Here’s a fantastic new interview via The Official London Theatre!

She has been a Bond girl, taken leading roles in British film Tamara Drewe and television drama Tess Of The D’Urbervilles and, at 24, has the sort of movie star status that makes young girls scream when they see her in the street (it happened to her on the tube the morning we meet). Yet despite all this, Gemma Arterton says that playing Hilde Wangel in Ibsen’s The Master Builder at the off-West End Almeida theatre is “the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life”.

“Yesterday I had a bit of a breakdown actually when I left rehearsals because it was really getting to me,” she says. “It’s a really strange play in that you have to go really deep, to beyond your mind; it gets into you. I left rehearsal and I just burst into tears in the car. I phoned my husband and I was like ‘I don’t know what to do!’… I went home and he bought me some ice-cream and it was fine.”

The ice cream was praline and vanilla. The husband, fashion salesman Stefan, she married in June this year after meeting him in April 2009; they got engaged after just 10 weeks. “He’s very special. Puts up with a lot,” she laughs. Continue…

Here’s a new interview with The Guardian, along with a new portrait image taken behind the scenes at the Almeida Theatre rehearsal rooms.

The other day Gemma Arterton attended an audition with “a very famous actor”. The actor looked at her CV, and said: “You’re in this for the art, aren’t you? I can see that from [the fact that you did] St Trinian’s.” Arterton, who is 24, tells me this with only the merest trace of indignation. “I think he was testing me,” she says. “But I’ve only been working for three years, and you can’t be creative at the beginning of your career. I left drama school [Rada] with a lot of debt. My student loan was £25,000, and I come from the kind of family where you’re not allowed to be in debt. So when you get offered a job, you’re going to say ‘yes’. It’s only now I can reflect on what I want to do next.”

Arterton followed her turn as St Trinian’s head girl with that of Strawberry Fields in Bond film Quantum of Solace. But this year has a somewhat different flavour – and don’t let the men’s magazines, who love nothing better than to stick her in fishnets and something tight by Alexander McQueen, tell you otherwise. Yes, she briefly wore supremely short shorts when she took the starring role in Stephen Frears’s Tamara Drewe. But the film, all dappled sunshine and bitchy literary types, was hardly a blockbuster. And now, as the nights draw in, she is to appear as Hilde Wangel in Ibsen’s The Master Builder. In case you don’t know it, this isn’t just ordinary Ibsen, dark as a forest, sombre as a priest; it’s Ibsen in his difficult late period, chilly and strange as a hoar frost. “People say that it’s one of the best female roles ever,” she says. “I just have to trust myself that I can do it.” Continue…

LA Times Magazine has a great new interview and photoshoot with Gemma! Check out the outtakes in the gallery and read on for the interview!

Gallery Link: Photoshoots from 2010 > LA Times Magazine

In Quantum of Solace, Gemma Arterton is a redheaded stylista whose curves prove irresistible to James Bond. As immortal beauty Io in Clash of the Titans, she is ogled so feverishly by Sam Worthington’s Perseus she orders him to “calm your storm.” And in the title role in Tamara Drewe, which hits theaters October 8, she sports a pair of shorts so tiny they could be a napkin.

But Arterton is no preen queen. Yes, the 24-year-old beauty may have beguiled Jake Gyllenhaal in the summer popcorn flick Prince of Persia, but this graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art loathes Hollywood glamour. In fact, to hear her describe the parts she finds most desirable, the uglier the better.

Take Drewe, the British comedy based on Posy Simmonds’ long-running comic-strip serial. The lovely Tamara owes her beauty to plastic surgery, and Arterton delights in discussing the massive prosthetic nose she wore in the film’s flashbacks.

She once volunteered to a reporter that she was born with six fingers on each hand, despite the fact that the condition was corrected at birth—and that little detail has now become a nagging press staple.

Arterton is not afraid to take risks…and they tend to pay off. Thanks in part to her tough role as a kidnap victim in the 2009 thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed and her nuanced turn in Drewe, the world now considers her a serious actor.

Well, a serious actor who also happens to look fabulous in short shorts.

Strong female roles aren’t exactly growing on palm trees around here. How’d you find Tamara Drewe?
I was requested to meet with [director] Stephen Frears, and that’s something you can’t refuse, really. To be honest, I wasn’t too sure I could play the character—I wasn’t sure if I liked her. Which is a ridiculous thing to say, because we can’t always play someone we like. But then I read the novel, and that sold it to me. Then Stephen told me, “I won’t do it unless you do it,” and that was very humbling, because at the time he hadn’t seen me in anything.

Read the rest here.

If I were Tamara Drewe’s title character, a newspaper columnist who shakes up the English village of her youth when she returns from London with a tiny new nose and a big new attitude, I would write that Gemma Arterton led me into her hotel bedroom with the obvious goal of seducing me. But I’m not, so I’ll admit that Arterton—who stars as Tamara in Stephen Frears’s new film, which had its Cinema Society premiere last night—was only trying to find a quiet place to conduct our interview.

Jenni Miller: True or false: writers are totally crazy.

Gemma Arterton: True! But I think that anyone that’s creative is a bit nuts…. I’m not a writer but I do know a lot of writers, and I also know a lot of songwriters, and one particular person I know, she dramatizes her own life so that she can write a song or something about it. And I thought, That is so what Tamara does.

So did playing a journalist give you a different insight to the journalists you deal with?

When you’re an actress, you meet lots of journalists, and sometimes you get really cross with them and then sometimes you love them, and I think actually playing one, you realize that they are real people with their own problems and their own lives. But writers get a higher ground, especially journalists. No matter what you do as a person, they can write whatever and that’s going to get published. So to play somebody that actually is completely out of control of her own life but who can control what is read, what is put out there, is interesting. Continue…

For days, the all-seeing blogosphere has been humming with speculation that Gemma Arterton (Prince of Persia, The Disappearance of Alice Creed) might be Ridley Scott’s choice for the heroine of his planned Alien prequel — a move that would add the British beauty to an Alien alumni directory that includes Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder. Then Arterton’s rep shut down the chatter, reportedly claiming there was “no truth” to the idea. So it’s all just another fact-free internet rumor, right?

Not so fast. When EW caught up with Arterton this morning at the Toronto Film Festival, where she’s promoting her quirky Stephen Frears-directed dramedy Tamara Drewe, she didn’t rule out the possibility.

“The honest truth is that Ridley Scott has approached me to meet with him about something in the next few weeks,” says Arterton, 24, who insists she doesn’t know which project might be on the table. “He saw Alice Creed and loved it.”

But if Alien is the subject at hand, Arterton isn’t sure which character she’d play — or even what species she might be. “I’d love to get buff. But maybe I’ll be playing an alien! I wouldn’t mind that, actually. I like dressing up. That’s why I became an actor in the first place.”

Source

Given the pace of her progress over the last few years – the speed and spills of her path from schoolgirl to starlet to the precipice she now teeters on – you could forgive Gemma Arterton some slight motion sickness. Ten years ago she was a grammar school girl from a Gravesend council estate, the lead singer in teenage bands with names such as Tourniquet and Violent Pink, spitting and screaming out Marilyn Manson covers. Five years ago she was a student on a full scholarship at Rada, rooting around her sofa for pennies to pay the fare to her job as a pub karaoke host. Then there’s the whirl of the last two years. Fourteen jobs in 24 months: bit parts and better roles, both rotten and rave reviews, and red carpets. And now, here she is, at 24, playing her first lead in a big budget film, as the title character in Tamara Drewe. And she’s good. Perhaps star-makingly good. Continue…

Looks like Gemma has quite a few exciting things ahead – hopefully they all pan out!

After her breakout performance as James Bond’s Strawberry Fields in 2008′s Quantum of Solace, Brit Gemma Arterton has become one of the most sought after actresses in Hollywood. In talking with The Sunday Times about her upcoming graphic novel adaptation Tamara Drewe, the actress revealed that she is set to meet with director Ridley Scott about starring in his upcoming Untitled Alien Prequel and its possible back-to-back sequel.

Ridley Scott himself called the meeting after being wowed by Gemma Arterton’s performance as Alice Creed, a young woman who is imprisoned in her own apartment by two ex-convicts in J Blakeson’s thriller from earlier this year The Disappearance of Alice Creed. If hired, it is assumed that Arterton will be taking on a role similar to the strong female protagonist Ripley, as played by Sigourney Weaver in the original Alien and its three sequels.

In the same Sunday Times interview, Gemma Arterton also revealed that she has joined Christopher Nolan’s planned adaptation of the Ruth Rendell novel The Keys to the Street. Nolan penned the screenplay for Fox Searchlight before directing The Dark Knight, but passed on directing this project about an abused woman so that he could focus on more personal projects. A director for The Keys to the Street has yet to be announced.

It was also noted that Gemma Arterton has recently joined Gabriel Byrne and Timothy Spall in Richard E. Grant’s upcoming comedy-Western In with the Outlaws.

Untitled Alien Prequel is in development . The film is directed by Ridley Scott.

The Keys to the Street is in development and stars Gemma Arterton.

In with the Outlaws comes to theaters in 2011 and stars Gemma Arterton, Gabriel Byrne, Timothy Spall, Eileen Atkins, Richard Griffiths. The film is directed by Richard E. Grant.

Source

She’s avoided the Bond girl curse to star in Stephen Frears’s raucous, raunchy new comedy. Cath Clark hears about squeezing into outfits, her new Sloaney look and ‘Midsomer Murders’

Rising star Gemma Arterton left Rada three years ago. Since then, she has played a head girl (‘St Trinian’s’), a Bond girl (‘Quantum of Solace’) and a canny kidnap victim (‘The Disappearance of Alice Creed’) and been in a blockbuster or two (‘Clash of the Titans’, ‘Prince of Persia’). Now she’s the heroine of black comedy ‘Tamara Drewe’, Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Posy Simmonds’s comic strip. Newspaper columnist Tamara is forced back to the village where she grew up. Once an ugly duckling, she returns, post-nose-job, as a smouldering femme fatale, entangling a trio of admirers: indie-drummer, fit farmer and philandering crime novelist.

Tamara makes a memorably slutty entrance back in the village, wearing the shortest denim shorts ever, prompting the catty comment, ‘I hope they don’t give her thrush’. Did you have any say in the shorts?
‘That’s such a Daily Mail reader’s comment isn’t it? Those shorts. Ugh. I really wanted them to be culottes, more flattering on the bottom. But for that joke to work they had to be alarmingly tight and offensive to a woman. I was in Paris about a month ago, where the film is already out. There are these posters of me in those bloody shorts everywhere.’

The ‘Tamara Drewe’ graphic novel is much loved. Did you know it already?
‘No, I hadn’t even heard about it. At the start, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do the film. I really liked the script and I knew that I could do it but I had a little bit of apprehension. I’m not sure why. Then they sent me the comic, and that was the deal-maker. I’ve always loved Thomas Hardy [‘Tamara Drewe’ is loosely based on ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’] and I just fell in love with the comic. Posy is so clever. She did a drawing of me as Tamara. It’s in my bathroom: the front cover of the book but with my face. It’s brilliant.’

Stephen Frears said that he wouldn’t make the film without you. Did he tell you that?
‘It’s funny when he says things like that because he’s so bumbling. I remember when I met Stephen, I had read with his casting director. She’d phoned him to say that I should be Tamara. So I met up with them both and he said: “Oh yes, you’ll do.” He’d never seen me in anything. I was asking if I could please audition – or something! I wanted to make sure he knew he had made the right decision. A lot of us are quite close to our characters.’ Continue…

Gemma Arterton doesn’t want to be remembered as Strawberry Fields forever.

Although she was aware of the typecasting danger when she won that Bond girl role in Quantum of Solace.

Since then, the 24-year-old London lass has snagged a few more high-profile parts in big-studio special-effects pictures released this year.

She played Princess Tamina in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opposite Jake Gyllenhaal’s Prince Dastan this spring and, earlier in the year, she co-starred as the immortal Io to Sam Worthington’s Perseus in Clash of the Titans.

Next up is something different for her. Arterton plays a kidnap victim in the low-budget independent movie, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, which opens in Vancouver Friday.

In the sparse, three-character movie, written and directed by J Blakeson, the caper is not what it appears to be. The kidnappers, Vic (Eddie Marsan) and Danny (Martin Compston), squabble among themselves while a desperate Alice (Arterton) plots an escape before the ransom is delivered.

Arterton’s portrayal counts as a riveting eye-opener, but the truth is, she almost missed out on the role because of her past involvement in the blockbusters, especially the Bond flick.

“It was quite a big departure for me ( Alice Creed), and it really was deliberate that I went for it, because it was polar opposite to what I had been doing previously,” admits Arterton. Continue…

Gemma is featured in the September 2010 issue of Nylon Guys with a new article and photoshoot. Can’t wait to see outtakes!

Gallery Link: Scans from 2010 > September 2010: Nylon Guys