Bond babe, cover girl and heart-stopping beauty, Gemma Arterton couldn’t look more demure. Sitting in dainty white pumps and a softly tailored jacket, you can’t help but think what Fellini or Hitchcock might have done with her at the height of their respective powers. Then she opens her mouth.

“I’ve done plenty of shitty roles in shitty films before now, know what I mean?”
Ah ha. This girl is no mere brunette Grace Kelly: this girl is a Charlton Athletic supporter. She can do plummy vowels and marbles-in-the-mouth consonants when it suits; indeed, this season you can catch her doing received pronunciation in Clash Of The Titans and the incoming Prince Of Persia. But for a RADA graduate – she received a full scholarship, no less - she’s surprisingly real.
“Last year I had one film or maybe two films come out,” she says. “Now they’ve all come along at once like buses. It’s fortunate and unfortunate. I’m in everything at the minute. People must be sitting down at movies and thinking, ‘Oh bloody hell, not her again’. I’m going to take a bit of time off now so you won’t have to see me for a while.”
Today, she’s here to talk about the film she’s most proud of on her increasingly glittering CV. Never mind the Hollywood stuff, she says; go see The Disappearance Of Alice Creed. A splendidly twisty thriller from hotly tipped newcomer J. Blakeson, the film features an unrecognisably messy Ms. Arterton as the victim of a kidnapping plot. Her abductors – brilliantly realised by co-stars Martin Compston and Eddie Marsan – appear to have a perfect plan but nothing in this ingenious chamber piece is quite what it seems.
“You know what?” she says brightly. “I never had the opportunity to do a film that gave me the opportunity to act before this one. I had to serve the script and the director and actually do a bit of bloody work. This really is the first film I needed to work on and not just sit around in a dress looking glam. It was so satisfying and so exhausting. Every night I went home feeling, ‘Yeah, this is what I am supposed to be doing.’ I’m comfortable with this.”
It’s odd to hear her use the word “comfortable” in the context. Alice Creed may be a superb role and showcase, but the humiliations and degradations visited upon the character are anything but comfortable. By the end of the first act, Ms. Arterton has been stripped, tied down, gagged and forced to pee into a bucket, in a series of graphic incidents that caused no little controversy at the film’s premiere during last year’s London Film Festival.
“I don’t know why people went on about it,” she says. “You know what? It’s really boring how people keep talking about the nudity. There’s male nudity in the film too and nobody says a word about that. Alice is a really strong woman so it shouldn’t matter that she gets her kit off. She’s got a great mind. She’s savvy, you know what I mean? I was thrilled to get the part.”
She admits, however, that certain nude scenes have not always been in her best interests.
“With this one, I knew there wouldn’t be a problem just from reading the script,” she says. “You have to see how shit things are for her for you to appreciate what she does next. It wasn’t sleazy on the page and it isn’t sleazy in the film. And I should know. I have had experiences with someone shooting me badly in a film. I’ve done shitty parts when I felt used after. This film couldn’t be more different.”
She is particularly enthusiastic about “looking like shit” on screen. For Alice she was required to wear a vile purple tracksuit (“It’s so disgusting it’s iconic,” she laughs) and cry for most of the five-week shoot.
“My eyes were really sore by the end”, she says. “It’s funny because when I was at drama school I thought I’d never make it as an actress because I couldn’t make myself cry. Of course, the trick is that you don’t make yourself cry. You can listen to certain songs to get yourself in the mood but really, you just have to make believe and get into character. Get imagining and be extreme. There was one scene with a gun and at the end of it I couldn’t actually see. I can’t see any of the actors. It was lucky I didn’t have to look beautiful. I was a bloody mess.”
As you may have gathered, Ms. Arterton is not one to mince words or affect airs and graces. Born to a proudly working class Gravesend clan – dad is a welder, her single mum was a cleaner – she got the acting bug through a performance arts programme at grammar school and was already landing choice stage roles before graduating from the Royal Academy.
“I love theatre,” she says. “I always imagined I’d do theatre all the time. I’ve had to turn down a few films to do my next play so I’ve had people shouting down the phone from LA at me. ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?’ But that’s where you learn about acting. I have to do at least one play a year for myself. So I’m prepared to put my foot down about it.”
Rather adorably, she thinks of herself as a freak and never objects to questions about her polydactyly (she was born with an extra digit on each foot and hand). She similarly shrugs off her status as a sex symbol and her high profile turns in Quantum Of Solace, St. Trinian’s and Clash Of The Titans.
“When you’re an actor you have to maintain some kind of visibility,” she sighs. “You have to do the blockbusters and take the bums on seats parts. But I’d never go to a blockbuster at the cinema myself. Eventually, my friends will nag me into seeing Avatar or whatever but it’s not my first choice. I like films like The Disappearance Of Alice Creed. I’m not just saying that; it’s the sort of film I go to see. So then you have your LA agent saying, ‘Oh, it’s a little risqué; it’s not right for you’. Well, that’s why I want to do it. I want a challenge.”
She laughs. “I’m hoping to play a fat, ugly stalker in my next film. No more standing around in dresses for me.”