Gal Gadot has had to put some serious work into her latest film 'Wonder Woman', particularly in a physical sense, but there were some aspects of her training that she had no idea would be as hard as they turned out to be. One of them was horseback riding.

Gal Gadot stars in 'Wonder Woman'Gal Gadot stars in 'Wonder Woman'

The 32-year-old Israeli actress had to learn all kinds of martial arts and sword fighting techniques months ahead of filming Patty Jenkins' DC blockbuster hit, all while getting her body into shape because there's really no way of pretending to be that athletic and unyielding.

'You can't fake looking strong and you can't fake looking powerful', she said. 'I had to train for five or six months prior to the shoot and I did a lot of fight choreography with swords, with kicks, with jumping - you name it, we did that. A lot of gym work so I can gain some body mass and horseback riding.'

Watch the trailer for 'Wonder Woman' here: 

She confesses that when it came to equestrianism, however, she didn't think she had anything to worry about. In fact, she hardly thought it could even be classed as a sport. Boy, was she wrong. 'When people say, 'Yeah, we do sports, we ride on horses', I thought to myself, 'This is so silly because the horse does all the work'. No', she says. 'Horseback riding is a very, very exhausting sport.'

Hard work, nonetheless, is nothing new to Gal Gadot, whose two years of experience in the Israel Defense Forces from the age of 20 where she was a combat instructor turned out to be quite the appropriate preparation. Plus, she has done action films before, appearing in four of the 'Fast and Furious' films including the titular 2009 film, 2011's 'Fast Five', 2013's 'Fast & Furious 6' and 2015's 'Furious 7'.

'Wonder Woman' is in theatres now.