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?
While Gadot is best known to audiences as DC's Wonder Woman, director Kevin Macdonald was intrigued by the idea of placing a larger-than-life action star in a grounded, recognisable world—and having her run through the real streets of the British capital.
We caught up with Macdonald to discuss bringing The Runner to life, from casting Gadot as its physically demanding lead to finding the right balance for Damian Lewis' sinister villain. The director also reveals the unique challenges of filming across London, including shooting Gadot running through busy streets without closing them down and capturing genuine reactions from unsuspecting members of the public.
You can check out our brief conversation with Macdonald about The Runner below.
I'd love to know: when you're tackling a story that needs a lead who's obviously incredibly physically capable, does having a former Wonder Woman on your side maybe give you a little bit more confidence going in?
That was certainly fairly uppermost in my mind when I was going through the casting process. I love the idea of taking someone like Gal, who is known as Wonder Woman, obviously, but putting her in a very real world. So the London in this film that she runs through—the whole movie, pretty much she's running, and she's going through the city, all different neighbourhoods of the city. And so you've got this larger-than-life comic book character in some people's heads, but she's in a totally real world. And that contradiction really tickled me.
Damian Lewis is great as The Caller. And he reminded me a lot, actually, of Kiefer Sutherland's role in Phone Booth. So what was it that made Damian the right choice for this part, and what did he bring to the character that you particularly responded to?
Well, Damian is my neighbour in London, and I thought it would be nice to keep it in the neighbourhood. But he's a great actor who's played many different roles. He's particularly good at this kind of sinister kind of—not melodramatic, but just kind of hovering around somewhere, like you feel like he's maybe a cool assassin or something. He never overplays. And I think in a movie like this, if we'd gone melodramatic, the whole movie would have fallen apart. So that's really what I appreciated in his role: he never overplayed it at all. And he's much more sinister for that.
You mentioned London. It is an extremely busy city. How much of a challenge was it to film there and follow Maya throughout the capital as she goes on this intense, crazy journey in the film?
Well, you can imagine filming in London at any time is difficult, but when the entire movie pretty much is on the streets, and you have to join up—because she's running a real route that you could run through from North London down to the south by the river. So we had to film every bit along the route. You couldn't skip a whole section or suddenly go somewhere else because everyone in Britain would go, "Hang on a minute. That's not the right... Covent Garden isn't next to Camden." So it meant that we had to piece together the permissions because it's very hard to get permission to film in some of these places.
So one day we'd be down by the river, and then the next day we'd be up on Hampstead Heath, and the next day we'd be somewhere else. So you're moving around, but you're having to try and make it feel like continuity. But another thing we did a lot on this film that I think was very unusual was we actually filmed on live streets a lot. We didn't close a lot of the streets.
We just had a real crowd, and Gal would run through, and people would be like, 'What? Who's that? That looks like Gal.' And we'd have some hidden cameras around the place, and you got these great reactions, which, of course, are appropriate to the film because in the film she's this desperate woman running through the crowd and most people are on their phones. They're not noticing, but the people who do notice—that works for the movie.
The Runner premieres globally on Prime Video on September 2, 2026.