Game Of Thrones Star's New Revenge Thriller Was Originally Written For A Man, Reveals Ballistic Star & Director

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Lena Headey's Nance looking angry while aiming a rifle in Ballistic

Published Apr 21, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT

Lena Headey has traded the political scheming of Game of Thrones' Westeros for a journey of grief and revenge in Ballistic.

Hailing from Girl filmmaker Chad Faust, the new film centers on Nance Redfield, the mother of a soldier whose quiet life working at a munitions factory is thrown upside down when her son is killed in action in Afghanistan. Struggling to come to grips with her son's death, Nance begins looking for answers, leading her to learn that the bullet that killed him was made at the very factory she works, uncovering a web of lies and leading her down a brutal path of revenge.

Alongside Headey, the Ballistic cast includes Transplant's Hamza Haq as Kahlil, a former interpreter who aids Nance in her mission, Stranger Things' Amybeth McNulty as Diana, Nance's daughter-in-law, Jordan Kronis as Nance's son, Jesse, and Person of Interest's Enrico Colantoni as Nance's boss, Rick. The film, Faust's first in the director's chair since the Bella Thorne-led Girl, has garnered generally positive reviews from critics, currently holding a 69% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Ahead of the film's release, ScreenRant's Liam Crowley interviewed Lena Headey and Chad Faust to discuss Ballistic. When reflecting on the early days of the revenge thriller's development, the pair recalled having been friends for quite some time prior, with Headey having a "trust and love" for the writer/director, while Faust found they had "an appreciation for each other and a friendship" after she cast him in an unspecified pilot of a TV show that she was directing.

When the filmmaker brought Headey the Ballistic script, it was "originally going to be a father-son" story, much like the Kevin Bacon-led Death Sentence before it, with Faust having spent some time "trying to get a certain actor" for the part and turning to her for help. Upon reading the script, though, the Game of Thrones alum not only found that "I f---ing love this" and praised it as "gorgeous and original," she also pitched turning the male character into a female, feeling "it's more powerful as a mother-child relationship," to which he immediately agreed:

Chad Faust: Ever since then, it was like, How could I ever have thought that this was a dad? The seismic love of a mother, that nuclear love worked so well." And then, as far as her artistry, I didn't really even know what film I was making until she and I started talking about it. And then I realized I'm leaning into exactly who Lena is. Her personal life, she's very playful and silly and irreverent and doesn't take herself seriously at all. But then her creativity, when she gets into her creativity, it's just from the center of the earth to the heavens above all at the same time. And there's just so much going on. There's a symphony inside of her and I want to play every note.

Faust Proved A "Deeply Collaborative" Director For Headey

ScreenRant: You've known Chad for quite some time, but he's a fairly new feature-length director. I know he did a couple of shorts. His directorial debut, I believe, was in 2020. What was that relationship like working with a fairly new director? Did you feel yourself learning any new things as a performer, with someone with that fresh lens?

Lena Headey: He's such a great director, Chad. He's deeply collaborative. He doesn't oversteer anything. And he's just a solid backbone, which is what you want as an actor. Low interference, but this kind of barrier, where you're not going to fall. Or if you do fall, you're caught and put back up on the playing field.

ScreenRant: You go on a full range of emotions here. There's grief, there's denial, there's unbridled rage. Could you just talk to me about that process and processing all those emotions and the specific crescendo and decrescendo you wanted to take her on throughout this journey?

Lena Headey: It was all there on the page, which is delicious. And it is rare to read something where you think, "Okay, I'm going to have to make something of this piece, of this little piece that I'm given." But Chad really wrote the entire meal. I'm a mother myself, and so it moved me deeply. And of course, our worst nightmare as a parent is losing a child, which I think, living in today's world, you think often. Every time you send your child to school in the States, you're like, "It could happen. This unthinkable thing could happen because no one is doing the right thing." It was kind of easy to be there and be present and feel all those things. And Jordan, who plays Nance's son, was just this extraordinarily open, just delightful human being that I fell in love with anyway. So yeah, it was a gift really, this whole job.

ScreenRant: You have so many powerful scenes in this film. And the one that really sticks out to me for, I guess, an odd reason, because I'd love to get your headspace on it, is when Nance gets the news, and she's crying in the bathtub, but there's no water, she's fully clothed. There's a safe space kind of vibe from just being in that bathtub. When you read that on the page, what was your interpretation of why it was set in the bathtub, and just what was the context there?

Lena Headey: I think there was a visual element to it, which was through the plastic-y curtain, you know what I mean? With it pushing in and this movement of a real tangibleness, and then behind this membrane, it was like that was the idea visually. It didn't really matter where it took place. I think, as I say, it was a director's choice for it to be there, but I love the fact that she was just in this tangible space that held her. It's a little womb-like.

Faust Wanted Ballistic To Be More Of A Personal Tale Than A Political One

Lena Headey upset while attending a funeral in Ballistic

ScreenRant: This is only your second feature-length directorial endeavor. You had done some shorts prior to this, and it had been some time, too. If I'm not mistaken, Girl came out six years ago. So what was that process like of getting back into the director's mindset, if you ever left it at all? What lessons did you learn from your first project?

Chad Faust: It takes a while to get some of these films made. And in the meantime, I was doing a lot of writing projects. That tends to be my resting place. Writing some films for my own endeavors and for others. The fact that anybody trusts a first-time director is remarkable because you have so much to learn on the first one. I feel like I'm proud of what we did on the first film, but I also feel like I got my a-- handed to me. This time I feel like I came in ready, and I still learned a ton, even more on this, that I will bring to the next. I think in some ways, as Dr. Dre said, I went back to the lab with a pen and a pad and tried to get this d--n movie off, and that's what I did. And it took me that long, but sometimes that's what it takes.

ScreenRant: There's a magic, too, when it's your own screenplay that you're the one directing. With that being said, where did the inspiration for Ballistic come from?

Chad Faust: I was sitting in a waiting room of some kind of office, I think it was a therapist's office, and I read some article. I don't even remember what publication it was. They were making an estimation. 30 percent of the lead that comes back in American soldiers was American-made. And I thought, I want to not so much politicize this idea, but personalize it and embed it at the heart of a parent. And what would it feel like if you — because anytime a parent goes to work to provide for their child, there's a sacrifice you're making of your time and everything. It's something you have to do to raise them. And what if the very thing you did to raise them was the thing that ended them? And what would happen if you felt like the blame was on you, but you felt like you had to blame everybody else to avoid your own culpability, which is, I think, a bit of an epidemic in our time. I was really interested in this idea of justice-seeking and how much we want to point a finger at everybody. Someone cuts you off on the road, you want to slam them with your car. And that's in us all. There's nothing wrong with that sense of justice. But when we have all of our fingers pointing outward and nothing inward, I think we're likely to miss the point.

ScreenRant: The line that Nance rides between paranoia and genuinely seeking justice. And a lot of the stuff she says at the beginning is interpreted by people around her as conspiratorial when we all know, as an audience member, the truth behind what is actually unfolding. For you as a director and as the writer too, how did you approach riding that line between paranoia and true seeking of justice?

Chad Faust: It was a tricky one to ride. Partly, I wanted to have the algorithm of the online world be fueling this pursuit of hers, dangerously so, as I do think it is quite a dangerous source of influence. But secondly, I wanted to blend that in with truth because that's usually what happens with these conspiracy theories. They get piled in with truth, and the truth fuels the conspiracy, but the conspiracy undermines the truth. That's why we live in this post-truth world, because all these things are blending together. I wanted to play with that, not just on a personal level of danger of how it was affecting her behavior, but how we are all in a bit of a state of danger because we don't really know what to believe anymore. I think actually one of the earlier trailers for this had a different tagline. It was like, "In a world of lies, the truth is all that matters." And I thought, "Oh man, we got it." And then, of course, it got changed, in case something was different now. But that was really quite at the heart of the thematic structure of this film, for me.

ScreenRant: I know every time I ask a director this, they're like, "Man, I just got this one in the can. Let's breathe for a little bit." But still, is there anything that you're excited about that you could tackle next? And also on that note, you've written both of your feature-length directorial endeavors. Have you ever played with the idea of working with an adapted screenplay?

Chad Faust: Actually, I did adapt a screenplay for director Marc Forster, who did World War Z and Monster's Ball. He's a great director. I adapted a screenplay for him. I'm not sure if he's still directing it or not, but it was a film called Dangerous Odds. That was really fun to do. I'm adapting something now, but it's for myself, and it's just too early to talk about it. I've also got this kind of really highly elevated historical horror film that I'm working on, that I'm developing right now. And then I've got a couple of TV projects. Actually, I've got three projects. Two of them involve Lena, which we're developing together. So we'll definitely be working together soon. One of them is crazy. It's like a dark comedy satire based on Shakespeare. So it's a wild ride. Lots of stuff coming.

Ballistic is now in theaters!