Today (February 02) it’s Gemma 33rd birthday! We hope she’ll have a great one, spent with the people she loves. To celebrate it we added in the gallery some exclusive outtakes from a portrait taken back at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016 while she was promoting Their Finest. This is one of my favorite portraits of her!

Be sure to check them out and please, credit us if you repost them, thank you! Enjoy :)

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).

Tuesday (September 11) was the Vita and Virginia day at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. Sadly not much coverage for it so I’m making a post with what I was able to find, hoping more videos and photos will be released in the next few days!

In the gallery I’ve added some instagram photos of Gemma – looking amazing – during the day for the press interviews and photoshoots. The portrait Gemma, Elizabeth Debicki and the director Chanya Button did for E! and few photos from the premiere.

During the premiere Gemma was wearing a Christopher Kane velvet crystal buckle and Le Silla shoes, and looked gourgeous! Stay tuned on our twitter @GArtertonOnline in case of more additions!

TIME OUT LONDON – Gemma Arterton bounds down a hotel corridor, fresh but flustered after lunch. ‘I got lipstick on my dress!’ she exclaims. Mindful of scheduled photoshoots, she playfully adopts poses that conceal the offending marks – and then starts our interview feeling bad about returning a slightly soiled dress to the designer. This is Arterton all over: spirited, funny, professional, thoughtful. She tells me that she was always the performer: both she and her sister Hannah have been acting since they were toddlers in Gravesend. ‘There are videos my mum filmed when we were about four and two years old,’ she says. ‘We were acting out Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. I’m like, “DO IT LIKE THIS! YOU HAVE TO DO IT LIKE THIS!” then she does it and I push her out of the way… God, it’s so bad.’ She gives a guilty giggle. ‘I was like, “Me! Look at me!”’

The world soon looked. After training at Rada, the actress landed a plum role in 2007’s ‘St Trinian’s’ before playing Strawberry Fields in ‘The Quantum of Solace’. Then came a couple of surprising picks, with grimy thriller ‘The Disappearance of Alice Creed’ and countryside romp ‘Tamara Drewe’, before she really hit her stride with ‘Byzantium’ and 2016’s ‘The Girl with All the Gifts’. Her latest, ‘The Escape’, is a largely improvised British drama about a woman who has a breakdown and heads to Paris, leaving her husband (Dominic Cooper) and two children behind. ‘It’s a taboo subject,’ says Arterton. ‘You’ve got to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother and so many marriages break down and the husband leaves. When a woman does it, it’s seen as an awful thing: “What’s wrong with her?”’

Arterton is heartbreaking as the unhappy suburban wife, but filming wasn’t without its challenges. ‘We used real children that live in the house we were shooting in – they weren’t actors. They didn’t really understand what was happening, and they actually didn’t like me,’ she says, and this time she’s not laughing. ‘I found that really difficult. I’d walk into the room and the kids would be like, “Oh God, not her!”’

THE TELEGRAPH – Gemma Arterton and Dominic Savage are having their photographs taken in a London hotel. The star of the stage musical Made in Dagenham, in a blue dress, exudes confidence and energy; the writer and director of such brilliant TV dramas as Freefall (2009) and Dive (2010), in necktie and designer spectacles, appears a little shy. Having your picture taken with Arterton, he tells me afterwards, is like trying to play piano alongside a concert pianist. It makes you self-conscious.

Arterton and Savage first met 10 years ago, to talk about making a film that never happened. Arterton, then a rising star after being cast as a Bond girl in Quantum of Solace (2008), asked Savage if he would send her his films. He obliged. To that section on her shelf, she can now add The Escape, a remarkable new film that they have created together.

Arterton, twice nominated for an Olivier award, gives what might just be the performance of her career as Tara, a wife and mother-of-two who succumbs to depression after she realises she wants more from life. Savage’s camera dwells on Arterton’s face as she withdraws deep inside herself, tears forming while she submits wordlessly to a “quickie” with husband Mark (Dominic Cooper, with whom she last shared a screen in the 2010 film, Tamara Drewe, directed by Stephen Frears).

It’s a beautiful, internalised performance that, in part, grew out of Savage’s belief in improvisation: “The whole idea of a director is as controlling and in charge and all that s—,” he says. “And I don’t work that way at all”. Before filming began, the two of them talked in depth about their own lives, a process that required an unusual degree of courage. “Actors of a certain level are very untrusting,” Arterton says. “They’re nervous about opening up to you, in case it gets leaked out.”

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.”

(Read the rest of the article at the source)

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!

– Magazine Scans > Scans from 2018 > The Guardian Weekend (July 14)
– Photoshoots & Portraits > The Guardian (2018)

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!

– Magazine Scans > Scans from 2018 > Elle France (April 20)
– Photoshoots & Portraits > Elle France (2018)