The art of shaping a rounded acting life
Gemma Arterton is an actress who refuses to be pigeon-holed, discovers Alison Rowat
SUCH is the ageism that already affects women in the public eye – as Julie Walters summed it up recently, where is Anna Ford? – there are not many 27-year-old actresses who would yearn to play a 200-year-old. Gemma Arterton, after reading the script for Byzantium, sprinted at the chance.
“She has this sexuality which she uses as a weapon,” Arterton says of her character, Clara. “She’s a femme fatale but at the same time she’s a mother, she’s very multi-faceted.”
Indeed so. Clara is also a vampire– and a woman not to be crossed. “This is a feminist film,” says Arterton.
There, she’s said it. While other women of her generation in the entertainment industry might welcome the F-word like Dracula greeted daylight, Arterton is only too happy to embrace it.
“Continually I read scripts where the woman is there to serve the man in some way, or to make him look better, his support. In this it is total subversion. Totally. The men are the prey, the weak ones.”
Clearly, the one-time Bond girl is all grown up now.
Directed by Neil Jordan and cowritten with Moira Buffini (Tamara Drewe), Byzantium is the tale of a mother and daughter who wash up in an English seaside town dragging many a secret in their wake.
Though the story springs from the realm of gothic fantasy, Arterton felt she could bring some of her own life experience to the part. She and her sister Hannah, also an actor, were brought up on an estate – council, not rolling acres and labradors – in Gravesend, Kent. Her parents, a cleaner and a welder, had divorced when Arterton was five. It was a household of women, with mum at the head.
“My mother was a single parent. Clara is a working-class, single parent who is very resourceful, practical, unashamed of that and absolutely, more than anything, protective of her daughter. That’s very much my mother.”
Jordan, director of Interview with the Vampire and The Company of Wolves, sees Byzantium as a postTwilight reinvention of the vampire genre. Buffini, whose inspirations included Carmilla, the novella by Sheridan Le Fanu, was similarly keen to present a less well-aired side to the undead. Vampires such as Clara and her daughter Eleanor (played by Saoirse Ronan) are different from the Bram Stoker variety, says Buffini.
“They don’t turn into dust in daylight, they don’t need coffins to sleep in, they don’t become bats, they don’t have visible fangs, they are much more invisible and they just move through society like everyone else.”
In Clara’s case, they lap-dance, and other things besides, to earn a living. All of which means Arterton’s costumes have a tendency towards the skimpy.
“She is scantily clad but it’s sort of cool scantily clad rather than a man’s version of it,” says Arterton, laughing.
Speaking ahead of the Glasgow Film Festival premiere of Byzantium in February, the recently-separated Arterton is proof that having a sense of humour can be as important in the acting game as a degree from Rada (she has one of those, too). Her career has been that of a savvy grafter, one who appreciates that it is the multiplex movies that pay for the stints in theatre (The Little Dog Laughed, Love’s Labour’s Lost) and other, lower-budgeted work.
While drawing a distinction between mainstream work and edgier fare, she does not disparage the former.
“I have this sort of conflicted view of what I do. I feel there are two sides to it, maybe there shouldn’t be. I feel like there’s the frolicsome fun, the business side, and then there’s the real s***. But I don’t ever think one is better than the other in terms of what it gives me.”
In the latter, real McCoy, category she includes Byzantium and The Disappearance of Alice Creed. J Blakeson’s 2009 crime thriller starred Arterton as a kidnap victim, held hostage by two thugs played by Scotland’s Martin Compston and Eddie Marsan. Widely acclaimed as an example of low-budget British movie making at its best, it showed a raw, fearless side to Arterton hitherto hidden from movie audiences.
SHE has fond memories of working with Compston – “He gives it his all” – and of the intense, four-week shoot in general. “It was hard to do but I felt like I was working. It’s like when I do a play, you come off stage and you are absolutely destroyed, but you know you’ve worked, you’ve gone somewhere.”
“I always like it when people say it’s going to be six-day weeks. I think yes, good, we’re just going to be working. We were there to get on with it and we did.”
She would like more Alice Creeds to venture her way, but acknowledges that “they don’t come very often”. In the meantime, and which has been the case since she left Gravesend Grammar School for Girls at 16 for theatre school, then Rada, she keeps working – and the roles are increasing in stature, and the films in budget, by the year. Quantum of Solace (the Bond film), Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia, Tamara Drewe, Hansel and Gretel, Song for Marion with Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave – she has graduated from that first major film part in St Trinian’s with honours.
Yes, about St Trinian’s, a film better known for its short skirts than being a short treatise on the role of single-sex education in boosting female selfesteem. Did she look on that as a bit of a laugh? No-one, it is fair to point out, asks the same of her male co-stars, Colin Firth and Rupert Everett.
She exercises that sense of perspective again. “People are so serious about ‘the art’ and that’s great, and I’m very serious about it as well,” she begins. But when she came out of drama school in 2007 she didn’t know what she was going to do, and there were student debts to pay. She had received a full scholarship (and doubts she would have been able to go without it), but it didn’t cover everything.
“I was going up for everything because you want to earn a bit of money and get your foot in the door, and that was the first job that I got,” she says of St Trinian’s. “So I did it and it was great. It was my first big break.”
Still, though, she finds herself coming up against what might be termed the St Trinian’s sneer.
“I met this actor, he’s a comedian, he was so arrogant. He came in and said, ‘Oh God, you’re not a serious actor, you did St Trinian’s.’ I was like, why are you judging me?”
Whatever that unnamed comedian is doing next, he might like to know that Arterton has recently wrapped on Runner, Runner, a thriller with Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake, out in September, and is currently filming The Voices, a crime drama with Ryan Reynolds and Anna Kendrick.
All that just as her feminist vampire movie takes flight. Talk about getting your teeth into a career. Byzantium will open in cinemas on May 31.