The Perth-born model is so tranquil, she seems to operate on an entirely different plane to the rest of us.
Or maybe I just think that because of how often she was hit with the ‘alien’ tag during her supermodel heyday.
About eight years ago, Ward was nearly as famous as Kate Moss, easily as big a deal as Cara Delevingne is now, and pretty much always described as an “otherworldly beauty” – though “Bambi on the beach” might be a more accurate description.
Today, at 26 and promoting her new campaign for Country Road, she looks exactly the same: all golden and long-limbed with giant eyes and wonderful cheekbones.
But her calmness (or is it shyness?) is unnerving; I wish she’d show some of Bambi’s friskiness.
Ward appears so chilled-out, I’m surprised she doesn’t fall over, and she dusts our interview so liberally with pauses, I have to bite my tongue not to fill them.
She speaks extremely softly, prefixing most statements with, “I think”, and giving precious little away.
She’s a contemplative sort, and since she visited India a few years back, loves to meditate.
Her hiatus from modelling was driven by “wanting to focus on some things inside, to go on a journey of self-discovery, find my truth – all those things that sound funny when you say them out loud”.
Deep stuff from this grown-up version of the girl who used to read Tolstoy backstage at Paris fashion week, and whose older sister, Sophie, is a writer.
So it’s a bit of a shock when Ward reveals she’s into kickboxing.
Say WHAT?
“We went to Thailand and studied Muay Thai at a boxing camp, just before I fell pregnant,” she says.
“There’s a funny thing about learning how to fight – it’s such a dichotomy because it’s about taking control but also about letting the body go; it’s not really about anger.”
The “we” is Ward and her partner, David Letts, a Sydney model turned photographer.
Their daughter, Naia, was born in December last year in Hawaii, a long way from the media glare that plagues them here and in New York, where they mostly live – although when Ward’s friend, fellow Perth model Nicole Trunfio shared a pic of mum and baby on Instagram, it went viral.
No wonder Ward needs to stay strong.
“In many ways, David taught me how to fight,” says Ward, by which she means standing up for herself – not kicking ***.
“When I say ‘fight’,” she explains, “I mean fight for what I believe in and what I need. That’s something I want to instil in my daughter – a mental toughness, a sense of confidence in herself and an ability to completely own whatever she feels.”
And what about what Ward feels? “Um, I think it’s about authority, really.
“I think it’s something I…”
I wait for her to finish the sentence, but she doesn’t, so I try to do it for her: didn’t have when she was younger? When she was plunged into things such as guest-editing Australian Vogue in 2005 (the last person to do that had been Karl Lagerfeld) and appear naked in water with some bloke in a Calvin Klein fragrance ad? When she was acting as muse for designers twice, three times her age? The photographer Michael Thompson once described her as “an exotic blonde; that rarest of creatures”.
In 2007, Forbes listed her among the highest paid models in the world.
When Ward was part of a model group gracing the cover of the inaugural issue of Chinese Vogue, 300,000 copies sold out in the first three hours.
That must have been strange, I say.
Did she feel that her image had become bigger than she was? “I think,” says Ward carefully, “maybe. I don’t know; it was a whirlwind.
“There wasn’t time to reflect, it was all happening so fast. I was just…” – another pause – “fully booked”.
And then, “I felt maybe a bit mute as a model sometimes. And I was exhausted.
“I wanted time, to find my story, my… power.”
There’s another long silence – if it were a picture with a caption, it would read: THINKING! Eventually, she says, “I think I did have authority when I was younger, just in a different way. I think my parents instilled that in us.”
Gemma Louise Ward is the second child of her English nurse mother and Aussie doctor father.
As well as Sophie, also based in New York, she has twin brothers, Oscar and Henry.
It’s a family of travel fans.
“Mum had lived in France and travelled to Hong Kong. My dad went to Nepal when he was young, and my grandma had been to India.
“I remember hearing those stories and I had wanderlust from a young age,” says Ward.
She was the performer in the family, something that’s hard to reconcile now, when faced with the adult Gemma, so quietly self-contained.
“Oh, I was the clown,” she insists.
“I loved attention.”
As a child, she wanted to be an actor and at age seven begged her parents for an agent.
“I got one eventually,” she says.
“I think I was 11.”
Tween Gemma acted in short films and TV commercials. Modelling never occurred to her.
She was 14 when she accompanied a friend to the local auditions for Search for a Supermodel, and was scouted.
She later told Teen Vogue she’d come straight from her aunt and uncle’s farm, covered in mud, and thought the whole thing was a joke.
At 15 Ward did Australian fashion week, by 17 she was a regular in New York, Paris and Milan.
The rest, as they say, is runway history, but she still had ideas about the stage.
The last time I interviewed her, in 2007 for Vogue, Ward was about to make her feature debut in Elissa Down’s coming-of-age movie, The Black Balloon.
She was bloody good, too, totally believable as the sensitive girlfriend of a boy dealing with an autistic brother.
Then there was a cameo in horror flick The Strangers, and she played a siren (the mermaids who sing seafaring gents to their death) in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, then… nothing.
What happened?
“There wasn’t ‘nothing’, just not a lot of noise,” says Ward.
It’s true she was in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, but only for about three seconds in a party scene – her bit was cut.
She “studied Chekhov and Shakespeare” at The Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York, and made her stage debut in Perth three years ago.
She played Fanny in Marius Von Mayenburg’s satire of our beauty-obsessed society, The Ugly One, for Perth Theatre Company.
“It was wonderful. Mum was in the audience. I could hear her laughing.
“I love theatre – there’s something about being in contact with people right there; you’re feeding off the audience’s expectations, reactions. All those emotions get stirred up in the room.”
OK, but after that, why the radio silence? “I was busy having a baby,” she says.
Well, not until last year.
Ward modelled less during 2006 and 2007 than previously, and gossips said it was because she’d gained weight.
There was a rumour she wasn’t booked for Burberry because she was “too fat” (hardly).
She wore a denim bikini in the Chanel spring/summer ’08 ready-to-wear show and looked infinitesimally curvier than she had the previous season.
I am instructed by her publicists not to mention this during our interview, so I don’t know if it’s still a touchy subject or if Ward’s management is just needlessly protective and she really couldn’t care less.
She seems too smart to be overly worried about whether she put on half a kilo seven years ago.
If it were me, I’d just say, “I ate a packet of Tim Tams, so what? I was 20,” and move on.
But then it wouldn’t be me, would it? Because being a top-level runway model is a rare and tricky thing, governed by rules – how fit, how perfect, how trim you must be to stay employed.
In late 2007 Ward started dating actor Heath Ledger.
They spent Christmas together in Perth before returning home to New York, where Ledger died in January.
A horrible time made worse by a media frenzy, and one I was told not to mention either.
Anyway, it is Letts who is the love of Ward’s life.
How did they find each other? “We met at [Sydney’s] Whale Beach.”
She picked him up at the seaside? Fun! “No, no. I didn’t pick him up! He wasn’t a total stranger.
“He was friends with my sister and I was holidaying there, we had other mutual friends. He remembered seeing this,” she says, pointing to a stack of old fashion magazines.
The top copy is the October 2007 issue of Vogue, which features Ward on the cover in faux dreadlocks a mile long – haute-hippie traveller chic.
“David liked it,” she says.
“He thought it was cool.”
They fell in love and went travelling, visiting India, Nepal and parts of South East Asia.
Two international models who’d travelled the world for work were now doing it differently – at the beck and call of no one.
They’re not married, but they are blissed-out new parents.
Ward says Naia, whose name means ‘dolphin’ in Hawaiian, is “the joy of my life”.
Ward says she is happy to go back to work “now that Naia’s a bit older”.
She’s not nervous, perhaps because she’s older and wiser, and better equipped to “fight”.
Last month she opened Prada’s spring/summer ’15 show in Milan, drawing gasps of surprised joy from the audience.
Will there be more runway? “I think so. I feel I can embody myself now.
“I feel comfortable in myself.”
Her agency, IMG Models, says definitely – after the Prada show, it tweeted, “Don’t call it a comeback, @Gem_Ward is here to stay!”
And next week Country Road will launch Ward as its new face in both print and a film campaign.
It’s light-drenched, dreamy and lovely, and makes me want to dash out to buy the easy, crisp cottons Ward models.
But even so, why did Ward, with all her couture credentials, pick this as her comeback gig? “The film concept appealed to me, and the storyline: a young woman goes back to a family beach house and is flooded with memories of childhood, and is bringing those memories to her daughter for the first time. I relate.”
Naia also appears in the ad, looking adorable.
Isn’t that asking for paparazzi trouble for this most private of public figures? “I think…” starts Ward, carefully.
“You know, I think it’s really hard to stop that now.
“Naia’s been in the papers already, without me sending in photos of her. I try not to struggle with it – there’s no point getting angry.
“The Country Road film is different. It’s beautiful, it’s about family, about nature, holidays on the beach – something we can all relate to.
“And it’s also, to some degree, about creating a lovely memory for us as a family. I am celebrating sharing her because she is such a welcoming character.
“She’s very social, I see how much she enjoys being around people and so I feel generous about her.
“But I think, well, obviously I want to protect her as well.”
It’s clever of Country Road to get Ward, but it’s also clever of Ward to get them because in this moment, the one captured on film with Naia laughing in the sand and with the sun winking and the beach towel all scrumpled up, Ward leaves otherworldly behind and becomes just like the rest of us.
I like the Country Road Gemma even better than I like the Prada Gemma, and that’s saying something.
