THE OBSERVER – If you ask Gemma Arterton if she regrets her career choices to date, she will look you straight in the eye and tell you it’s complicated. The year she graduated from Rada she appeared in Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla; in a Brit comedy with Mackenzie Crook; as the lead in Tess of the D’Urbervilles; and as Bond girl Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace. From there, she went straight on to blockbusters Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Clash of the Titans. On her first day working on Quantum of Solace she filmed her death scene, lying naked for two hours on Bond’s bed, covered in black oil. It seems now that the experience gave her time to think.

It’s a hot afternoon in Soho and she is mixing a drink with the casual swing of someone just home from holidaying with her best friend; she’s tanned, freckled, quick to laugh. At the weekend, for her belated 30th birthday party, she tells me she’ll be performing TLC’s “No Scrubs”. Suddenly she’s rapping. “See if you can’t spatially expand my horizon. Then that leaves you in the class with scrubs, never rising…” And then my hands are clapping, because that’s what happens to your hands when a girl spontaneously raps.

We’re at the Dean Street Townhouse – and the sun has brought out celebrities like rain does snails. At every table is a doubletake. Arterton, her back to the room, seems profoundly at ease with herself, which makes her stories about the anger she suppressed – about her “freak-outs” after bad experiences at work, about her decision to quit films altogether – all the more compelling.

It happened slowly. Once, she remembers, she was working on a film where, apart from the make-up artist, she was the only woman on set. “Everyone just behaved so badly, people were getting fired left, right and centre. It was just power, power, power.” She hated it. “After that, for a while I was doing ‘Fuck You’ work, because I was angry about the industry. I wanted to do these aggressive films to show that I was badass and could kill people.”