On the heels of her leading role in director Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, this past winter, ravishing English actress and former Bond girl Gemma Arterton returns to the world of crime in the thriller Runner Runner, in theaters in October. She plays Rebecca Shafran, the right-hand girl of nefarious poker-Web-site owner Ivan Block (played by Ben Affleck), who is forced to contend with Richie Furst (Justin Timberlake), a Princeton student who has lost his tuition money on the site. Embroiled in the billion-dollar online-gambling industry, Rebecca “finds herself trapped and in too deep in a world of crime she doesn’t really enjoy,” Arterton says of her character. “She is the only female in the movie, so I had to make her earthy and give her a lot of substance,” Arterton adds. “I made her a little more female—she was a man’s idea of a woman before I brought some of my ideas to the writers.” As for the plot, it’s when Block takes Furst on as an apprentice, and Furst and Shafran fall in love, that, she says, “it gets messy and complicated.”

“Gemma’s ability to access deep emotion is rare and inspiring,” says director Brad Furman. “She’s a movie star who has real acting chops.”

Filming the movie wasn’t easy. “It was quite a tricky shoot,” Arterton says. “We had a hurricane scare—the movie was shot in Puerto Rico—and had to shut down production, so it was stressful making up the time.” But, for the Kent-born daughter of a cleaner and a welder, the good memories surely make up for the bad ones. “There’s one scene where Justin and I go to a party,” she recalls. ”We just danced all night to Latin music, looking out onto the sea.”