Gemma Arterton: The Bond girl done good
Since her debut with 007, Gemma Arterton has resisted the starlet trap and opted for surprisingly gritty roles
Gemma Arterton is, in her own words, a freak. “I was born,” says the 23-year-old former Bond girl (Quantum of Solace) and St Trinian’s starlet, casually thrusting forward her hands, “With two extra fingers.” She rubs softly the raised pinkish knuckle scars on the side of both hands and continues, “There were no bones in them, just the fingers and the fingernails.” Arterton, dressed down in denims and black winter woollies, and munching on a rocket and goat’s cheese salad in an East London rehearsal studio, then cocks her head to one side, parts the hair of her trademark bob, and adds, “And I’ve got a crumpled ear, look!” She taps the mildly swollen flesh at the top of her right ear, and sighs, “I was a freakish baby. A bit of an oddball. And I still feel like that now.”
Which is perhaps easy to say if, like Arterton today, you’re sporting sculpted cheekbones, smouldering brushstroke eyes and a rising Hollywood career. And yet the star of BBC One's Tess of the Urbervilles in 2008 wears her beauty and her nascent stardom lightly, and projects the chirpy mien of someone unimpressed by cover-girl kudos. And there is little cause to doubt her. She has recently returned, for instance, from a blockbusting Hollywood sojourn, shooting two of the biggest movies of summer 2010, the video game adaptation Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opposite a newly buffed Jake Gyllenhaal, and the mythological epic The Clash of the Titans, co-starring Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson. But she mostly speaks of these high-gloss experiences in less flattering terms. As a proud RADA graduate, she found the obsession with body image over performance style troubling.
“On one of the movies, I’d just done this big comedy scene, and all they said was, ‘You need to work on your arms!’ ” she recalls, looking down perplexedly at her own arms, as if to say: “Hey, when you’ve had 12 fingers, everything else looks OK from here.” She continues: “And I said, ‘But what about the acting?’ And they said, ‘Don’t worry about the acting, worry about your arms!’ I just wanted to say, ‘Screw you all! I’d rather do a play!’ ”...
Read more...
http://commanderbond...quicknews/56958 - The Times
