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 – 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).

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)

SCREEN DAILY – In a quiet corner of suburban Dublin, the Bloomsbury group is bringing art to life. Paintings and drawings are dotted throughout Baldonnell House, one of several Irish locations hosting the production of a new film about literary icon Virginia Woolf.

Vita & Virginia, directed and co-written by Chanya Button (Burn Burn Burn), centres on the true story of the love affair between the acclaimed author (played by Elizabeth Debicki) and socialite/writer Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton), and how the relationship inspired Woolf’s novel Orlando. Isabella Rossellini and Rupert Penry-Jones also star.

For Arterton, who is an executive producer on the film — based on Eileen Atkins’ 1993 stage play — the story is one she has long aspired to bring to screen. “Eileen Atkins sent me a very early draft, maybe four or five years ago. I ended up showing Chanya the script on holiday.”

While many accounts of Woolf turn towards her troubled later years, this film shows her at her most vibrant, according to Arterton. “She wrote such vivid stories, full of inspiration and energy and creativity and humour and wit,” she says. “I don’t know if we’ve seen that side, because the fascination with her is always the end of her life, which is sad, I think. They were only lovers for a small period of time, but they were great friends.”

This is the actress’s second time in a producer role. “I produced a film which has yet to come out called The Escape,” she says. “My involvement comes more creatively — script stage, crew stage, getting directors and the cast in place. I was very involved in that, and various drafts of the script. Because Chanya is a friend of mine, it was very collaborative with her in terms of visual style, what we felt about this story.”

(Read the rest of the article at the source)

GALLERY LINKS:
– Movies & Television > Vita and Virginia (2018) > Production Stills

TIME OUT LONDON – ‘Films stick with you,’ Gemma Arterton stresses, as she leans across the desk of a central London office. ‘They’re with you for your whole career so you really have to know why you did them.’ The 31-year-old actress is dressed top-to-toe in tomato today. It’s the kind of ‘fuck you’ outfit you wear to meet an ex for dinner, so it’s no surprise that she’s ready to speak her mind.

She’s here to talk to me about her new movie ‘Their Finest’, a feminist-angled romance set during WWII. She plays a writer who enters the movie business to write romantic ‘slop’ for propaganda films. Her character Catrin Cole is based on a real woman, Diana Morgan, who wrote for Ealing Studios at the time. Cole flourishes once she’s given the opportunity to flex her talent. It’s certainly reflective of Arterton’s own journey.

A few years ago you probably knew the Kent-born actress as a Bond girl. She spent her early career getting cast in arm-candy roles, which she says she took because she was ‘grateful’ for the opportunities. Now, she’s an accomplished stage actress and a film and TV producer, having started her own production company with two female friends. And she’s not afraid to dish the industry dirt…

What was it that drew you to ‘Their Finest’?
‘I loved the period. The war gave so many opportunities to women but it was also a very bizarre time to be in London. I didn’t know about propaganda filmmaking or the roles women played in it. I thought it was really fascinating.’

It’s a bit of an untold take on the wartime story, isn’t it?
‘Yes. Usually we tell stories of the battlefield or what was happening in Germany. We don’t really talk about what was happening at home, but as well as being a time of pressure and loss, it was a great time for women finding out about themselves. They were being called into munitions factories and driving buses.’

The film has a very feminist message; you’ve become more outspoken about your politics in recent years too – how’s that been?
‘When I first started talking about being a woman in the industry I got into trouble. Not many people were speaking out like they are now. Now everyone talks about it. It’s brilliant. You don’t have to be prim and prissy about it; you can be fun and gross, you can have an intelligent voice and be working-class as well.’

How has the way you’ve chosen roles changed over the years?
‘At first I was just taking what I was given. Now I have a little bit more respect for myself. Especially because I’ve done some really challenging theatre. My film roles should reflect where I am in terms of theatre, which is more complex stuff. I care about what I do so much that now it has to be something I really believe in for me to invest my time.’

(Read the rest of the entry at the source)

GALLERY LINKS:
– Photoshoots & Portraits > Time Out London (2017)