Gal Gadot
64 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com October, 2017
PREVIOUS SPREAD: DRESS BY HENSLEY. PROPS BY STEVE HALTERMAN.Contributing editorAlex Morris
wrote about Emilia Clarke in RS 790.
onder Woman herself is about to bless my
unborn child. “Can I?” she asks, before
spreading her long fingers around my preg-
nant belly. Her hands feel warm and mater-
nal. She holds my gaze, unwavering. “Girl or
boy?” she asks. “Girl,” I tell her. Her smile
widens. “Being a woman is a strength,” she
says. “In so many ways.”
Oddly, this is not a dream; it’s a lunch
at the Chateau Marmont. Gal Gadot is os-
tensibly here to talk about her rise from
almost total unknown to an iconic, world-
wide symbol of all that is good and power-
ful as the first-ever feature-film incarna-
tion of Wonder Woman. But it’s hard not to
see elements of the superheroic in the way
she just is. Never mind that she was up at
5 a.m. with a four-month-old (“Dude, it’s
exhausting, but it’s the best”); in person,
her aura hovers somewhere between Earth
mother and glamazon. Her accent is Bond-
worthy and cloaked in the smokiness of her
voice. Her Wonder Woman performance
so convincingly embodies both the badass-
ness and the overwhelming decency of the
character that she may as well be a walk-
ing, talking rebuff to the misogyny of the
Trump era – so much so that it was report-
edly not uncommon to see women weeping
openly in theatres as they watched her on-
screen. Most of the world may not yet know
how to pronounce her name (it’s “gadott”,
not “gadoh”), but Gadot can hardly bother
herself with such frivolous concerns. “I like
it when it’s calm and there’s a harmon-
ic type of atmosphere,” she tells me. And
later: “You should find your neutral place
with yourself.” In her presence, these things
seem possible, even probable.
Or, at least possible, if you’re her. Take
the way she brushes off the naysayers who
took issue with Wonder Woman, a nation-
al treasure (lauded by the Smithsonian as
one of the “101 Objects That Made Ameri-
ca”), being portrayed by an Israeli: “Oh, my
God, seriously, you guys?” (The movie was
banned in several Arab countries for the
same reason.) Or how she dispelled
interweb gripes about the size of
her bust with the pointed knowl-
edge that, rather than having pinup
proportions, Wonder Woman would
historically have lopped off one of her
breasts anyway: “I told them, ‘Listen,
if you want to be for real, then the Am-
azons, they had only one boob. Exactly
one boob. So what are you talking about
here? Me having small boobs and small
ass? That will make all the difference.’ ”
Or the way she braved a London winter,
shooting 12 hours a day, six days a week, in
not much more than a leotard and metal
wristlets. Or, most impressively, the way
she filmed Wonder Woman reshoots and
the next instalment of the DC Comics fran-
chise (Justice League, out this spring) while
pregnant with her second child, morn-
ing sickness be damned. “We cut open the
costume and had this green screen on mya ss, Wonder Woma n- st yle. “It just show s
that the world was ready for a female-
driven action mov ie,” says Gadot. Or even if
it wasn’t then, she’s made sure that it is now.landing a lead in a tent-pole fran-
chise would have been a coup for any young
actor, of course. “When you’re a beginner,
you get excited about having a job,” says
Gadot. “That’s where I was.” But Wonder
Woman wasn’t just any leading role. It was
a role that feminists had long been jones-
ing for – as every major male superhero
got trotted out in big-screen prequels and
sequels galore – and one with a history
that extended far beyond the mere sym-
bolism of a female superhero. After being
cast, Gadot turned to the Warner Bros.
archives to read the original comics, and
she soon learned that Wonder Woman
was the brainchild of William Marston,
a psychologist who not only helped invent
the lie detector and lived in a polyamorous
household with his wife (whom he’d met
in middle school), his girlfriend (who’d
been his student) and their four children
(two per woman), but who also believed
that women were not only equal to men,
but probably superior. “Frankly, Wonder
Woman is psychological propaganda for
the new type of woman who should, I be-
lieve, rule the world,” he is noted as saying
in Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Won-
der Woman. And as Lepore points out,
“In the first story, Wonder Woman comes
to the United States to fight for women’s
rights, because this is the last bastion of
possibility of equal rights for women.”
None of this history was lost on Gadot.
“People always ask me, ‘Are you a feminist?’
And I find the question surprising, because
I think, ‘Yes, of course. Every woman, every
man, everyone should be a feminist. Be-
cause whoever is not a feminist is a sexist.’ ”
She maintains that she and her younger
sister were taught “to believe that we’re ca-
pable, to value ourselves” as they grew up in
Rosh Ha’ayin, a small city in the centre of
Israel, where their dad worked as an engi-
neer and their mum was a phys-ed teacher.
“I had a very sheltered kind of life,” Gadot
says. “There was no TV-watching. It was al-
ways ‘Take a ball and go play.’ ” Which suit-
ed her just fine. “In general, I was a good
girl, a good student, a pleaser, and I was a
tomboy. Always with wounds and scratches
on my knees.”
Despite these blemishes, Gadot had got-
ten offers to model, but opted instead to
work for Burger King. “I was like, ‘Posing
for money? Ugh, it’s not for me.’ ” But in the
few months she had off between graduating
from high school and serving her two man-
datory years in the Israel Defense Forces,
her mum and a friend applied on her behalf
for the Miss Israel pageant. When she foundstomach,” she says. “It was funny as hell –
Wonder Woman with a bump.”
In fact, Gadot’s bump was just one of
the complications visited upon the Jus-
tice League production team. After a fam-
ily tragedy, director Zack Snyder stepped
down, leaving the movie in the hands of The
Avengers’ Joss Whedon, and rumours of a
vast overhaul were all but confirmed when
co-star Ben Affleck described the result as
“an interesting product of two directors”.
But, true to form, Gadot doesn’t buy in to
the controversy. “Look,” she says. “Joss,
to my understanding, was Zack’s choice
to finish the movie. And the tone can’t be
completely different because the movie was
already shot. Joss is just fine-tuning.”
It is, in part, Gadot’s innate unflappa-
bility that helped Wonder Woman not just
vastly outperform anyone’s wildest expec-
tations, but also almost singlehandedly save
the floundering DC Comics universe. To
date, the movie has earned more than $400
million domestically and close to $800 mil-
lion worldwide. It is currently the highest-
grossing live-action film ever directed by a
woman. In other words, the film has kicked“EVERYONE
SHOULD BE A
FEMINIST.
BECAUSE
WHOEVER IS
NOT A FEMINIST
IS A SEXIST.”