Here’s a new interview with CinemaBlend. In it Gemma discusses taking on the role of Alice Creed and briefly touches on her upcoming projects – can’t wait to get more details on those!

If you’ve only seen Gemma Arterton in big budget productions like Quantum of Solace, Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia, you’re really missing out. Lucky for you, Arterton has something new hitting theaters on August 6th and while The Disappearance of Alice Creed may not have been showered with cash and effects like those other productions, it’s certainly far more powerful.

Arterton stars as Alice Creed, the poor young woman Vic and Danny (Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston) target in their kidnapping scheme. They confine their terrified victim to a room while they move along with their plan to make some quick cash at her expense. What Vic and Danny don’t know is that Alice has no intentions of being a good hostage and obeying their orders; she wants to fight back and survive.

For someone who only knows big budget Gemma, Alice Creed Gemma is absolutely going to blow them away. The actress was well aware of the stereotype she was developing and signed on for this project in an effort to show what she’s capable of and boy does she, but it wasn’t easy. During our recent chat, Arterton talked about the difficulties that came along with playing the role as well as the massive payoff and so much more. Check it all out in the interview below.

How’d you get involved? Did the just script come your way or did J approach you?
No, he didn’t. The script came my way because the casting director, Lucy [Bevan], is an advocate of mine, but J wasn’t really at the time because he’d only seen me in [Quantum of Solace]. She said to him, ‘Oh, you should meet Gemma,’ and he was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think she’s up to it. Is she? I mean, she’s a Bond girl.’ But Lucy said, ‘Just meet her.’ Anyway, so I came in and I didn’t know any of this, I just came in and I loved the script and I really wanted to do it and had to do this really demanding scene in the audition, which is just horrible to have to do that in the audition, but I did it.

He offered it to me on the spot and then when he told me that story months later, I said, ‘How could you have made such an assumption?’ He said, ‘Well, you know.’ I said, ‘Fair enough.’ That’s the reason I did the movie as well, because I had an idea that people are thinking that I couldn’t do this sort of movie and I needed to test myself. Until then if I was going up for stuff it was always the girl who is in love with the guy, the girl who is hot, the girl who is oh whatever, no substance, no interest. And then this one came along and I was like, wow. First of all, she’s a woman, she’s not just a girl and she’s flawed and complex and she’s kind of like an animal in this film and it would require some acting. [Laughs] But also, more than the role, it was the film itself. I just loved the story. For a British film as well it was so tight and it felt European, French. It felt like a movie I would go and see. My favorite directors are like [Michael] Haneke and [Lars] von Trier. It had that kind of feel.

Even if this is the type of material you want to work with, it’s still tough stuff to handle. Did you have any apprehensions about it?
No, there wasn’t apprehension, it was more fear of not being able to do it. I’d wake up in the morning and dread the scene ahead, not for the physical demands, but I didn’t know if I was able to convey what the scene needed; act it, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to act it because I’ve never been terrified in my life. I didn’t really know how you act that.

Wow, you would never think that!
Oh, thank you. I don’t know, I just work with the actors really. Every time I got freaked out that I wasn’t going to be able to do it, Martin or Eddie would give me this amazing performance, which you can’t help but be affected by. And that was how we did it really. I just used to get myself worked up into a state and they would then come in and we did the scene and it was really full on. Some days I was crying all day and I’d be like, ‘I don’t want to cry anymore!’ I really would try not to cry and I couldn’t see at the end of one day and J was going, ‘Just one more,’ and you’re not really supposed to do that to your body. You’re not really supposed to put yourself into that position. It was really exhausting, but it was so satisfying, the most satisfying job I’ve ever done.

Did you have any rehearsal time with Martin and Eddie or even just some time to get to know each other and get a little more comfortable with each other?
I think, as an actor anyway, you get used to not having that time really. You kind of get to know each other as the job goes on. We kind of all threw ourselves into this situation and everybody knew we were going to just trust each other. But we did, we had three days of rehearsal, three days to like five days or something of rehearsal, which was mostly spent rehearsing the moves of the kidnap, which is kind of a real icebreaker, ‘Hello, my name is Gemma, now you can carry me and I’ll kick and scream and punch and then you can pretend to be cutting off my clothes.’ I learned very quickly that these were people to trust and they were very respectful, ultra respectful actually, too respectful to some degree because they were very careful with me.

I swear to God, in my short career I’ve worked with some amazing actors, some of the best actors in the world, but I’ve never felt anything like what I felt in this film because they just went for it and they gave me everything that they had every single time, even if the camera wasn’t on them. And I’d do the same for them; you get something out of doing that. I’ve worked on movies before where the actor doesn’t hang around for the reverse and you have to do it to ‘x’ and the box and whatever and it’s so not acceptable in my book. You get so much out of reacting off of somebody. And so they would just do that and they would stop, check I was all right, snap out of character, be silly and jump on the bed and then they’d get back into it. Proper acting, none of this walking around as the character all day, it was proper acting, snapping in and out.

Read the entire interview at the source