Gemma Arterton has opened up to Red about almost quitting acting, what being a Bond girl was really like, finding love when she least expected it and taking the lead in a much anticipated BBC drama, starting this weekend.

In an exclusive cover interview for our January issue (out now), Arterton said she was in a ‘terrible film…called Runner Runner’, adding: ‘To be honest, I just wanted to quit acting after that. I shouldn’t have done it in the first place.’

She said: ‘The script wasn’t good; I just did it because it was this big American film and everyone was telling me it was a good idea. It was all the things I don’t enjoy when I’m on a film set and there was a lot of animosity and tension. And now it pains me that things like that are out there.’

The actor also spoke candidly about what it was like to play Bond girl Strawberry Fields alongside Daniel Craig in the 2008 film Quantum of Solace.

‘I was like, “Oh, whatever, it’s just another role.” Then my publicist called and said, “Gemma, is there anything you need to tell me? Any skeletons in the closet? You have to tell me now because they will find out.”

‘And I remember thinking, “It’s me, who cares?” But that was also a really valuable moment in my life as it made me kind of guarded and careful. I’ve never wanted to court any

You are best known for your feature films, but you got your start in Shakespeare. What is it about his work that continues to excite you?

There are two things that I enjoy, and one is how it is basic storytelling that is echoed in almost all drama. It exists in superhero movies, such as having something Shakespearean in the Marvel films. All of his stories are relatable, and it feels so pure. The other thing is the language, and how he could get under the skin and make you viscerally feel the words. Maybe, it has something with the iambic pentameter and how it follows the rhythm of the heartbeat. The more Shakespeare that I do, the more that I discover, and especially when you are doing it during a play, it becomes exciting to continue to notice things about the language.

You have won some notable awards for your theatrical work. What are some of the few things about the live stage that drives you to pursue that craft?

Theater in the UK is so important, and it really is one of our calling cards. This is something that is in our blood. So when I thought about becoming an actor, I did not think about television or movies; I thought about being in theater. I love being on stage, and I love the immediacy. You are connected with the audience. I understood this interaction better because of the lockdown. You don’t have that on screen, and that energy is something I am craving now. Theater also has stages and in the middle of a long run, you may hate it, but you can make changes in your performance, and in the end, you are in love a different way.

You have a robust resume, but what is really interesting is your voice work on Watership Down. Did you enjoy your voiceover work?

Here in the UK, it comes around every Easter. There is something so relevant to what is going on with the environment. It was an amazing experience and was just thinking the list of actors to face the characters. I love voice work because they want a piece of me to be in the character, and I am grateful for the experience.

STELLA MAGAZINE – Gemma Arterton is explaining the little-known art of ‘pistol-whipping’. ‘Sounds pretty mad, doesn’t it?’ says the 34-year-old star of Quantum of Solace, Clash of the Titans and Tamara Drewe with a peel of laughter. ‘Like a euphemism, or like you’re going to be slapping someone around the face with a pistol.’ And the term has been used in that way more recently, but in Matthew Vaughn’s action-packed prequel to the Kingsman spy sagas – set during the First World War – ‘it’s not that,’ she assures me. ‘It’s more flipping it up and around in the same way you see gunslinging being done in westerns.’

Not enough of Gemma’s pistol-whipping made it into the final cut of The King’s Man – which is ‘typical’, says the Kent-born actor. Having spent months being taught how to do something that cool by ‘a lovely ex-marine named Tony’, and having ‘practised it incessantly, it’ll inevitably end up being one second in the film. And there you are desperately asking everyone: “Wait – did you see that amazing pistol-whip thing that I did?”’

Gemma needn’t worry. If ‘pistol-whipping’ were a euphemism, then her character, Nanny Polly, pistol-whips her way through and around every character in the drama – from Ralph Fiennes’ Duke of Oxford to his son Conrad (played by star-in-the-making Harris Dickinson), to a toddler hanging on her apron strings. (The cast also includes Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Matthew Goode and Stanley Tucci.) Simply put: Polly’s a pistol-whipping, Yorkshire-accented Mary Poppins. ‘And not just a nanny,’ Gemma explains, ‘but a matriarch who runs everything. She’s the emotional anchor; everybody’s rock.’

Check in our gallery the beautiful photoshoot Gemma did for the magazine, together with scans from the issue! Enjoy :)

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.

HARPER’S BAZAAR UK – I am sitting in the basement of a glamorous London hotel chatting to Gemma Arterton over paper cups of tea. She is make-up free in black jeans, a jumper and a pair of ‘ancient old Chelsea boots’, and is mesmerisingly beautiful. We are supposed to be concentrating on her astonishing performance as Tara, a married mother of two in The Escape, a film in which the dialogue was entirely improvised and for which Arterton, also a co-producer, has won Bazaar’s coveted award. But her joie de vivre makes it difficult to remember we are not just there to have fun. And Arterton is fun, whether exclaiming over homemade coffee cake or choosing a deliciously sparkly pair of Jimmy Choos for the upcoming fashion shoot. This is not to imply that she doesn’t take her work seriously; a good word to describe her approach to acting is ‘dedication’. She researches, she reads, she visits locations, she asks questions, she listens. Her interest in everything she takes on, her sincerity and her warmth all inform the intelligence with which she approaches her work.

Although only 32, Arterton is a professional lifetime away from those inevitable post-Quantum of Solace, lace and lipstick offers to play what she describes as ‘sexy girl in this and sexy girl in that’. Over the past decade her roles on both stage and screen read like a cast-list of factual and fictional female stand-outs, a multifaceted pageant from the past, a sequence of the tragic and the triumphant, the misunderstood and the wise. They have included Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the Duchess of Malfi, a Dagenham Ford-worker activist, Joan of Arc and Nell Gwynn. Her gorgeous depiction of Marilyn Monroe’s innocence and knowingness in Sky Arts’ ‘UrbanMyths’ series focused on the 47 takes Monroe needed to say ‘It’s me, Sugar’ in Some Like It Hot. More recently, Arterton has played the poet Vita Sackville-West and a reclusive writer in World War II in Summerland, and will soon take on the enigmatic 1960s singer Dusty Springfield (Arterton loves to sing).

THE GUARDIAN – A protest march is one of Gemma Arterton’s favourite things. “Oh, I love going on marches,” she beams. “They’re such an amazingly galvanising, brilliant community.” She brought her mum along on a women’s march recently, “and she loved it, too. She just loved the energy you get off it. It’s like carnival, people really together, and they’re singing and they’re chanting.” She throws her head back, exhilarated by the memory. “It’s like, you feel power.”

The 32-year-old has not always felt powerful. Her career began on the 2007 St Trinian’s movie, and a year later she became a global sex symbol as a Bond girl. “The first six years of my career were all about me learning what I didn’t want to do,” she admits. “If I’d been really, really strong-minded back then, I would have turned them down. But I wasn’t, so I own that.” She pauses for a moment to reflect.

“I think self-belief is very rare in young actors. Whenever I meet a really confident young actor, I just think, ‘Fuck, yes, go on.’ I wasn’t that person when I was younger. I wish I was.”

The terrible truth is that while Arterton is telling me this, I can’t concentrate. Her beauty is quite unlike anything I have ever seen in real life, and hopelessly distracting. We meet in a north London studio, following her photo shoot, but there is no artifice in the minimal makeup or artlessly swept-back hair, and the miraculous perfection of every feature is mesmerising. Such are our delusions about the power of beauty, the idea that it might ever confer disadvantage feels counterintuitive. And yet, for years, the Rada-trained actor found herself underestimated because of her face.

“My taste in film and theatre has always been very marginal, very arthouse, very out there, and then it always surprised me that I got these mainstream roles. I’ve done so many things that were not meaningful, and I have always wanted to do meaningful work, and I don’t get sent those meaningful scripts.” She has no regrets, she adds quickly, about her decorative roles. “But I found, in my experience, that people just think you’re a bad actor.”

Gemma was featured in the July 14 issue of The Guardian Weekend, with a very interesting interview and a brand new beautiful photoshoot! Outtakes and digital scans from the magazine can now be found in our gallery, enjoy!

Gemma is featured in the latest issue (April 20) of Elle France, with a beautiful new photoshop. She was in Paris a few days ago for the premiere of The Escape – the movie will be out on April 25 in France.

Be sure to check the digital scans and photoshoot outtakes in our gallery!