Gal Gadot Reveals The Runner’s ‘Hardest Part’ Wasn’t the Running & Action Scenes | Interview
The Runner star Gal Gadot spoke with ComingSoon about her new action thriller movie. Gadot discussed having to run for most of the film’s runtime, what the surprisingly hard aspect was, and how she related to her character as a mother. The Runner is out on Prime Video starting on Wednesday, September 2.
“In the pulse-pounding psychological thriller The Runner, Maia Marten (Gal Gadot) has built her life on being one step ahead — a sharp, resourceful, high-powered lawyer at the top of London’s legal world. During her routine morning run, a single phone call shatters her world: her son has been taken. The instructions to get him back are simple and merciless — keep moving, follow every command, and tell no one. Stop, and he dies. Forced to sprint through the city and obey a series of sinister commands, Maia must confront an impossible question: how far will she go to bring her son home? Set against the backdrop of London’s hyper-connected streets, The Runner is a visceral, high-stakes race where every second counts, every choice carries a price, and a mother’s unstoppable love becomes the most dangerous weapon of all,” says the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Gal, as the title suggests, you do a lot of running in this movie. Obviously, you’re athletic and you’ve done a lot of action movies, but did you work with anybody to hone in on your running technique for this? Because it’s non-stop here. I was shocked.
Gal Gadot: You know it. Yes, I worked with an incredible Olympic trainer. His name is Malachi Davis, and he taught me how to run. I am not a runner. And actually, if there’s one thing I really don’t like to do when I work out, it’s running. You got it. So he kind of taught me how to do it the right way. And yes, we just went for it.
In the film, so much of it is you talking to Damian Lewis on the phone. But it’s tricky when you don’t have a scene partner. You’re just by yourself, and most of the time you’re running. It’s very physical. How was it doing all those lines of dialogue to yourself without a scene partner? That’s tricky to keep engaging.
I think that was the hardest part. The hardest part was having to carry the film and playing off of a voice in my head. Because also, the voice when we were filming it, it wasn’t Damian. It was someone’s reading me the lines, and sometimes he doesn’t hear my reply. Sometimes, I just play off of my imagination. So that was really, really difficult.
Then if you add up to it, the fact that I have to do it while running in different phases. Now you run, but you run. It’s like a game. Run, but run like you’re super exhausted and tired, and you just twisted your right ankle. No, now you sprint, run, sprint, sprint. It was so exhausting, everything about it.
But I think that essentially that helped bring the movie to life. It’s one of those things that we use the running as a mechanism on how to tell the story, and it helped push the story through.
You’re a mother and this is any mom’s worst nightmare. How did your real-life motherhood kind of help you connect with what Maia’s going through? Because it’s just horrendous.
Gal Gadot: It’s made everything so much more easy for me. I could completely relate to how Maia feels and understand her motivation. Every mother’s biggest fear is that something bad will happen to her children. And every mom I know is a lioness that would do anything they can in order to keep their children safe.
Thanks to Gal Gadot for taking the time to speak about The Runner.
Source: Comingsoon.net