Gal Gadot is running out of road. Since rocketing to fame as a steely Amazonian superhero in 2017’s Wonder Woman, the 41-year-old Israeli actor has been unable to wrap that golden lasso of hers around a decent film role for love nor money. There were the despairing Wonder Woman followups – the cacophonously emo Justice League and gaudy scorn-magnet Wonder Woman 1984. There was the dopey Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile (Whodunnit? Whocares!). The turgid espionage thriller Red Notice, which sandwiched Gadot between The Rock and Ryan Reynolds, all fizzing with the sort of wonderful tri-directional chemistry you’d normally only get to see by asking Grok to generate its own remake of The Philadelphia Story.
That was 2021, and who’d have thought there was still some bottom left to this barrel? Last year brought Snow White, with Gadot slumping to new lows as an inhumanly creaky singing witch. Now, she’s hoofing it around London in The Runner, a trashy, garishly colourful piece of nonsense about a jogger blackmailed into committing a murder to save her son. Run, Gal, run!
Directed by Kevin Macdonald, the once-credible Scottish filmmaker behind The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, The Runner arrived on Prime Video last week. It already seems to have come and gone: as I’m writing this, it sits at 5th in the streamer’s charts. Reviews were universally damning, and gleeful in their ridicule. Gadot is on characteristically brittle form as she jogs around London, smashing into pedestrians and cars and talking frantically into her earpiece. It’s not quite her worst performance. Shockingly, it’s not even the worst performance in the movie, being somehow outdone by Damian Lewis in preposterous puppetmaster mode. But it’s yet more ammunition for her myriad detractors. The Runner’s largest viewing demographic may in fact be those social media users who’ve had three-second clips of Gadot’s clunky line deliveries shared mockingly on their feeds.
It’s hard to see a way back for Gadot at this point. She has become not just a bad actor, but an actor who is famously bad at acting. There is always a need for such a figure to exist in the world, to serve as a sort of universal shorthand punchline, and in 2026, it’s clear that Gal Gadot is it. In previous decades, the vacancy has been filled by people like Bo Derek, or Madonna, or Jessica Alba, or Megan Fox, or Kristen Stewart. Sometimes the criticism is entirely unfair; sometimes it isn’t; sometimes bad actors manage to grow into good ones.
It’s true there’s often a gendered element to the way that “bad actors” are often framed, with many of the consensus targets being women who are seen as sex symbols. To a lesser extent, this has always been true of men too – the vapid pretty-boy stereotype has been wielded against people like Keanu Reeves, or Zac Efron, or Robert Pattinson. (“Bad actor” action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Henry Cavill, Jean-Claude Van Damme or even Steven Seagal are also often judged by their bodies, albeit in a slightly different way.)
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Gadot is being written off as an actor for purely sexist reasons. A former Miss Israel pageant winner, Gadot is a glamorous figure – “statuesque” was the word sometimes thrown around during her Wonder Woman breakthrough – but more often than not she eschews roles predicated on sex appeal. (The Runner, for instance, is the sort of all-action part that 30 years ago would almost certainly have been written for a man.) Dating back to her very first film role (in the fifth Fast and Furious movie), Gadot has worked primarily as an action star – a direction informed, perhaps, by her two-year conscripted stint in the IDF, the Israel military, between 2005 and 2007. In recent years, Gadot’s IDF background and outspoken support of her native country has also made her something of a permissible target to some audiences, adding a political ballast to what is, at core, a purely aesthetic distaste for her awful acting.
Given her early success as Wonder Woman, you might wonder if the problem is usually her choice of material: even Daniel Day-Lewis would have struggled to come out of something like Snow White with his credentials untarnished. There is an element, too, of miscasting: in a way, Wonder Woman was an ideal role for Gadot, the character’s status as a supernatural émigrée offering the perfect in-universe justification for the actor’s slightly flat, vaguely alien affect. But not many roles provide such a pretext. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what material would allow Gadot to flourish at this point. (The Wonder Woman door has shut: DC Studios boss James Gunn jettisoned her when he re-set the franchise in 2024, with Andor’s Adria Arjona rumoured to step in.) She has never shown much evidence of range, so her options, we can only assume, are limited to projects seeking “a Gal Gadot type”.
It may be that the only way out is through. If I were her agent, I might look at Gadot’s ironic cheerleaders on social media who find camp value in her wooden performances, and see failure morph slickly into opportunity. (Her ornately unnatural delivery of lines like “Enough champagne… to fill the Nile!”and “KAL-EL! NO!” has long outlasted the memories of the actual films they were in.) In other words, her best point of action at this point may be to lean into her own weaknesses as an actor, to sign onto ever more ridiculous projects and really push her bizarre line deliveries into uncharted territory. To own her own stiltedness; to make it style.
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Gadot needs her Schwarzenegger-in-Batman & Robin role. Her Van-Damme-in-Street Fighter. Her Nicolas-Cage-in-The Wicker Man. Can you imagine what she’d do with a helmet full of bees? Maybe, on some subconscious level, this was the idea behind The Runner – a purposeful wading into the waters of schlock wherein “good” and “bad” are nebulous concepts. Maybe it’s time to test just how deep those waters get.
‘The Runner’ is streaming on Prime Video