So far in her Hollywood career, Gemma Arterton has played a Bond girl, a Persian princess and a Greek goddess cursed with immortality, roles that helped her make a name for herself but left her in the shadow of her male costars. Her starring turn in Paramount’s new fractured fairy tale, “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” sees the ethereal English beauty finally on equal footing as a wisecracking, weapon-wielding heroine.

“She’s not the damsel in distress, not the girlfriend,” Arterton said last week, speaking by phone from New York where she was promoting the film ahead of its opening Friday. “She’s a stand-alone character in her own right, very strong, very independent. That kind of role doesn’t come up very often, not having to be kissing anybody. It’s liberating.”

“Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” picks up 15 years after the events in the Grimms’ famous fable. Having escaped their childhood captivity in the confectionery cottage, Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Arterton) have turned pro, coping with the trauma of their youth by slaying spellcasters for hire. The seemingly unstoppable bounty hunters appear to meet their match in the devious machinations of Famke Janssen’s Muriel, a powerful witch who’s hatching a plot that involves the snatching of small-town youngsters for a diabolical end.

It might be the latest in a string of Hollywood reinventions of beloved fairy tales, but “Hansel & Gretel” is not for kids. The brash 3-D outing embraces its R rating with copious amounts of screen violence and gore and a heavy-metal-inflected soundtrack that pairs well with the movie’s offbeat, occasionally profane sense of humor.

The oddball concoction is the brainchild of Norway’s Tommy Wirkola, the writer-director who won a following for the 2009 horror comedy “Dead Snow,” about a group of students who unleash a battalion of frozen Nazi zombies.

Wirkola said he cast Arterton as Gretel not based on her earlier turns in such spectacle movies as “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” or “Clash of the Titans,” but rather her performance in 2009’s “The Disappearance of Alice Creed.” In the small indie, she delivered a raw, emotional performance as a woman who is kidnapped and held for ransom.

“I think all great female action heroes we have, the truly great ones, are the ones that are not perfect, they are not super strong,” Wirkola said. “Gemma, in that film she was so strong at times, but she had this vulnerability that shows through. I thought that was important for Gretel.”

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Photoshoots – Los Angeles Times (2013)