Gal Gadot Says She Channeled Tom Cruise While Sprinting in ‘The Runner’ (Exclusive)

Gal Gadot chatted with “Extra’s” Derek Hough about her new action-thriller “The Runner.”

Derek said, “So, you play a mom in this film as well, and your character has only one hour to save her son, by sprinting across London. How did you handle the intensity of this shoot?”

She laughed, saying, “You just do… The running part of it is kind of like the vehicle of how we tell the story… I had to run I think almost every day of filming… but it really helped me get into the state of mind of where the character is and being out of control and exhausted and fearful and all of that.”

Gal added, “It was a lot. I finished the film on crutches, because there’s only so much you can take. Oh, yeah. It was go, go, go.”

Gadot joked about how she was channeling Tom Cruise, saying, “I was like Tom Cruise. Just think, manifest Tom Cruise to my energy and just, like, if he does it I can try and do that.”

Gal and Derek also talked about their shared love of dancing, as Gadot explained, “I was a dancer. That’s how I started. I was a dancer for 12 years. Yes, that’s my passion. At one point, I wanted to be a choreographer. You have no idea… but not like ‘Dancing with the Stars’-type… I was dancing, like, hip hop and modern and ballet and all of that.”

Derek insisted, “We’ve got to revitalize this passion that’s brewing inside you,” and Gal laughed, saying, “‘Black Swan,’ here we go.”

Plus, Gal is a mom to four daughters, so she gave new girl dad Derek some advice!

“Girls are incredible,” she said. “They will bring so much love and so much joy and you’re going to worry about them when they’re in their teen age. So, you have a few years to prep yourself for it. But it’s amazing. Congratulations.”

Gal also dished on her upcoming film “Bitcoin,” which has an AI component.

She explained, “All the performances and everything is real and they generated the sets and lighting with AI but we had a big crew and everything.”

Gadot went on, “In a weird way, it felt like a theater because we were walking into a gray space and everything was gray, the table, if we have a table, the glass was gray. Everything was and… everything that was left to do was the performance, you know what I mean?… It was a clean performance. You don’t rely on anything. So, that was an interesting experience and I had such a wonderful time filming with Doug Liman and Casey Affleck and Pete Davidson, and we had a lot of fun. It’s a crazy movie.”