{"id":399188,"date":"2026-04-27T01:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T01:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/399188\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T01:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T01:30:15","slug":"i-was-very-headstrong-and-very-disobedient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/399188\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I was very headstrong, and very disobedient\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since it is the word of the moment and since from Monday she is playing an MI6 spy-runner on ITV\u2019s new thriller series Secret Service, I ask Gemma Arterton a facetious question: if she applied to be a secret agent for real, would she pass her vetting?<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019d want me, to be honest,\u201d is the one-time Bond actress\u2019s evasive reply but a moment later she is not so sure if that\u2019s even right. Her Secret Service husband, Rafe Spall<\/a>, told her about an actor friend who had been approached. \u201cHe\u2019s a very well-known actor and he\u2019s been asked twice to work for MI6, and each time he has flatly refused. I know this actor. He\u2019s very charismatic but, you know, and it made me think, wow, they approached him. Maybe I could do it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Secret Service is an adaptation of a novel by the urbane ITV News anchor Tom Bradby and has a top-notch cast that also features Alex Kingston<\/a> and Roger Allam<\/a>. Its moreish plot concerns a member of the British cabinet suspected of being a Soviet asset. But which one? And will he or she be our next PM? Arterton is Kate Henderson, head of MI6\u2019s Russia desk, ambitious but also a bit of a maverick, not averse to going \u201coff book\u201d and presumably a borderline vetting case herself, since an old suitor of hers was a Russky. <\/p>\n

As for whether Arterton would pass her vetting process, I am, as they say, leaning against. And this is to her credit. Despite her demure charm on and off screen, and after her career\u2019s iffy moment 18 years ago servicing 007\u2019s libido, Arterton is one of the most fiercely independent-minded actors I have met and also, just fierce. My research finds an uncelebrated clip of her from 13 years ago telling an American chat show she once punched a tramp in the face. \u201cOh God,\u201d she says, initially apologetic. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t use that word [tramp] any more either. It was in Berlin, in an ATM, one of those indoor ones, and someone grabbed my bum and squeezed it, so I just turned around and punched them. Which I\u2019d done before. It\u2019s like a reaction that I have. Someone touched it in a nightclub one time. I\u2019m not a violent person but someone grabbing me without consent. If they grab your bum! And unfortunately, I think the person was a homeless person. It was a long time ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

He ran after her? \u201cHe did.\u201d<\/p>\n

She joked on TV about tottering off in her high heels and him \u201clurching\u201d after her, but it must have been terrifying. \u201cIt was a little bit terrifying. I remember when Saoirse Ronan was on The Graham Norton Show<\/a> and said women have to watch their backs all the time walking down the street. And it\u2019s true. I don\u2019t know. I reacted very strongly but I guess it\u2019s a form of self-defence.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are talking on Thursday afternoon in a hotel restaurant in west London. I am lucky to be seeing her because she has been ill with an infection she ignored because she was a \u201cnegligent mum\u201d, by which she means a mum negligent of her own health because her focus was on her children\u2019s. The big news is that a few months ago she gave birth to a daughter, a sister for the son she had with her husband, the Irish actor Rory Keenan, three and a half years ago. I am no sleuth, but tell her I had my suspicions watching previews of Secret Service \u2014 all those flappy jackets and unbuttoned overcoats Kate wore.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can so see it when I watch it. I started at about three and a half months pregnant and they just kept expanding the waistlines. By the end, I was six months and it was just undeniable and I think they had to do a bit of CGI on a couple of shots because it was very obvious. I mastered the art of, you know, the lean that hides it, certain positions, bags, arms crossed, all that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"KateArterton in Secret ServicePotboiler Productions<\/p>\n

She had some experience. During her first pregnancy she filmed the movie The Critic with Ian McKellen<\/a>. \u201cBut I wasn\u2019t as pregnant. I wasn\u2019t as far along. But hey, you know, if we do season two, Kate\u2019s going to look very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spooky Kate is mother to two teenagers \u2014 Arterton was asked by a producer if she minded, but she is 40 now and didn\u2019t \u2014 and has manifest work\/life balance problems. Her children don\u2019t know what her job really is and assume it is boring. They do notice she is an unreliable attendee at parents\u2019 evenings. Stuart, her husband, is special adviser to the home secretary and neck-high in intrigue himself. Arterton sympathises with them. While she allowed herself a few months off around her daughter\u2019s arrival, Keenan was starring in a West End adaptation of John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt was brilliant but it was a really full-on part. We had this five-week-old baby and our toddler and he was doing all of the dad things and then going off to do that, because he\u2019s an amazing dad.\u201d<\/p>\n

They met on a 2017 Donmar Warehouse production of Saint Joan in which she took the lead. After her divorce two years earlier from Stefano Catelli, an Italian fashionista, she had not, she says, particularly expected to marry again, yet knew she wanted children one day. She noticed Keenan immediately. \u201cFrom the first impression I had of him I could tell he was a really kind man, like really intelligent and kind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the Peaky Blinders clan, Keenan is from a big Irish family, \u201cchaotic but very close\u201d. They moved from south London to a big house \u201cnestled\u201d in an oak forest in Sussex, where their boy searches for dinosaur bones and makes dens. Refreshed motherhood has made her reflect on her very different childhood on a council estate in Gravesend in Kent. (I still hear her Kentish accent today. She says its battle with the RP taught at drama school is an \u201congoing saga\u201d.) Her mother ran a cleaning business while bringing up Arterton and her younger sister after she and her husband, a welder, divorced. Her parenting style \u2014 common, Arterton thinks, in the Nineties \u2014 was to give children as much freedom as possible, and then some.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mum\u2019s a rebel and always said that she believed rules were made to be broken. So she never really put any rules down for us. Really let us do whatever we wanted,\u201d she says, acknowledging there were specific times the sisters had to be home by on school nights.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a teenager, I was very headstrong and I was very disobedient. My dad was remarried and had a new family, so he wasn\u2019t really around that much. So I think for my mum, it was challenging to have two teenage children. I think she\u2019d sort of made her bed and then maybe had regretted it when we became teenagers. It was loving, but, you know, at 13, 14 we thought that we were so grown up, thought we were 20.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Gemma\u201cMy mum never really put any rules down for us. Really let us do whatever we wanted\u201dKatie Wilson for the times<\/p>\n

At 16 she left home to live with her boyfriend and his parents. \u201cI remember Mum calling me and saying, \u2018Are you going to come home for Christmas?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Only if you let me have a lock on my bedroom door, a key and I can pay rent.\u2019\u201d Her mother rejected these conditions but they made up later. Arterton returned home, enrolled at a performing arts school and from there auditioned for and was accepted by Rada. The closed book of Shakespeare and classical literature sprang open for her. In her last year at Rada she took the lead in its production of The Beggar\u2019s Opera but left mid-year for her first professional job, the 2007 St Trinian\u2019s movie.<\/p>\n

The year after she was cast in Quantum of Solace as Strawberry Fields, more \u201cintern\u201d than spy, she now thinks, charged with bringing James Bond to heel but instead sleeping with him. Strawberry, she later said, should have told him \u201cno\u201d and \u201cworn flat shoes\u201d. But Arterton was young and had a student loan to repay. The same year came the BBC\u2019s Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles, in which she played Thomas Hardy\u2019s relentlessly wronged \u201cpure woman\u201d. While it is generally considered a feminist work, Arterton is now sceptical about its author.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there was a kind of relish in telling this story about this woman. And then as time went on, I started reading his letters and he was a bit misogynist and not very nice to his wife. It did make me think, well, why would he write this wonderful book about a woman being destroyed when he wasn\u2019t applying its lessons to the women in his own life?\u201d<\/p>\n

I ask if she had consciously made an early decision to speak out about the treatment of women in her industry? \u201cNo. I think it came from seeing in my time \u2014 it\u2019s a different, different time now \u2014 things that I didn\u2019t agree with on set, seeing the ways that people were treated.\u201d Sometimes the issue was how she herself was treated. A director once pointed to a bed on set and told her this was where she would \u201cshag\u201d and failed even to introduce her to the supporting actor (ie extra) with whom she would do the deed. \u201cBut it was a long time ago and it wouldn\u2019t be like that any more, and that really has changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

As one of the most eloquent voices for MeToo<\/a> and Time\u2019s Up, she can take some credit for improvements such as the presence of intimacy co-ordinators for sex scenes. She also campaigned for equal pay for men and women in showbusiness, a war she says is yet to be entirely won. After a terrible 2013 Hollywood crime thriller, Runner Runner, which happened also to be punishingly unpleasant to work on, she decided in future to accept only projects that interested her. She set up her own production company, Rebel Park, to make her sort of films and to hire more women. It has produced one of her best films, The Escape, in which she played a young mother escaping her abusive husband, and Summerland, where she was a lesbian recluse locally mistaken for a witch. <\/p>\n

Take these films, alongside her stage work on Made in Dagenham, which celebrated a Sixties fight for equal pay, her company\u2019s foray into television, Funny Woman, in which she was a sitcom actress of the same era far better than the scripts she was given, and her portrayal of the sexually liberated society gardener Vita Sackville-West in the film Vita and Virginia, and there emerges a performer in love with unsettling the status quo.<\/p>\n

So, no, I don\u2019t think Gemma Arterton, the spy who never was, would clear developed vetting to serve in His Majesty\u2019s secret service. She is far too attached to her beliefs. On the other hand, she is a wonderful actress and that would count for something with MI6. How great she is our asset and not the state\u2019s.
Secret Service is on ITV1 at 9pm on Mon and Tue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since it is the word of the moment and since from Monday she is playing an MI6 spy-runner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399189,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-399188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}