If you’ve seen British actress Gemma Arterton as a Bond girl in Quantum of Solace or as the regal Tamina in Prince of Persia, you really haven’t seen her at all.

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

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