Gal Gadot is taking action to new heights this summer — literally. In the trailer for Heart of Stone, first introduced by the cast at the Tudum: Global Fan Event in Brazil, you can see the star and producer parachuting off a snowy cliff and fighting thousands of feet up in the air.
Gadot plays secret agent Rachel Stone in the upcoming blockbuster directed by Tom Harper (Peaky Blinders, Wild Rose). But she’s not your average operative — Stone is a member of an elusive and mysterious group of elite spies known as the Charter. In the trailer, they’re described as “the most highly trained agents — no political leanings, no national allegiances — working together to keep peace in a turbulent world.” To achieve their lofty aims, those agents rely on a one-of-a-kind asset called the Heart. “If you own the Heart, you own the world,” Rachel Stone’s MI6 counterpart Parker (Jamie Dornan) explains in the trailer. That sounds like a plan to Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt), whose quest to find and control the Heart threatens global stability. Can Stone stop her before it’s too late?
Netflix’s Chief Action Officer Arnold Schwarzenegger certainly has faith in Rachel Stone’s spy credentials. The star of FUBAR recently caught up with Gadot over a cup of coffee to share some of his best espionage tricks of the trade — not that she needed the lesson. Watch their exchange and read more about what to expect from the heart-pumping Heart of Stone below.
Who is in the cast of Heart of Stone?
Gadot stars opposite Dornan as MI6 agent Parker and Alia Bhatt as hacker Keya Dhawan. The Heart of Stone cast also includes Sophie Okonedo, Army of the Dead’s Matthias Schweighöfer, Jing Lusi and Paul Ready.
Having played a superhero goddess in Wonder Woman and a sleek heist queen in Red Notice, Gadot felt strongly that the character of Rachel Stone should be more grounded. “It was really important to me that Rachel be a character who can fight, but I also wanted her to be able to use her brain, intuition and emotions,” she told Netflix. “She doesn’t just run in, guns blazing. She thinks about how she’s affecting people and situations. I choose roles that show that women can be beautiful and strong, and none of this is mutually exclusive.”
What’s ‘The Heart’ in Heart of Stone?
The Heart is the world’s most powerful AI, able to keep track of anyone’s entire online history and then use that data to predict what they might do in the future. But it’s not just about predicting how many episodes of Queen Charlotte you might watch in one sitting, or what you’re about to make for dinner. The Heart can advise on responses to potential global threats and even deliver odds on the success in neutralizing them. That’s where the Charter comes in.
“The Heart is what’s called a general AI — an AI that can do anything you want it to do, and it becomes a master of that immediately,” VFX supervisor Mark Breakspear told Netflix. “No one has built a general AI yet. And it’s connected to a quantum computer, which processes way faster than an ordinary computer. The Heart is tasked with monitoring all human data, analyzing it, looking for patterns and then using those patterns to make predictions. The Charter uses the Heart to look at a given situation and help their operatives plan what to do.”
All interviews included in this article were completed earlier this year.