Gemma Chan: the bombshell actress who tamed Jack Whitehall

You’d have to be supremely confident to take a lady to Nando’s on a first date. With her glossy hair and endless legs, the 30-year-old actress Gemma Chan seems more of a lobster risotto at Balthazar kind of girl. But the Portuguese chicken shack was where she shared a first date with boyfriend Jack Whitehall after they met on the Fresh Meat set two years ago. ‘He didn’t even offer to pay, we split it,’ she says with a warm, grammar school-polished accent.

The peri-peri chicken and bottomless pots of fro-yo must have worked some magic as she managed to drag him away from his bachelor pad in Putney, just around the corner from his parents’, and they now live together in Notting Hill, where they cook pies every Sunday. She assures me that Jack eventually upped his wining and dining game.

Next month Gemma will be starring in Dates, a new Channel 4 series from the creator of Skins; hence us sitting in the sunshine on the South Bank talking about the merits of being wooed over fast food. ‘I don’t think it matters where you are or what you do,’ she says. ‘It’s about two people and the chemistry.’ Each Dates episode follows a different character looking for love. She appears as Erica, a young woman struggling to come out to her family. ‘Playing a gay character, you feel a certain responsibility,’ she says. ‘I’ve never dated a woman, and I wouldn’t want to do something that wasn’t truthful, so we had to trust the writer.’ She had no qualms about taking the role. ‘I think it’s important to see gay relationships on TV. In New Zealand recently they’ve legalised gay marriage and we need to get with the times over here; there are no good arguments against it.’

Gemma has popped up on TV with reassuring regularity in the past few years: playing a woman living on Mars in Doctor Who; a Chinese ceramics buff in Sherlock; clad in latex as a dominatrix in Secret Diary of a Call Girl (‘It’s actually really comfortable… until you start to sweat’); not to mention her stint as drama student Ruth in Fresh Meat. Last year she nearly hit the big time, losing out on the role of Skyfall’s Severine to the French actress Bérénice Marlohe: ‘I would have done it happily, but to be a Bond girl isn’t everything I aim for as an actress.’

There’s no doubt, though, that things are starting to change. In December this year she will star opposite Keira Knightley and Kevin Costner in the CIA thriller Jack Ryan, directed by Kenneth Branagh. ‘Filming scenes with Kevin was surreal. My inner 13-year-old was thinking, “I’m in The Bodyguard!” ’ Not bad for a first crack at Hollywood, especially when you consider how close she came to a desk job.

Until Gemma was 21, she was the perfect daughter. She grew up near Sevenoaks in Kent, the elder of two daughters. Her mother is a Chinese-Scottish pharmacist and her father an engineer from Hong Kong. She spent her evenings after school doing ballet, playing the violin and swimming competitively to national level. She insists, however, she has ‘an impulsive, reckless side’ and likes to unleash it on holiday in Ibiza once a year. After school she considered going to music college, but instead decided to read law at Oxford. She then turned down a training contract with Slaughter and May to spend a year working as a model to save up for drama school, which she had applied to in secret. ‘My parents were worried. It’s not the most stable of jobs and added to that, they are the children of immigrants and come from a background where they didn’t have much; it’s all about security for them. It was difficult; we disagreed over it.’ She finally came clean, after being accepted to the Drama Centre London, whose alumni include Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender. Her father didn’t speak to her for three months, but she has no regrets.

The conversation turns to feminism and it's clear that Gemma is far more comfortable and animated talking about politics than about her relationship. She’s terrifyingly quick and articulate and would have made an excellent lawyer. ‘We were sold a lie that the job of feminism had been done and it’s now a level playing field. That’s patently not true,’ she says. ‘At one end of the spectrum some women don’t have access to basic human rights, healthcare, education or freedom, and in our society women are still stereotyped, marginalised and objectified all the time. Unfortunately, there are women who are complicit in that.’ She is fully supportive of the campaign to put an end to The Sun’s Page 3 girls. ‘It is frankly a disgrace that the largest picture of a woman in a national newspaper on any given day is of a young woman topless. That was true even in the week that Jessica Ennis won her gold medal.’

I ask whether she feels the same about on-screen nudity since four of her recent roles have involved at least one sex scene. She pauses. ‘I object to the idea that it is mandatory to do a nude scene. In Game of Thrones it seems to be a rite of passage for a new female character — a friend of mine calls it “Game of Tits and Arse”. It’s a distracting thing, if you’ve got someone’s genitalia on screen the audience can’t concentrate. No one can out-act boobs... Could De Niro? Or Daniel Day-Lewis? I’ve turned down jobs where the nudity is gratuitous.’

And the opinions don’t stop there: she’s critical of the government’s austerity plans, wants to see more colour-blind casting and thinks the modelling industry can be damaging to young girls. But just as we’re covering rampant Western materialism, a gust of wind tips a jug of watery Pimm’s over her green skinny jeans, lightening the mood a little. So what, apart from getting soaked, makes her laugh? ‘The absurd.’ Does Jack? ‘He has to work quite hard to make me laugh. It’s a persona he plays on stage; it’s a heightened, exaggerated version of him. I don’t know how you would deal with someone at that pitch every day.’ A persona it may be but he has a whole sketch, for example, about taking a girl to Nando’s on a date... does he ever get a little too close to home? ‘As a comedian you use your own life but I think people know it’s not a literal telling of the truth. You appropriate stories and present them as something that happened to you. If he wants to draw on my life, it’s on a case-by-case basis. He knows he has to run everything by me first.’ If I were him, I would, too. ES

Dates starts on Channel 4 in June. Gemma also appears in Yellow Face at the Park Theatre, N4, from 21 May (parktheatre.co.uk)