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out she’d gotten in, “I told myself, ‘I’m just
gonna do this. They’re gonna fl y us to Eu-
rope, and I’m gonna get to tell my grand-
children that Grandmum did the Miss
Israel thing.’ Little did I know that I would
win.” Or that winning would land her in
the Miss Universe pageant (“It’s funny
now that I say it. It sounds so bizarre, like
a diff erent life”), which totally freaked her
out. “I knew that I did not want to win
Miss Universe. It wasn’t my thing. For an
18-year-old, it looked like too much re-
sponsibility.” So she decided to deliberately
tank in the competition, pretending she
didn’t speak English, wearing the wrong
things. She didn’t make the top- “I lost majorly,” she happily
declares. “I victoriously lost.”
When her unexpected reign
as Miss Israel ended, she was
assigned to be a combat trainer
in the IDF, reporting daily at 5
a.m. to put soldiers through a
sort of boot camp. While still
serving, she met real-estate de-
veloper Yaron Versano at “this
party in the desert that was all
about chakras, blah, blah, blah”,
then married him, went to law
school (“Because I’m so deep,
and I loved Ally McBeal”), and
thought she was done with a ca-
reer path that relied
on her looks, when
a casting director
asked her to audi-
tion to be a Bond
girl. “I told my
agent, ‘What
are you talking
about? I’m in
school. I’m not
an actress. I’m not gonna go.’ And he was
like, ‘Just show respect and go.’ ” That au-
dition eventually led to her role in The
Fast and the Furious, which led to Wonder
Woman , though in her fi rst audition for the
fi lm, she wasn’t even told what part she was
tr ying to get. “Zack [Snyder] called me and
was like, ‘So do you know what you’re test-
ing for?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m not
sure if you have her in Israel, but did you
hear about Wonder Woman?’ ”
Turns out they did have her in Israel, and
Gadot immediately realised the opportuni-
ty she was being handed, both as an actor
and as a feminist. “I’ve had my moments
where I’ve felt like men were misbehav-
ing – nothing sexual, but inappropriate in
a sexist way. Dismissive. Life wasn’t always
rosy and peachy for me as a woman in the
world.” Even after she landed the role, she
was worried about being thought weak, so
she waited to tell her Justice League co-
stars that she was pregnant. “I didn’t want
attention,” she says. “The default should be
that women get the job done, but there’s a
long way to go and a lot of reprogramming
that needs to be done to both genders.”
Nor was it immaterial that Wonder
Woman – who, Gadot says, “stands for love
and hope and acceptance and fi ghting evil”- debuted in 1941, the year America en-
tered World War II. While Gadot’s father
is a sixth-generation Israeli, her mother’s
mother escaped Europe just before the
war. Her mother’s father, who was 13 when
the Nazis came to his native Czechoslo-
vakia, was not so lucky. His father died in
the army. The rest of his family was sent to
Auschwitz, where his mother and brother
fall into the clichés.” Instead, she and Jen-
kins thought long and hard about how a
woman raised only by women would re-
spond when plunked into a world domi-
nated by men.
The result is a kind of guileless feminism
that feels accidental exactly because it’s
anything but. “We didn’t want to treat the
misogyny in a preaching way,” says Gadot.
“We wanted to surprise the audience.” So
when Wonder Woman isn’t allowed in a
war-council meeting that’s essentially the
Edwardian version of a sausagefest, she
doesn’t bristle; she’s merely baffl ed. Like-
wise, when she sees a baby on the street,
she doesn’t hesitate to fawn (“A
baby!”). “We wanted to bring
some naiveté,” Gadot says.
“Being the mother of two girls,
I’m like, ‘We need more naiveté.
Everyone is too in their head.’ ”
The result is the portrayal of
a woman onscreen without a
shred of insecurity, a woman
who never questions her own
impulses, “gendered” or not.
What neither Gadot nor
Jenkins could have foreseen is
how their careful deliberations
would resonate. “Even at some
early test screenings, women
were coming to me afterward
and saying, ‘I feel like you made
a movie for me!’ ” says Jenkins.
“But it wasn’t until the second
week that the movement start-
ed, people going multiple times and taking
girlfriends and grandmothers, and pictures
sent to me from 90-year-old women who
were wheeled in. All of that was absolutely
stunning to see.” Gadot agrees. “I defi-
nitely think that 75 years is a long time for
this character to not have a movie, but it’s
craaaaaaaazy,” she says of the fi lm’s recep-
tion, of the all-female viewings held around
the U.S., of the grade-school boys coming to
class with Wonder Woman swag, and of her
role in all that.
And now, as the crazy snowballs around
her and Wonder Woman 2 no doubt looms
on the horizon, Gadot uses her formidable
powers to keep things Zen. She and her
family recently moved to L.A., where her
fi ve-year-old is starting school. “I’m gonna
go pick her up,” Gadot says of her afternoon
plans. “Then I’m gonna go back home to
the baby, have a relaxing day.” Maybe she’ll
make a little dinner (“I love cooking Ital-
ian. It’s easy”), put on a little music (“Zero 7
because it’s superchill”), revel in the “really
simple moments” she says are her thing.
In pursuit of all that, she gathers her fi ve-
foot-10 frame and stands to leave. Then she
pauses. “It’s gonna be great,” she says, gaz-
ing at my stomach. And in that moment,
yes, it all seems like it wondrously will.died in the
gas cham-
bers. After
he war, he
ade his way
el alone. “His
entire family was murdered – it’s unthink-
able,” says Gadot. “He aff ected me a lot.
After all the horrors he’d seen, he was like
this damaged bird, but he was always hope-
ful and positive and full of love. If I was
raised in a place where these values were
not so strong, things would be diff erent.
But it was very easy for me to relate to ev-
erything that Wonder Woman stands for.”
Now, Wonder Woman was Gadot’s story
to tell, and she and director Patty Jenkins
were obsessive about getting it right. “It
was almost emotional, because we were
so united in our desire to make something
so delightful that people didn’t mind also
talking about this deeper issue,” says Jen-
kins. Gadot had trained for eight months
to put on muscle – “Strength is not some-
thing you can fake” – but she also felt that
the most feminist approach would be for
Wonder Woman to remain feminine, to
be strong because of, rather in spite of,
being a woman. “I didn’t want to play the
cold-hearted warrior. We didn’t want toAmazon
Prime
above In Justice
League. right
She was Israel’s
Miss Universe
con testant as a teen.