Posts Tagged ‘Gemma Arterton’

Gemma Aterton takes time to pick eclectic roles RICHARD CROUSE METRO CANADA Published: October 22, 2010

gemma_arterton_2010_tamara_drewe-wideSince 1904, London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) has almost single-handedly kept the British actors’ union flush with members. John Gielgud, Anthony Hopkins and Kenneth Branagh are just a fraction of the school’s famous alumni. More recently, Gemma Arterton, star of this weekend’s Tamara Drewe, studied there before becoming Britain’s latest “it girl.”

“I left RADA three years ago and never expected I would have a film career,” she says. “I always thought I would do theatre, and then it happened and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes’ to every job without thinking about it.

“You are grateful that you’re being considered and don’t want to seem rude by turning them down. As a Brit, we tend to think like that.”

Among the roles Arterton said yes to are Quantum of Solace Bond girl Strawberry Fields and leads in green screen blockbusters Prince of Persia and Clash of the Titans. High profile for sure, but not exactly challenging for the recent graduate.

“This year I have been able to think about what I want,” she says. “I’ve always just wanted to act and do things that are interesting and exciting. So now I have learned that the only power I have as an actress is the power of choice.

“I’m taking my time and reading scripts thoroughly. It doesn’t matter if it is big or small, or whether I have a large part or a small part and that is serving me well. And those films that I did like Tamara Drewe and The Disappearance of Alice Creed have actually transformed my career from here on. It’s going to be much more eclectic, intriguing films rather than all out action movies.”

In that vein, she recently played the decidedly non-glamorous lead in Alice Creed and the manipulative Tamara Drewe, a successful columnist who stirs things up in her childhood village in rural Dorset.

“They are not particularly attractive roles, in that Tamara Drewe is kind of a sex symbol but underneath it all she is an ugly character and isn’t necessarily appealing or someone you’d want to be with,” she says. “For me, as an actor, that is exciting because I want to work out why people who aren’t me, do things.

“The same with Alice Creed. She’s full-on, visceral and dirty inside and that, to me, is very attractive when I’m looking for a role.”

BYZANTIUM: 2 ½ STARS

byzantium-gemma-arterton-13Almost twenty years after dressing up Brad Pitt as an undead marionette, “Interview with a Vampire” director Neil Jordan is back at it with “Byzantium,” a gothic tale of secrets and blood sucking.

Based on a play by Moira Buffini, “Byzantium” gives a new spin to the Dracula mythology. Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) are two-hundred-year-old vampire mother and daughter trying to survive in modern day England. Setting up shop in a British seaside town, Clara goes into business as a Madame, turning the dilapidated Byzantium Hotel into a brothel, while Eleanor, frozen in time at age sixteen, befriends a local hemophiliac boy named Frank (Caleb Landry Jones). Their lifestyle choices—prostitution, sanguinary pursuits and general melancholy—soon bring unwanted attention from the townsfolk and an ancient brotherhood.

Like “Interview with a Vampire,” this movie centers around an account of the past. Eleanor, a melancholy child tired of the burden of her family secret, pens a story outlining the lurid origins of their immortality. “It’s like Edgar Alen Poe and Mary Shelley had a very strange child,” says her teacher. As the story passes hands, the movie flits back-and-forth between modern day and 1804, slowly unfolding the bloody tale.

Atmospheric and gothic, “Byzantium” is a vampire tale that will leave “True Blood” fans wanting more. With no fangs—these succubae pierce their victims with pointed thumbnails before draining them dry—coffins or capes—although Clara does wear a bustier emblazoned with he word SUCK—in sight, these vamps are unlike anything we’ve seen before.

The revisionist horror history is engaging enough, but seems a little lifeless, even for a movie about vampires. Lacking any real dramatic tension, it meanders through time—past and present—failing to work up any real momentum. It’s slow and contemplative in Eleanor’s scenes, more rapid fire in Clara’s, who is a bit more enthusiastic about the wet work.

All in all “Byzantium” is an elegant, if slightly dull film, that tries to bring something new to the “Twilightized” vampire genre, but staked by flawed storytelling.