While Gal Gadot found herself a big franchise role as the DCEU’s Wonder Woman, the actress could have been part of another long-running movie series first as she once auditioned for the role of Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road and apparently slayed it. Decades after Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome seemed to have brought the dystopian future-based film series to a close, Fury Road arrived with Tom Hardy taking on the role of Max to rave reviews that mostly claimed the film is one of the greatest action movies of all time.
In the film, Charlize Theron played Furiosa, a new character to the franchise, who is a high-ranking officer in the army of Immortan Joe, the tyrant leader of a warlike cult, and is helping his wives escape the War Rig. However, in a new book by Kyle Buchanan called Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, one particular piece of information suggests that Theron was not the only actress in the running to play Furiosa, and of the others Gal Gadot “gave an incredible audition.”
In an except shared by Vulture, it is revealed that others who read for the part included Jessica Chastain, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Ruth Negga when George Miller and casting director Ronna Kress were holding auditions all the way back in 2009. However of all the actresses who Miller saw, it was Gadot who stood out as a potentially incredible star of the future. In the quote, Miller says:
“She tested, and she did incredibly good work — already, you could see that she was very fine,” said Miller. “But here’s the thing about Gal: We were testing her not just for Furiosa but also for the Wives, and in terms of age, she fell in between.”
Mad Max: Fury Road Could Have Been Gal Gadot’s First Big Break In Hollywood
Gal Gadot’s audition for the Mad Max sequel came prior to her appearance in Fast & Furious, which was released later that year, at a time when Gadot was trying to clinch that big role that would bring her into the Hollywood elite. Elsewhere in the book, Gadot is quoted as acknowledging that she had “so many almost’s for big, great things,” but at the time being a relative unknown against well-established actresses such as Theron it just wasn’t happening for her.
In the end, the missed opportunity of Mad Max: Fury Road did not exactly see Gadot’s career nose-dive into obscurity, as just over five years later the star made her debut as Diana Prince in Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. As one of the linchpins of the DCEU, Gadot has now played the heroic Amazonian princess in a total of four movies so far – five if you count Zack Snyder’s Justice League as a separate entry – and work is currently happening behind the scenes on a third Wonder Woman movie.
With Charlize Theron following up her role in Fury Road with action movies such as Atomic Blonde and The Old Guard, which were both popular enough to have sequels put into development, and Gal Gadot appearing in recent hits like Red Notice and this weekend’s box office topper Death on the Nile, it is fair to say that things worked out well for both stars.