"Wonder Woman" star Gal Gadot took on a role in a Bitcoin thriller produced with artificial intelligence tools despite her own fears of the technology, she told the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

"I am afraid of AI, but am I going to be afraid and look away? No," the actor said, in comments reported by Variety. "The train has left the station. You're going to work with it or be out of the game completely. I am trying to make the best of it and protect what I can protect."

Gadot said her lawyers went over the contract for "Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi" with a fine-tooth comb in order to "protect" her from AI. "This was the longest contract I have ever worked on," she said, noting that the deal took six months to negotiate as her legal team worked to "go through every scenario we could think about as far as the AI component of it."

"The AI component in this movie is for sets and the lighting," Gadot explained, emphasizing that her performance is "all me" and that she "did not want AI to have anything to do with my performance." Her lawyers focused on that element of the contract to such an extent that "SAG called my lawyers to ask for pointers to update the SAG contract to protect other actors," she said. That inquiry comes amid an ongoing industry reckoning over AI: SAG-AFTRA made consent and compensation safeguards around digital replicas a central issue in its 2023 strike, and the union has since continued negotiating over how AI can and cannot be used on performers.

Doug Liman's Bitcoin thriller

"Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi" is a $70 million thriller directed by "The Bourne Identity" filmmaker Doug Liman, centered on the hunt for Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator. Gadot co-stars alongside Casey Affleck, Pete Davidson and Isla Fisher in a plot that spans continents and roughly 200 locations—yet none of the actors were filmed on location.

Instead, the cast worked inside a former car showroom lined with gray screen, nicknamed the "gray box," with every set and lighting setup generated afterwards. Producer Ryan Kavanaugh has said that shooting the film conventionally would have cost more than $300 million, putting the savings at over $200 million, according to Variety. The production model positions the film as a high-profile test of whether AI-assisted virtual production can deliver studio-scale spectacle at a fraction of conventional budgets—a question Hollywood has been grappling with as AI tools spread across visual effects and production workflows.

Gadot compared the experience to theater, since the warehouse held little beyond the actors themselves. "It felt like a pure art form of creating a movie," she said. With no lighting setups to wait through, shooting ran for 10 hours at a stretch: "We would film on and on and on."

She has not yet seen any of the finished footage. "I haven't seen a single shot," she said. "We'll see. It's crazy."

A studio thriller centered on crypto is itself a relatively novel undertaking. Crypto has spent most of its screen life in indie productions and direct-to-video crime capers, and where it does appear in mainstream films, it is usually attached to criminals or to characters the audience is meant to dislike. The tide appears to be shifting, however, with "Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi" joining Netflix's currently-in-production crypto romantic comedy "One Attempt Remaining" in a race to the screen.