The discourse surrounding gender-swapped roles in remakes, reboots, and even original projects is one that generates plenty of unsavory opinions, with Gal Gadot’s incoming Netflix blockbuster Heart of Stone certainly painting the picture of a project that could ruffle the feathers of the internet’s darkest corners.
It wasn’t too long ago that director Tom Harper effectively labelled the James Bonds, Jason Bournes, and Ethan Hunts of the world as outdated and irrelevant relics, while star and producer Gadot also waded into those potentially treacherous weeds by making it clear she didn’t want to tell “a male story that’s been done many times already.”
Doubling – if not tripling – down on those sentiments in an interview with Total Film, the DCU veteran explained why she wouldn’t have considered tackling Heart of Stone if it was a part originally written for a male actor that was simply swapped to woman when casting came around.
“I wanted to show a great story about a female character who is doing it in the action genre. Right? She is thriving. But at the same time, how many times have they just switched gender? They take a story that all about the men and they just change it to a woman, and then go shoot it? To me, it was so important in the DNA to make Heart of Stone a little different, because men and women are different. They’re built differently, they operate differently.”
Of course, that does leave us wondering if Gadot has ever seen Salt, which was initially scripted as a Tom Cruise vehicle before Angelina Jolie ended up playing the title role. Things turned out pretty well in that instance, but maybe it’s the exception more than the rule. Either way, we’ll see how Heart of Stone fares when it comes to Netflix on August 11.