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Privacy NoticeShe’s starred in everything from Bond to Shakespeare but Gemma Arterton’s greatest role is being a mum to her son. Gemma, 38, who is married to Peaky Blinders hunk Rory Keenan, is so besotted with her baby boy, she took him with her when she filmed the second series of her hit Sky comedy Funny Woman. It was Gemma’s first role since becoming a mum and even though her son was always by her side, she still fretted over how he’d find filming. “He was 10 months old,” she says. “I brought my family up to Liverpool where we shot the show, so he was with me. I dyed my hair blonde this season and it sounds ridiculous but I was convinced he didn’t recognise me! He’d see me for an hour or something a day, I’d be dressed as Sophie and I just don’t look like myself when I’m playing her, with the costumes and the hair and make up, so I was convinced that he didn’t know I was his mum. I found that quite hard.”
Sophie is hoping she and Dennis will be together in the new series of Funny Woman
(Image: © Sky Uk)
Days on set are long, but when Gemma’s not working, she’s free to devote all her time to being a mum. “It is what it is, though,” she adds. “The good thing about this job is that it’s intense when you’re filming for three or four months, but then you might have months off where you can just be with your child. It was hard not to be with him but it’s OK. He’s forgiven me. He recognises me.” In Funny Woman, Gemma plays Sophie Straw, a former Blackpool beauty queen turned comedy star who is juggling her TV career with her complicated personal life. The series is set in the swinging 60s. As well as having her son on set, Gemma, was also joined by her husband Rory, who appears as Vernon Whitfield, the arch enemy of Dennis (Arhser Ali), the married man Sophie is in love with. Gemma explains how casting Rory in the role of nasty Vernon came about. “Ollie Parker, who is the director of Funny Woman, knows us both and I remember, we went round for dinner at his house once and he said to Rory: ‘We must get you in season two. When the scripts came in, I thought he would be really good and would play that part so well,” she says. “We went through the professional avenues and sent the script to his agent and we didn’t expect him to say yes, because he has other things to do, but he did, and it was lovely.” “We only have one scene where we are in the same scene together but it was really nice to have him there and he’s so good in it. He’s nothing like his character in the series, he’s lovely in real life, not anything like Vernon!”
Gemma with her husband Rory, who appears in the new series alongside her
(Image: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Aud)
Gemma clearly enjoys playing funny, goofy and adorable Sophie, a character that is a departure from some of the more serious roles she has been known for, such as Vita Sackville-West in Vita & Virginia, the title character in Gemma Bovery (for which she learnt to speak French fluently) and Bond girl Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace. “I think I have funny bones and in life I’ve always been quite the clown,” she says. “People that know me know that I’m quite silly but this is probably the first time that people have seen me do something like that on screen. Before this, I’d always get these very in control characters, which is so not who I am.” “That’s why I love playing her, because it’s probably the closest character to me that I’ve played. She’s fun, she’s ditzy, she’s smart as well and she’s quite sharp and intuitive.”
Gemma has said she has “funny bones” and loves playing Sophie
(Image: © Sky Uk)
The series follows Sophie as she becomes a sixties TV star at a time when the industry was very male dominated, which is something Gemma experienced herself at the start of her career. “It’s a different landscape now in terms of female directors, writers, people behind the camera, women running studios,” she says, and indeed Gemma herself is a producer, both on movies and Funny Woman. “When I first started, it was old school and a very male dominated industry,” she continues. “There has been a huge push in the British film and television industry to make sure you hire as many women as men. It’s a completely different world to where I started, which is really encouraging. I have my own agenda as a producer, which is making sure that there’s lots of women on set and things like that, and they’re usually quite feminist projects.” Gemma is hopeful that there will be another series of Funny Woman – “at the end of this season, we find something out and Sophie’s life will change and I would like to see that” – but in the meantime she has got rid of Sophie’s blonde hair and gone back to being a natural brunette. “It’s funny, my sister is blonde, and my mum, they are both natural blondes,” she says. “I wondered what it would be like to be blonde but it just wasn’t me. I’m definitely dark, just in terms of my soul. I just didn’t feel myself as a blonde, it was very strange.”Story SavedYou can find this story in My Bookmarks.Or by navigating to the user icon in the top right.Follow OK! MagazineFacebookTwitterCommentMore OnGemma ArtertonComedy
