Gemma Arterton is a British beauty who has served time as a Bond girl as well as arm candy for the leads of Clash Of The Titans and Prince Of Persia.
However, on Aug. 13, Arterton ditches glamour for the remarkable low budget indie The Disappearance Of Alice Creed. She is one of only three actors in the tense thriller about a kidnapping gone wrong that’s set almost entirely in a single location.
Simply put, it’s an actor driven film that gives Gemma a chance to show off her skills. “That’s exactly why I did the movie,” Arterton told Metro. “I had to show myself that I could act again because I hadn’t felt like I was challenged in that sense recently.”
The film marks an impressive debut for writer/director J. Blakeson, who had nothing but short films to his name before this. Now he’s being courted by Hollywood, but when Gemma Arterton signed on to play the title role, she was taking quite a risk.
“When I read the script I thought that it was so clever and that he was clearly raw talent,” explained the actress. “I thought, ‘everybody has to take a risk at some point in their career.’ Somebody took a risk by casting me in my first movie and I have to do it too. So I put all my trust in him.”
The difficult role required the young actress to be bound to a bed for most of the film, crying in fear and uncertain of the motives of her captors.
“It was pretty grueling stuff,” recalled Arterton. “I was in a constant state of really horrible anxiety. I had to cry all day for two days, which you’re not supposed to do, and at one point I couldn’t see because my eyes were so exhausted.”
The brief and cheap production was difficult for everyone involved, but also one that proved to be quite rewarding. As Arterton jokingly said, “Making the movie felt like a guilty pleasure. Like we were all doing it for fun before going off to get our mortgage repayments.”
