Gemma Arterton: ‘I feel more in control now’

Gemma Arterton was desperate as a teenager to leave her small home town in Kent to go and live in London. She remembers, in detail, the day she finally moved, driving up with her dad and her boxes, to stake her claim at independence and adulthood.

“It was a tiny flat in west London,” she says, her voice stripped of any hint of Gravesend. “My room was like a wine cellar underneath the pavement – I could hear people walking above me – and it had mould all over it. But I was just so happy!” Her dad cried at leaving her “in this disgusting little flat”. But Arterton was thrilled. She was a grown-up, she had her own space. “I got to hang out in the pub round the corner with all the students from Lamda and…” She pauses slightly, then says: “Oh, hello?!”

Here, Arterton is saying hello to my mum, who has walked in on our video call at the precise moment one of Britain’s most recognised actors is telling her tale of adult escape. Because, of course, instead of being in my own grown-up flat in London, I am stuck between tiers and lockdowns at my parents’ house, my childhood home in Peterborough, a place I, too, grew up desperate to leave for bigger things.

“Hi there!” Arterton says again.

There she is, waving at my mum from my laptop screen, grinning on her sofa in front of a neat curation of lamps, a console and an elegant nude sketch, which hangs on a wall in her Battersea home. My mum freezes behind me and mouths: “Oh!” She has tiptoed into the scruffy box room that doubles as my dad’s office for the second time in 10 minutes, this time to rescue his glasses.

“Sorry,” she says, on her way out.

“No problem,” comes Arterton’s inordinately sweet reply. “Don’t worry!”

It’s mortifying. Perhaps less so for the revolving cast of family members who continue to walk in and out of the room over the next 40 minutes, but certainly for me, back in an environment where I will forever be seen as an 11-year-old. Here I am: flustered, embarrassed, slightly in awe of this pretty, ever-so-together girl next door. Arterton, who looks exquisitely understated in a chocolate brown sweater and autumnal makeup, laughs at the weird situation in which we find ourselves. And then she says: “It’s all very 2020, isn’t it!”

For what it’s worth, Arterton has had a reasonable pandemic. Apart from the grinding general sadness and despair that has cloaked the world, she is relieved that there’s been no illness, touch wood, among her family and friends. She and her husband – the Irish actor Rory Keenan (Peaky Blinders, the BBC’s War and Peace) – hunkered down and got on with it. “Actors usually have times where we don’t know what’s going on,” she points out. “We don’t know what the next job is, so that bit was kind of normal.” In a period marked nationally by the making of banana bread and doorstep clapping, they both found new ways to keep ticking over. Keenan, she tells me proudly, wrote and made two films this year. Arterton, a serial and accomplished hobbyist, took up painting.

“Writing is frustrating for me because you’re just sitting down for such long periods and I think I’m much more physical,” she says, her hands flapping in demonstration. And so after Lockdown One, Arterton took classes at the London Fine Art Studios, something she’d wanted to do for a long time.

“I love it. It’s become a real kind of passion. I wanted to learn how to classically paint. I thought: ‘Oh, it’d be good for me to have some real proper technique’ – and then I can mess it all up again.”

Without wanting to labour the point, it’s a notion that’s generally underlined Arterton’s career since she graduated from Rada in 2007. She landed her first professional role – playing Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe Theatre – before she had even finished her degree. And within a year she’d skipped theatre work and found herself catapulted into movie stardom in her early 20s, playing Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace.

Back then, she became best known in the public eye for being the babe in the James Bond film, dispensable hot totty who – surprise – dies on screen soon after bonking 007. The next couple of years pushed Arterton into clunky, mega blockbusters – Prince of Persia, Clash of the Titans – that did little with her actual talent and moulded her into whatever the industry demanded. One producer told her to lose weight and insisted on flying a personal trainer out on set to Morocco. Stephen Frears, who directed her in her first lead role in a film (Tamara Drew), said her voice didn’t match her face, and sent her along to voice coach Penny Dyer. “It was a squeaky little voice,” he told GQ in 2012. “But she got rid of it. She dealt with it.”

For a time, Arterton simply worked nonstop – she did 26 jobs in seven years – before something snapped. She seemed to have taken the whole of 2015 off. By then, she’d moved to France, immersed herself completely in the language and even made some films in French while shuttling between her life in Paris and her home in London. It was also the year she was granted a divorce from her first husband, Stefano Catelli, who she had met at Download festival, in 2009, and split from a few years later.

I wonder if she took a strategic time out to change things, or if she’s always seen her job as “doing one for the CV, doing one for the wallet, doing one for me,” as Paddy Considine (her co-star in The Girl With All the Gifts) once put it.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised it’s better to be careful about what [work] I do,” she says, mulling it over. “Before, I would just do stuff to, you know, do it. But it doesn’t sit well with me, because I do care so much about it. I wish I could be more flippant. I wish I didn’t care, but I do. I really care!”

What isn’t she proud of?

“Well, I’m proud of Black Narcissus,” she laughs, diplomatically swivelling us back to the subject at hand. Arterton is about to appear in the BBC’s production of Black Narcissus, a lavish three-part series based on the 1939 novel by Rumer Godden. Arterton is costumed in a severe-looking habit throughout and appears scrubbed down and ruddy-faced to play Sister Clodagh, a nun in charge of a fretful mission attempting to establish a school and hospital high on the cliff of an isolated mountain in the Himalayas.

The production took Arterton and the cast (including, briefly, the late Diana Rigg) to Nepal for three months at the end of 2019. Despite the potential for breathtaking scenery, the acting does much of the heavy lifting in the TV adaptation. Arterton is great to watch, though the new production is a more staid version than the deliciously loopy and sinister 1947 film, which won two Academy Awards and launched Deborah Kerr’s career. “I had a great time on the shoot,” Arterton recalls. “I love being in nature, in forests and mountains – I really shouldn’t live in London – and it was so untouched up there. There wasn’t really any phone signal or wifi and, like the characters, there was a lot of altitude sickness. You do feel different up there.” Arterton escaped the fate of the nuns, who slowly unravel in the abandoned palace they confine themselves to. “I think the thin air did me well,” she says. “It’s so clear, there’s no pollution. It was gorgeous.”

Arterton at 34 is a very different proposition to the Arterton who came into the public eye at 22. She’s beguiling to look at – a fact confirmed by studying her films as well as the countless images of her all over the internet. She is the embodiment of the English rose one moment, a vampy seductress the next. And there is obvious talent to mine, especially when she is gifted a decent role in a decent film (The Disappearance of Alice Creed and The Escape being my favourites). But there does seem to be a sense on the outside that she’s been cheated of the luck and acclaim that, say, Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley have had.

“I don’t know, I feel more in control now,” she says, assessing her own career. “When I was younger, people tried to mould me. They’d say: ‘We’ll cast you, but you need to do this, this and this.’ Whereas now I know what I need to work on as a character and I will do that myself. It’s different now. I feel a lot more grown-up. And people treat me more like a grown-up as well, I guess.”

In the past few years she has been noticeably vocal on inequality in the industry and she was instrumental in getting the Time’s Up campaign organised on the Bafta red carpet in London in 2018. “I’m a doer,” she says. “I’m quite good at getting things done.” Her campaigning, particularly in light of the #MeToo movement, is beginning to pay off. “It definitely has in terms of commissioning. It’s still ongoing, but there has been a shift in actively commissioning work from women and being mindful about it.”

In 2018, Arterton set up her own female-led production company, Rebel Park Productions, to champion female talent. Last year, she declared she wouldn’t pick a decorative Bond Girl-style role now. As an actor, she is drawn to female characters who are complicated and sometimes unlikable, “with a little bit of conflict, you know?” Decorative arm candy won’t cut it any more.

Still, there is a pervasive cultural sense that women in the public eye, film stars especially, become a kind of public property – their very bodies become owned by the industry and scrutinised by everyone else relentlessly. How much does that bother her?

“It depends on the day. Like, some days it really can and other days it doesn’t bother me at all and I feel OK. And I think that’s just kind of normal.” She laughs, something she tends towards at the end of her sentences when she’s on vulnerable ground. “It’s a really weird side of it that you just have to accept. Try not to tune into it too much, but sometimes you just are faced with it. So yeah, I’d be lying if I said: ‘Oh, you know, I feel amazing now and it never bothers me!’”

She laughs again.

“It’s one of the reasons I don’t go on social media, because I think I’m somebody that gets affected by things. So I just thought, I need to look after myself and not be subject to that.” What about behaviour from men in the industry, does it feel like a veneer of change or has dodgy behaviour genuinely been corrected? “I just think people are more careful with the words they use these days,” she says, slowing down her sentence before starting again. “What I’m trying to say is that even though people are managing the way they respond and speak and behave, there’s still an undercurrent there.”

Arterton once joked in an interview that “everyone in the industry knows I’m a pain” because she was speaking up about feminism and unequal pay, and demanding more recognition for women in filmmaking. That quote became the headline which has followed her around ever since.

“When I was working on The Kingsman with Matthew Vaughn, he said he’d read that interview and couldn’t understand why I’d said it. He was, ‘But you’re the opposite of a pain, you’re the easiest person to work with.’” And while it’s true that Arterton is entirely lovely to be around, I think, you get a clear sense that she has developed a steelier streak.

A lot of it stems, she thinks, from being made to feel like she wasn’t enough. She remembers turning up to drama school on a scholarship having read little Shakespeare or Chekhov, against “all these amazing graduates from Oxford and Cambridge” and feeling distinctly small. “For a long time, it was me thinking: ‘I don’t belong in this group of people, because I haven’t read all the books. I haven’t watched all the stuff I need to watch. I felt like I needed to learn. Whereas now, I feel like, yeah, OK! I do know what I’m doing. I’m well informed. My opinion is something I’ve grown more confident in expressing. I feel all right!”

She’s finally at a point, she says, where she is unlearning some of what she’d been taught. She’s doing her best to rid herself of the apologetic and unassuming self that many women are ingrained to display. “That said, even the other day, I caught myself texting my dog walker in the way we do. ‘Oh, just checking if it would be OK if you could take Luca for a walk tomorrow. Don’t worry if not, just wanted to check!’ And for God’s sake, we always do that. The ‘Oh, don’t worry if not!” She laughs again.

Black Narcissus will air on BBC One at 9pm on 27, 28 and 29 December. Master Moley is available to watch on Boomerang now

See full photoshoot here. Fashion editor Jo Jones; makeup by Naoko Scintu at the Wall Group using Armani Beauty, Skincare; hair by Earl Simms at Caren Agency using Hair by Sam McKnight; fashion assistant Peter Bevan; lighting by Michael Furlonger; digital by John Munro; set design by Matthew Duguid