The 2013 movie that permanently turned Gemma Arterton against Hollywood: “No more of that shit”
For a while, it looked as though Gemma Arterton was being primed to become the next big thing in Hollywood, and that was something she was acutely aware of, too.
11 months after her feature debut in 2007’s St Trinian’s, she was a ‘Bond girl’ starring opposite Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace, and while her character felt like a throwback in all the wrong ways, given her silly name and quick demise, it put her on the industry’s map in a major way.
In 2010, she played the female lead opposite Sam Worthington in the Clash of the Titans remake, which came within a whisker of clearing half a billion dollars at the box office despite not being very good, and it seemed like her star was on an upward trajectory that would send her straight to the top.
Arterton was also the female lead in the same year’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and while that was pretty crap too and has since been pushed to arm’s length by Jake Gyllenhaal, it nonetheless became the highest-grossing video game adaptation of all time, and she was still only 24 years old.
It was a meteoric rise, and with smaller films like The Disappearance of Alice Creed and Tamara Drewe showing that Arterton was much more than just another pretty face, a huge Hollywood career seemed like a given, until one film convinced the actor that she didn’t actually want it. “At the time, I really thought I had to say yes to those films,” she explained.
“I even have emails from people saying you must do this film, it’s the right choice and strategy,” Arterton added. “Sometimes, I think the Hollywood mentality: what is the aim here? The aim is to win an Oscar, and that is not my aim.” 2013 would prove to be the breaking point in more ways than one.
In her first release of the year, she led the R-rated action/horror hybrid, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, alongside Jeremy Renner, which recouped its budget four and a half times over at the box office to become an unqualified hit. Like most of her big-budget work, though, it was rubbish, and she’d had enough.
“I had to call my agent and say no more of that shit,” she revealed, with that call being made after Tommy Wirkola’s genre flick had well and truly convinced her that those weren’t the kinds of movies she wanted to be making. Somehow, worse was still to come, with Arterton retrospectively describing her second film of the year, Runner Runner, as a huge mistake, admitting that she “wanted to quit acting after that.”
It’s been almost a decade and a half since then, and she’s been true to her word. The only blockbuster she’s made since then is The King’s Man, and seeing as it hailed from a British writer and director, featured a mostly British cast and crew, and was shot almost entirely in the United Kingdom, it didn’t break her ongoing Hollywood studio sabbatical.
