Not long ago Gemma Arterton decided that she was finished with films. She was having a bad experience acting in something big-budget for Hollywood — it would be “ungracious” to name it, she says, disappointingly — in which she was the only woman in the main cast. Her opinion was not required, she says. And while her character was supposedly “intelligent”. . . well, you can make a female character a scientist or a doctor, but still essentially stick her there as eye candy. “I was just the totty,” she says. “The way I was spoken to, the way I was treated, I just thought, ‘I can’t do this actually. That’s it. I don’t want to work in film. I’m going to sell my flat and I’m just going to do theatre.’ ”
Since then she has indeed gone on to tread the boards. She starred in a tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, the inaugural production at the intimate, candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014. She starred in a West End musical, the spirited if not entirely successful stage version of the film Made in Dagenham. This year she had a West End triumph in a bawdy romp, Nell Gwynn, playing the royal mistress of the title with “joyful naughty-but-niceness”, according to this paper’s five-star review.
We are meeting now, in the Donmar Warehouse’s warehouse-chic Covent Garden offices, because Arterton is playing what she calls “the scariest role I’ve ever done”. Arterton is Joan of Arc in the Donmar revival of George Bernard Shaw’s 1924 play Saint Joan. She has chopped off her locks for the part. Just before she goes on stage every night — once again the only woman in the cast, albeit this time the star — she feels like she’s about to walk off a precipice, she says. Joan has to dominate everyone around her. She read a book, Playing Joan, that included famous predecessors such as Judi Dench and Joan Plowright talking about the role. Her conclusion? “Oh f***, they are all saying how hard it is!”
She’s single, and she says that’s just as well. “Well I am playing Joan the Maid,” she says, with a chuckle, “so no boyfriend action. Actually I go home at night and I am so exhausted and I couldn’t even imagine having a relationship at the moment. And that’s a shame, it’s nice to have relationships, but at the moment I am not in the space.”
Ah, but the eagle-eyed reader — well actually even the casual cinemagoer — will have noticed that, despite that vow of stage work only, Arterton, 30, keeps popping up on the big screen too. She may have moved away from the fantasy flicks — such as Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters — that helped to make her famous, but now she is just as busy in independent films. This year alone she has been a teacher in the sci-fi flick The Girl With All the Gifts, been married to Idris Elba in the London drama 100 Streets, and there are many more to come. Those include, most interestingly, heading a cast including Bill Nighy, Sam Claflin and Helen McCrory in Their Finest, a film by the Danish director Lone Scherfig (An Education, One Day) that won praise at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
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The stage was her first love, she says — her mother, Sally-Ann, studied theatre design before giving it up to concentrate on bringing up Arterton and her younger sister Hannah, also an actress — but if she can mix a play or two with a film or two each year, she’ll be delighted.
So that earlier experience on that unnamed film still changed her life, but not quite as she first imagined. At the time she was already booked in to make another film, The Voices, with the Iranian film-maker Marjane Satrapi. And Satrapi was so different, “so completely bonkers and brilliant”, that Arterton began to think: “Oh, there’s another way.” Whatever the offending Hollywood film that preceded it, then — and, not jumping to conclusions or anything, but the internet suggests that she made Runner Runner just before The Voices, with a largely male cast including Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake — she looks back on it with gratitude.
“Now I think, ‘I’m glad I made that dreaded film because that’s the film that made me go, now is the time to get my shit together. I want to produce as well as act. I am going to do it the way I am going to do it.’ It changed my mindset.” So she didn’t have to sell her flat in Battersea, south London, after all? “I didn’t have to sell the flat.” She laughs. “I had to remortgage it, but I didn’t have to sell it.”
Conceivably, it’s all just a good piece of acting — and she has a bit of form on pulling the wool over people’s eyes: she got the title role in the film Gemma Bovery after pretending that she spoke French in her audition, when in fact she had only parrot-fashioned a few phrases; in her late teens she adopted a South African accent in her interview for a part-time shop job, then got the job and had to keep the accent for the next two years. “That is true. But with acting you’re sort of lying, aren’t you? While telling the truth.”
“I don’t think I would do a job to keep my worth up. I don’t really care about that
However, Arterton gives a very good impression of being a film star with her feet on the ground. She is, let’s not pretend otherwise, implausibly good-looking, unobtrusively elegant today in a silk shirt and pearl earrings, although those, she says with a giggle, she wore only because she mistakenly thought she was doing a photoshoot today — with a flawless complexion. She is passionate about the work she is trying to do, but she studs the hour with laughter as she points out actorly vanities and showbusiness venalities.
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She inherits a passion for hard work from her parents: Sally-Ann and Barry, a welder, who brought her up in Gravesend, Kent. “They are both grafters. Sometimes I think I’ve got the dream job. Just pissing around in frocks.” Ah, but in Saint Joan she has to piss around in medieval chain mail instead. “Well, I do go through it every night in this one — it’s a different strain, more an emotional strain.”
After the Donmar’s artistic director, Josie Rourke, offered her the role in March, Arterton did what work she could to try to find the real woman behind the preconceptions of this 15th-century icon: going on the pilgrimage in France, visiting the farmhouse where she grew up, reading up on religion, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and epilepsy as she tried to work out how to interpret the voices Joan heard in her head. “I mean, she’s a saint, and I’m definitely not saintly. But it is an error to think of her in that way, that’s a thing that has been put on her by the church. And she was against the church. She was a force.”
Arterton doesn’t see herself as a force. “I’m self-deprecating, maybe that’s a British thing.” She hates the idea of having to sell herself. “That’s what agents are for.” And while she thinks Saint Joan is Shaw’s masterpiece, she is aware that, even with its running time chopped down to two and a half hours, as it is here, it can be hard work. “It takes a lot of dedication from the audience as well as the actors.”
Perhaps that’s another luxury of not working on blockbusters: the option to undersell. And, yes, she knows her early success has given her the luxury of working on plays and small films while still maintaining a nice lifestyle. “It has been hard to turn my career around. I was very young and you get swept along with all of that. But I am really lucky that I did those early jobs because they gave me that financial stability.”
She paid off her student loan — which was “f***ing massive” — with her first big job out of Rada, playing a schoolgirl in the film St Trinian’s. Then, as other jobs came in — Tess in a BBC television version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles; getting bedded and deaded as a Bond girl opposite Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace — she bought her flat. At 30, she has plenty of friends older than her who still haven’t been able to buy their own home. “And you know, I am very lucky in that I get given a lot of things as an actor, you get all these perks, but actually I know what I need.”
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Becoming a producer, setting up a production company, Rebel Park, has led to her first film as a writer. In The Escape she plays a mother who leaves her child and husband, played by Dominic Cooper. She and the film’s director, Dominic Savage, thought up the story. The actual lines were improvised by the cast on set. “So really all the cast wrote it. But I was quite pleased with myself when lines I thought up would stay in. I thought, ‘Ooh, maybe I should write. I’ve never written before.’ ”
There is much more to come from Arterton the producer, she hopes: a film called Summertime, to be written and directed by Jessica Swale, who wrote Nell Gwynn; Vita and Virginia, the story of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, based on Eileen Atkins’s play, and a film of The Duchess of Malfi. She wants to make “a good British comedy that is not middle-class”. This year has been “the happiest of my life”, professionally at least — she won’t discuss the break-up with her French boyfriend Franklin Ohanessian, which means she’s mainly back in London after living with him in Paris for a couple of years.
So if her change of tack requires hard work from her, that’s fine, she loves hard work. She knows her place in the pecking order too. She has a name, she has some clout, but she is not Emily Blunt, she is not Jennifer Lawrence. A friend of hers, a casting director, spends most of her job breaking it to British film-makers that, alas no, she cannot get Lawrence to star in their film. Arterton chuckles. Yet that proves the value of making a big fantasy hit as Lawrence did with The Hunger Games, doesn’t it? Would it be worth it to do one of those to make yourself more marketable for the work you’d rather do?
“You just have to hope that one of your small films is a success, that’s all I can say. I don’t think I would do a job in order to keep my worth up, I don’t really care about that. As a producer I would rather make a film that is good and right. Of course you want your films to be a success, but if you start thinking the other way it all gets a bit silly.”
She doesn’t get sent the “totty” roles any more, she says — either that or her agents know not to forward them to her. And she doesn’t have to sit waiting for a producer to call either. “That is excruciating. I’m in a lucky position, that having been that person I can now go to a theatre, maybe because I have done these bigger things back in the day, and say, ‘Let’s put this play on,’ or ‘I would like to direct this play.’ I haven’t done that yet, but I would like to. I don’t think I could be that person sitting around any more.”
Saint Joan is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0844 871624), to Feb 18, returns, day seats and Front Row seats (£10 seats released at 10am on Mondays two weeks ahead) only. It will be broadcast live to cinemas on February 16 (ntlive.com). Their Finest is released on April 21
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Great Joans of Arc
Winifred Lenihan The American actress was the first to play Shaw’s 19-year-old heroine, at the Garrick Theatre in New York in December 1923.
Jean Seberg Starred in Otto Preminger’s 1957 film version, above, with a screenplay adapted by Graham Greene.
Sybil Thorndike Shaw wrote the part with Thorndike in mind. The London premiere in March 1924 — directed by Thorndike’s husband, Lewis Casson — made her a star at the age of 41.
Siobhán McKenna The Irish actress first triumphed in the play, aged 27, in Galway in 1950 in a Gaelic translation she did herself. She went on to more success in the role — in English — in London and New York.
Anne-Marie Duff Her portrayal at the National Theatre in 2007, above, won her an Olivier nomination.
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Joan Plowright Played Joan during the National Theatre’s first year in 1963, at the Chichester Festival Theatre and the Old Vic.
Judi Dench “She gives to Shaw’s relentless but superbly innocent saint the touching and unusual quality of a daring child,” said The Times in 1966.
