The Girl With All The Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts

Gemma Arterton’s been busy. The 31- year- old actor made five films in 2016, three of which ( Their Finest, Orphan and The Girl With All the Gifts) screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last year.

“This was the starkest,” she says bluntly of the last title. “I’ve done gritty films quite a lot, like with Alice Creed,” referencing The Disappearance of Alice Creed, a 2009 kidnap thriller. “And Hansel & Gretel was a shoot’em-up kind of movie.”

But The Girl with All the Gifts, in which Arterton plays a teacher trying to save a young girl in a post-apocalyptic world?

“It was a departure for me,” she says. “This was much more of a thought-provoking film.”

She isn’t much of a science- fiction fan, but was taken by the screenplay, adapted by comic-book writer Mike Carey from his novel of the same name. “It’s probably one of the most feminine characters I’ve played; very sensitive and caring and loving. So I like that, the dichotomy of ... everyone fighting to live, and this heart in the middle of it. It really is a story about human connection.”

Arterton’s character connects most closely with Melanie, played by 12- year- old Sennia Nanua in her first film role.

“I’ ve always wanted to work with a child,” she says. From hundreds of young applicants, Arterton had a “chemistry read” with the final 10, and something clicked with Nanua.

“There was something quite sophisticated about her and quite in control ... she wasn’t bratty, she wasn’t showy- offy.” But she’s still just 12, “so she gets very over- excited about there being Jelly Babies on set. She has this energy, this freshness.

“We’re friends,” Arterton concludes. “She doesn’t need any help.

“But it was nice to be there for her.”

Arterton’s acting career started on the stage and still includes treading the boards; in 2014 she starred in the musical Made in Dagenham, and in 2016 she appeared in the West End run of Nell Gwynn, about Charles II’s mistress.

“I like the balance,” she says of moving between stage and screen. “I feel more comfortable on stage because I started off doing that. I never really was into film growing up.”

But part of her is always looking over her shoulder. When she’s in the midst of filming, she misses the ability to “let loose” and try new things in a live performance. And then, during a West End show, she’ll find herself thinking: “It would be really great to just never do this scene ever again.”

So a play a year’s the thing. “It’s really nourishing for me to do that,” she says. “I think it’s important for me as well to flex my muscles in a different way.” ΩΩΩ

The Girl with All the Gifts opens Feb. 24 in select cinemas in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa and Halifax.