HARPER’S BAZAAR UK – Gemma Arterton has just returned from finding God in Nepal. “I’ve been learning all about Christianity,” she tells me cheerfully, when we meet for coffee in the cosy Drawing Room of London’s Soho Hotel. Arterton is dressed casually in jeans, a soft black woollen jumper and a pair of chunky crocodile-effect boots, her skin so impossibly luminous that you wouldn’t for a moment image she has recently stepped off a long-haul flight from the Himalayas.

If it sounds as though she has gone all Eat, Pray, Love on us, that impression is swiftly dispelled. Arterton’s trip to Jomsom, a spectacularly scenic village in Nepal’s Mustang District, was to film Black Narcissus, a BBC TV adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel about a group of Anglican nuns sent to the mountains to open a convent, and her interest in religion is purely academic. “I’ve been reading this amazing book about becoming a nun – you have to kind of shut yourself down and then start again in God’s vision,” she says. “My character, Sister Clodagh, has managed to close off her entire personality, and then when she gets to Nepal, the sheer beauty of the place opens her up again, and she unravels.”

Brought up in a down-to-earth, straight-talking family in Kent, Arterton herself has had no such crises of faith to contend with, though she acknowledges having some kind of ‘higher beliefs’. “I don’t have a religion, but I’m into spirituality,” she says. “I definitely like the idea there’s something else, and who knows what that is? I think I’d feel saddened to think this is it.” Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that her forthcoming projects deal with the tension between reality and something just beyond it. While Black Narcissus shows a woman falling apart in the face of her own spiritual doubt, Arterton’s newest film, the beautifully shot World War II drama Summerland, tells a rather more hopeful story of a reclusive writer, Alice, who becomes progressively more open-minded – and open-hearted – as the narrative progresses. “I do tend to get those parts now – the really cranky people who soften,” reflects Arterton.