Gemma Arterton and Harry Lloyd take on Hollywood

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10 April 2012

When you have a meeting with the naughtiest girl at St Trinian's on the day after the film's premiere, youhavenogreat expectations. I was sure Gemma Arterton would arrive late, green about the gills and nursing a roaring hangover (if she turned up at all, of course). But here she is, early if you please, and almost indecently glowing, with a perfect scarlet pout and bright brown eyes that show no trace of post-party lethargy. 'Oh, I always make a swift exit from that sort of thing,' she explains. 'I was in bed by the time Sarah Harding arrived. Even the 12-year-olds were still partying!'

It's not just because Gemma, 23, prefers to let her hair down out of sight of the world's assembled paparazzi, she simply can't afford to waste a day in bed with a hangover, as she's only got four weeks of rehearsal before she makes her West End debut.

The Little Dog Laughed is a witty satire on contemporary Hollywood, starring Keira Knightley's chiselled squeeze Rupert Friend as a secretly homosexual film star, Tamsin Greig (Dr Caroline Todd in Green Wing, or, if you prefer, Debbie Aldridge in The Archers) as his biltong-tough agent, Harry Lloyd (Will Scarlett in Robin Hood) as the rent boy he's in love with, and Gemma as Harry's on-off girlfriend. 'The play is pretty accurate,' says Gemma. 'The writer, Douglas Carter Beane, is a very successful screenwriter in Hollywood, so all the stories are true. One of the reasons I wanted to do it is because I've been in that world over the past two years, and I know what people will do just to become famous.'

She wrinkles her freckled nose in distaste. Her own success has been so apparently effortless that it must indeed be difficult for her to sympathise with the lengths to which less fortunate mortals are prepared to go. She had to turn down four film roles to find the time for the play, which hasn't dented the casting directors' keenness at all. Next year sees her taking the lead in two eagerly anticipated blockbusters: Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, a medieval epic also starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ben Kingsley; and Clash of the Titans, in which she plays a nymph called Io, alongside Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson. She's also taking the lead in Tamara Drewe, a Stephen Frears film based on the Posy Simmonds graphic novel, which was itself based loosely on Far from the Madding Crowd. Gemma plays the eponymous heroine, a newspaper columnist whose beauty (enhanced by a successful nose job), allows her to wreak havoc in male bosoms across an entire village. Tamsin Greig costars with her in this film, too, but Gemma says they didn't have many scenes together, apart from when Tamsin had to punch her on the nose.

Gemma is also rumoured to be starring as Cathy in a remake of Wuthering Heights (replacing Natalie Portman), although she seems rather doubtful about the project's viability. 'I just think it's such a rich book, it's hard to make it into a film,' she says.

Anyway, if she can, as rumour has it, command £1.5 million a film, her earnings next year should hit £6 million. No wonder she's being hailed as the new Keira Knightley.

Gemma was brought up in Gravesend and can produce the accent intact on request. 'When I first met Stephen Frears, he said, "It's quite alarming, your voice doesn't suit your face, it's just annoying," ' she confesses. 'He sent me to a vocal coach, and said, "Please make her sound different." I've been vocally trained, but when I have a drink, it goes back.'

Although her rather feline features and high cheekbones give her an aristocratic look, Gemma's background is working class: her mother is a cleaner and her father a welder. Nobody in her family was artistic. 'I just did acting because I liked it. I was quite good at school but I wasn't really into it, so I was always doing plays at the Gravesend & District Theatre Guild, and someone told me I should leave school and pursue it.'

With effortless brio, she won a scholarship to a performing arts college, then got into RADA. 'So I thought, "I'll do that then." I never really had a plan. My agents in the US talk about a strategy, which makes me laugh because I've never had a strategy. I've never worried about what to do next, and I've been very lucky.'

Indeed she has; St Trinian's was her very first job, and despite a line-up that included Colin Firth and Rupert Everett, she stole the show. She followed this up with roles in Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla, and a critically wellreceived performance as Tess in the BBC's drama series Tess of the D'Urbervilles, before being cast as Bond Girl Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace, a role that required her to come to a sticky end, smothered in oil on 007's bed. Didn't she have to pinch herself, I wonder, finding herself in a clinch with Daniel Craig just a year out of drama school? 'Yes,' she says, 'but when you meet all these people, they are just people like me. And this is just a job, but a job I love doing.'

So she's rather impatient with all the attendant nonsense of fame that comes with her chosen day job, and gives very short shrift to an amiable drunk who wanders up to our table to tell her how beautiful she is.

'I'd much rather just be working, but you have to do all the other things as well, all the red-carpet stuff,' she says. 'I haven't really been hassled yet, because my name is known rather than my face, but the more people get to know who you are, the more it will happen. It's a very lonely world and you have to be so selfish to seek fame. People think they will be able to handle it but they don't know the ins and outs of it.'

Gemma deals with her growing public profile in a practical way. She's recently bought herself a flat on the top floor of a large gated building so no one can wait outside her front door. She has also learned to be wary of discussing her personal life after a few too many prurient articles speculating about her relationship with Spanish stuntman-Eduardo Muñoz, whom she met on the set of Prince of Persia, and which ended last year. 'I talk honestly, but not about very private things.' So although there is a large diamond engagement ring flashing on her finger, she won't reveal anything about her fiancé, apart from the fact that he's not, as reported, Daniel Craig's body double. 'He thinks that's really funny.' As for the date of the wedding: 'Even my mum doesn't know!'

I'm not sure whether to blame Gemma or the play they're in for the fact that Harry Lloyd, 26, is even more reticent about his private life. An hour before I'm due to meet him at the rehearsal studios, one of his 'people' telephones with a request that I don't even enquire whether he has a girlfriend. Intrigued, I ask immediately, and poor Harry, who seems rather shy, twists his lanky frame into a human pretzel. 'That's just not on the radar,' he stutters.

Of course he must have; he's as alluring as Gemma, with not dissimilar attributes: razor cheekbones, cat-like eyes, floppy dark hair. He was even fanciable playing a greasy-haired, alien-possessed schoolboy in a couple of episodes of Doctor Who.

But it's rent boys that Harry is interested in right now. 'I was in New York last month, and I had a little nose around the scene,' he says. 'I managed to find this guy on rentboy.com who was brilliantly helpful. We went out for a coffee and he was so candid about his life; who he could tell and who he couldn't; what kind of clients he got, and hourly rates, and what people like to do. He was 25, a goodlooking, athletic, preppy guy who can make $100,000 a year from successful businessmen who don't have time for a relationship and just want a part-time boyfriend. There was nothing seedy about it, no drugs or shame.' This was, of course, research for his role in Little Dog, which appears to be affecting him as profoundly as it has Gemma.

'I consider myself straight, but if I met a guy tomorrow and fell in love with him, would I be brave enough to accept that without having to change the way I look at myself?' he muses.

Not that there's much chance of that, given that his role involves getting up close and personal with Gemma. Already, the mutual fan club is in full swing. He says she's 'brilliant. It's always tricky to begin with because we're playing people who have known each other for eight years. You can't force that natural intimacy and comfort.' But I bet it'll come. 'Harry's absolutely lovely and so gorgeous,' gushes Gemma in turn.

Harry was brought up in Hammersmith. His parents work in publishing, his sister Poppy is a producer for Heart FM, and his brother Tom teaches English in Paris. Harry has been acting ever since he was spotted in Murder in the Cathedral at Eton, aged 15, and lured away to play Steerforth in the BBC's David Copperfield. You can imagine the publicists' delight when they discovered Harry was a direct descendant of Charles Dickens.

The boy who played David Copperfield was one Daniel Radcliffe. 'We were both the young ones,' says Harry. 'I asked him, "Have you ever done anything like this before?" And he said, "Well, I played the elephant in The Jungle Book at school." Then we went to see Star Wars in Liverpool. Dan even had a Star Wars birthday cake.'

This relationship was denied a chance to deepen when Harry just missed out on the role of evil Tom Riddle, the young Voldemort, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Instead, he went to Oxford to study English, then, a year after leaving, and with a few appearances in the grittier soaps under his belt, won the plum role of Will Scarlett in the BBC's Robin Hood serial, which involved 13 months cavorting around a Hungarian forest.

'It was like being on a huge stag weekend,' he says with a grin. 'On a normal day, you might get one line. You've got to be there, and know who your character is, but it's not taxing. You have time and energy for other things, like drinking. The fight scenes were the best fun, but I was rubbish with a bow and arrow.' Harry has just filmed a pilot for HBO, Game of Thrones, which should make him as much of a household name as Gemma if it's picked up in March. It's an epic fantasy in which seven aristocratic families fight to control a kingdom. Harry plays the 'beggar king', Viserys Targaryen, battling against Sean Bean. As a result, he is turning his thoughts towards Hollywood, albeit with some reluctance. 'American agents have started calling, and it now seems to be a time to start looking that way,' he says. 'But to be honest, the play makes you think you don't want any of it. Right now I'm happy with my level of success. I don't get hassled in the street and I've had some brilliant parts. Now it's getting to the point where the world's opening up a bit, but I'm very aware that it's important not to do anything that you can't undo. I just don't think any job is worth sacrificing your private life for.'

It's hard not to feel genuinely sorry for the pair of them. The nature of their talent and their extreme camera-friendliness make the kind of global fame they both despise pretty well inevitable.

The Little Dog Laughed is at the Garrick Theatre until 10 April 2010 (0844 412 4662)

Hair by Oliver de Almeida at Caren. Make-up by Liz Arimoro using Lipstick Queen. Fashion assistant: Orsolya Szabo. Shot on location at the Bermondsey Square Hotel (bermondseysquarehotel.co.uk)

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