As published on CLAUDIA

Gal Gadot appears almost makeup-free in The Runner, a thriller premiering September 2 on Prime Video. Even so, it is impossible not to think that only she could run across London, exhausted and under pressure, without completely losing her glamour. Gal laughs at the observation.

“I don’t think I looked my best in this film, just because the character goes through so much. And in many scenes, I was wearing no makeup, you’re right,” she said in an exclusive interview with CLAUDIA. “But this movie is go, go, go from the get-go. It doesn’t stop until the movie finishes. And it kind of felt the same way for me as an actress. When I was filming this movie, it was go, go, go. I could not breathe until we were done.”

In The Runner, she plays Maia Marten, a lawyer whose son is kidnapped by a man who manages to control her life through her phone. To save him, she must cross the city obeying the criminal’s orders while trying to find a way out without crossing her own moral boundaries.

The formula is a classic one, but what surprised Gal was the character’s intelligence even more than her physical endurance.

“She was so cerebral, so sophisticated, and she could think 30 steps ahead. And that’s what I loved,” she explains. “I was reading the script, and when I read the end, I was like, ‘How is she going to… What? Is she going to kill him?’ And then, at the end, it blew my mind. It was so satisfying.”

If Maia is a kind of Wonder Woman without superpowers, capable of doing anything to protect her son, the comparison comes at a price. “Yes, but Wonder Woman’s feet don’t break,” Gal joked. “I finished the film on crutches. I broke both of my feet. At the end, my body was like, ‘I give up.’”

Director Kevin Macdonald says the injury happened when the actress was running on an uneven surface during the final ten days of filming. Some scenes had to be adapted, using close-ups of Gal pretending to run as well as stunt doubles. A few months later, once her foot had healed, she returned to complete the work.

Maia’s route covers approximately five miles — around eight kilometres — and follows a real path from Hampstead Heath into central London. Gal trained with former Olympic athlete Malachi Davis, while the camera crew had to keep up with her on rollerblades and skateboards.

“We were like a team. I had to keep pace with them, and they had to keep pace with me,” she says. Because many of the streets could not be closed, much of the film was shot amid the public. “It was very challenging, and we were very exposed, but it kept everything alive.”

When she discovered she was speaking to someone in Rio de Janeiro, Gal smiled: “So lucky! I miss Brazil.” And after our own race against the clock to finish the interview, she signed off with an affectionate “tchau” and, of course, another declaration of her love for Brazil.