Before Gal Gadot became Wonder Woman, she was in the running for another major action-movie role: Imperator Furiosa in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Gadot recently revealed that she auditioned for the role alongside Tom Hiddleston during an appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast. The audition wasn’t a quick reading, either. Gadot says she and Hiddleston spent approximately four hours working with Miller in London.
“I did my match test with Tom Hiddleston,” Gadot recalled. The actress remembered arriving in London on a cold winter day wearing multiple layers of clothing before entering a beautiful London home that had been converted into an office. By the time the audition was over, she was down to wearing a tank top.
“It was so intensive, the work that we’ve done and how much we filmed. It was amazing,” Gadot said.
Gadot also revealed that she came away from the experience believing she had a real shot at playing Furiosa.
“Yeah, because I felt good about the work that we did,” she told Horowitz when asked if she thought she might have gotten the role.
She had particularly high praise for Hiddleston, whom she did not know at the time. “Hiddleston is such an incredible actor,” Gadot said, explaining that he was primarily known to her then as a major theatre actor in England. “He was so amazing and it felt really good.”
Of course, George Miller ultimately had a different vision for Mad Max: Fury Road. Charlize Theron was cast as Imperator Furiosa, while Tom Hardy took over the role of Max Rockatansky. The resulting film became one of the most acclaimed action movies of the 21st century and won six Academy Awards.
Interestingly, Gadot wasn’t the only major actor involved in the audition process who didn’t end up in the movie. During the same conversation, she learned that Jeremy Renner had also gone through the casting process. Michael Fassbender was another actor previously known to have auditioned for the movie.
Gadot’s Fury Road audition took place around the same period that another career-changing opportunity was beginning to take shape. She would soon meet filmmaker Zack Snyder and eventually land the role of Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, transforming her into one of Hollywood’s biggest action stars.
It’s fascinating to imagine how different Gadot’s career might have looked if George Miller had chosen her as Furiosa. Her version of the character could have led to an entirely different Mad Max franchise, especially if she had been paired with Tom Hiddleston as Max.
Mad Max: Fury Road was released in 2015 and stars Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton. George Miller directed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris.
Gadot can currently be seen in The Runner, which debuted on Prime Video on September 2nd.
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