Gemma Arterton.
She's done Hollywood -- and now she's turned her back on it. Former Bond girl Gemma Arterton tells Kaleem Aftab why pretty-girl roles aren't enough.
It was Gemma Arterton's heart-shaped mouth that got Marjane Satrapi, director of The Voices, most excited. "She became fixated with my mouth," says the 29-year-old star. "It's a little bit heart-shaped, but she made a big deal out of it. In every scene I had to wear red lipstick."
The lips are especially important as, for much of the black comedy, the only part of Arterton we see is her decapitated head in a fridge. She's been killed by a schizophrenic toilet factory worker, played by Ryan Reynolds, who despite lusting after her, chops off her head under the instruction of his Scottish cat. When he starts dating a fellow worker, played by Anna Kendrick, he also gets advice from Arterton's talking head in the fridge, as well as the psychotic cat, and his loveable dog.
The British actress was offered the choice of playing either leading lady when she first chatted to Satrapi on Skype. She went for the less obvious of the two roles: "I just wanted to do something non-connected to what I had been doing before, which was focused on the body and beauty. Anna's part is more deep and profound; I just wanted to be a bit silly."
It's this desire not to be pigeonholed that has led Arterton to turn her back on Hollywood. The English star had barely got her feet wet as an actress when she got the call from Bond producer Barbara Broccoli saying she had won the role of Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace.
Most actors would have been doing cartwheels. "Just last night I was thinking about the moment that I found out I was going to be in a Bond film," says Arterton. " I wasn't happy about it. It wasn't like: 'Oh my God, I'm going to be working with these people and it's a dream come true.' It's like 'Oh, cool', and it was a great experience and fun to go all those places, but the work wasn't so interesting."
She had a handful of scenes, wore beautiful clothes and died.
The pressure to take on such roles (she has also starred in the Hollywood fantasies Prince of Persia and Clash of the Titans) was immense. "At the time I really thought I had to say yes to those films. I even have emails from people saying you must do this film, it's the right choice and strategy. Sometimes I think the Hollywood mentality -- what is the aim there? The aim is to win an Oscar and that is not my aim."
At first she was afraid to speak out as she felt it would sound ungrateful. Her mother was a cleaner; her father a welder. They divorced when she was 5 and she lived with her mother and her younger sister, Hannah, now also an actress. Acting was a way of escaping and she won a government grant to attend Rada. So to her it seemed a bit cheeky to start complaining about her lot when at the age of 21 she could buy a flat in Battersea, London.
"I never ever thought that I'd own anything. That's when I was richest, when I was 21."
However, she reached breaking point two years ago, just after making the action-horror Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. "I had to call my agent and say 'no more of that shit'." Arterton realised she didn't have to play the Hollywood game. She received her greatest acclaim appearing as the titular character in Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe, which debuted at Cannes in 2010, and she started making annual appearances on the London stage. Last year she played the title role in the Duchess of Malfi at Shakespeare's Globe and she's spent the last six months performing a musical version of Made In Dagenham, based on Nigel Cole's 2010 film about seamstresses working at the Ford car factory who walked out in protest at being designated unskilled workers. The protest led to a strike over equal pay and to the introduction of the Equal Pay Act 1970. The play received mixed reviews and will close in April, when Arterton's contract is up.
When she saw the film, she wondered why she hadn't been seen for the main part, played by Sally Hawkins, and was told she was too young at the time. On the early closure of the musical she says: "Audiences love it; it's just in too big a theatre. It's just the state of British theatre at the moment that people will happily see The Phantom of the Opera four times and pay maximum price but will not go and see a new show because they are scared and don't support new work. I think our show would have lasted if it was in a slightly smaller theatre. That theatre is a massive 1400-seater."
The pressure on the actress was all the greater because the play's marketing centred on her, something she thinks the producers didn't think through properly. "I remember saying: 'Oh God, I'm not going to sell out this theatre.' I made a reservation for lunch today under my own name and they were, like, 'Who?' That suits me well."
Arterton has lost roles thanks to her perceived lack of star power. "There was a film which is out now, so I can talk about it: Under the Skin. It was me that was meant to be doing it, and they couldn't finance it with me. Jonathan [Glazer] called me and said, 'I've tried, but they need someone really famous to star in it.'"
She has accepted that; and the film, which Arterton loves, was eventually made with Scarlett Johansson in the lead. She argues that her goal is longevity.
"You have to do good work. I think in the long term it goes against you [doing pretty-girl roles]. That might last for 10 years, but I want to be working when I'm in my 70s and 80s. I don't want to suddenly get to 40 and be like, 'Oh, I just did those pretty-girl roles'."
No theatre-lover's visit to London is complete wihout taking it a performance at Shakespeare's Globe, a modern reconstruction of the theatre on the Thames' South Bank where many of the Bard's later plays were first performed.
The new version is actually a couple of hundred metres from the site of the original, but the meticulous attention to detail gives the visitor a real sense of what it must have been like to be there, especially those prepared to stand in the "yard" in front of the protruding stage - where tickets are only £5.
The standing spectators, called groundlings, get the closest view, though they are unprotected when it rains - and umbrellas are banned. But a season of Globe performances coming to local cinemas give audiences the chance to see the shows without being exposed to the elements.
The eight-play season, screening between now and November, comprises seven of Shakespeare's plays, but opens this week with a production of John Webster's famously bloodsoaked "revenge" tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi.
The play was first performed publicly at the Globe in 1614, so last year's production - staged in the complex's indoor (and entirely candlelit) Sam Wanamaker Theatre - marked its 400th anniversary: Gemma Arterton, the busy English actress whose breakthrough role was as a Bond girl, plays the eponymous widowed Duchess whose love for a man below her station enrages her nutjob brother and sparks a killing spree.
The Shakespeare works in the season are: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Peter Calder
- Independent
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