Gal Gadot sat down with Vanity Fair for an in-depth cover interview that touched on feminism, her upcoming turn in Wonder Woman: 1984 and the unfortunate reception to her “Imagine” video.
“IMAGINE”
Seven months after Gadot released that infamous “Imagine” video on Instagram, she said, with a “smile and shrug” via VF: “Sometimes, you know, you try and do a good deed and it's just not the right good deed. I had nothing but good intentions and it came from the best place, and I just wanted to send light and love to the world.”
As the lockdowns increased in the U.S., Gadot, along with Amy Adams, Natalie Portman, James Marsden and several others joined her and sang—many thought awkwardly—John Lennon’s iconic 1971 hit in its entirety.
“We are in this together, we will get through it together,” she wrote in the caption at the time. “Let's imagine together. Sing with us All love to you, from me and my dear friends.”
FEMINISM
Gadot shared that she never imagined acting growing up. Gadot told VF: “I came from a home where being an actress wasn’t even an option. I always loved the arts and I was a dancer and I loved the movies, but being an actress was never a discussion. My parents were like, You need to graduate university and get a degree.” She had planned on becoming a lawyer.
Her husband is the one who told her to go for it: “Jaron Varsano,” her husband, “was the one to say, You can do whatever you want to do. He’s the one who really gave me the strength to follow this dream.”
She married Varsono in 2008, and has never looked back. “We are really, equally partners,” she said. “We have a group of friends here and all of the wives have careers, and we always joke that the husbands are the ‘new man’—very involved in the household and in taking care of the kids and everything. Jaron is literally the wind beneath my wings.”
1984
Gadot also spoke out about playing Wonder Woman, and her family’s perspective on the iconic role. “I’m the mom who bugs them and asks them to do things and wakes them up in the morning. Whenever I get a Wonder Woman Barbie, they get excited about that and they play with it a little bit, but they’re not obsessed with the idea that I’m Wonder Woman.”
The 35-year-old said of the iconic role: “One of the biggest things that I believe is that you can only dream about becoming someone or something after you’ve seen it visually. And for boys—lucky them—they got to experience, since the beginning of the movies, that they were the protagonist, they were the strong ones, they saved the day. But we didn’t get this representation. And I think it’s so important—and of course it’s ultra-important for me because I’m a mother of two girls—to show them the potential of what they can be. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be athletic or physically strong—that too—but that they can be bigger than life.”