clear this role meant more to her than anything she’s done to date. “I could not keep my mind off it,” she says. “I was really nervous. I put everything into it.”

Given her meteoric rise, I wonder how she’s managed to stay so down-to-earth. “All the people I hang around with are really grounded,” she answers. “Everyone wants me to be myself. I want to be myself. I feel sometimes that people think you’ve changed because you get picked up in cars or sent things, but they’re things you don’t ask for. They’re perks – and it’s easy to see how you could change, because you could get used to that. But I don’t want to and I don’t feel as if I have.”

If anything has been difficult for Arterton during the last year-and-a-half, it’s been finding time for love. “It’s hard maintaining relationships,” she says. “You have to have people who really understand you and your life, and trust you, and trust that you want to be with them and spend time with them – but you really can’t because you’re on the other side of the country.” This is the point that her real friends have “come out of the woodwork”, she’s discovered. With all the craziness that’s about to engulf her, she’ll need them more than ever.

Quantum of Solace opens on 31 October

Interview by James Mottram
Saturday, 18 October 2008

Source: The Independent

Tess ended a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve added 8 new stills from it as well as a photo from the set to our gallery. We now have incredible 60 stills from the TV Series!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Tess of the D’Urbevilles (2008): Production Stills
- Tess of the D’Urbevilles (2008): On The Set – Unknown Date

Thanks to Mari of Eddie Redmayne Online for uploading it on YouTube!

They’re probably the last ones we’ll be seeing.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Production Stills