Gal Gadot’s Heart of Stone team broke a lot of cameras to protect its 500-year-old locations

11.08.2023 - 16:15 / polygon.com / Stone

About 40 minutes into Netflix’s new spy thriller Heart of Stone, protagonist Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) and her team are attacked in a safe house in Portugal. After a thrilling fight filled with impressive stunt falls and breaking glass, Stone drives an unwieldy van through the narrow cobbled streets of Lisbon, chased by vehicles filled with baddies firing guns at her and her team.

There are explosions, bone-crunching hits, and a large van jumping over an entire staircase before careening into the Praça do Comércio. It’s all a solid showcase for Heart of Stone’saction ethos, which prioritizes more “reality-based” action than many of its modern peers, stunt coordinator Jo McLaren tells Polygon.

“We had a brilliant script, and it was high-octane action,” McLaren says. “Cars, fights, aerial, snow, water, we just covered everything. For a stunt team, it absolutely tops the bill for us. Our favorite movie we’ve done because the people we work with were just incredible.”

McLaren is a veteran stunt performer and coordinator who doubled Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Rachel Weisz in The Mummy in addition to stunt work in multiple MCU and Harry Potter movies. She has since gone on to coordinate stunts in Paddington 2, Annihilation, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the upcoming The Marvels and Wicked. Heart of Stone clearly takes inspiration from the Bourne, Bond, and Mission: Impossible franchises, and McLaren says she was “very blessed” to be able to work on a film that did so. According to director Tom Harper in Netflix’s press notes, he wanted its hero to feel “human rather than some sort of superhero.”

“We prefer it. It’s so nice,” McLaren says. “I love superhero movies, but I’ve done a lot of them. And so it was very nice for me as a coordinator to do ground-based reality with a female lead.”

The found-in-the-world locations for Heart of Stone’s action set-pieces range from those cobbled streets of Lisbon to the snowy Alps. Shooting on the ground presents infrastructure challenges (“We can’t get rigging gear up a ski slope,” McLaren jokes), but they were the kind the team was up for.

McLaren credits second unit director Rob Alonzo (“brilliant”), assistant vehicles coordinator Rob Hunt (“he knows vehicles inside out”), and the “best drivers in the world” for building a sequence atop Lisbon’s slippery cobbled roads, all while keeping the stunt crew and the historic streets safe. The team built ramps over some of the more delicate staircases to prevent damage if something went wrong, and had buffer cars placed in key locations to stop the stunt cars from colliding with the walls, as well as stunt drivers in vehicles ahead of, behind, and beside the action.

The sequence was