She is known to the world now as Wonder Woman in her solo movies and Justice League. However, had she not been, Gal Gadot’s life would have been very different and not in the way you’d expect. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Justice League director Zack Snyder revealed that the 35-year-old Israeli actress was almost ready to quit acting before landing the coveted role of Diana Prince in the DCEU.
“I remember Gal saying to me, ‘Zack, I was going to quit the business.” Snyder says in the piece, “I was getting ready to just move back to Tel Aviv and just have a life there. I was done with Hollywood. I was going to do this one more audition.’ Then she came in, and I was like, ‘That’s my Wonder Woman.’”
Thus, that is how we have the first actress to portray Wonder Woman in live-action Hollywood films. The most famous Wonder Woman to precede Gadot is Lynda Carter who portrayed the character from 1976 to 1979. across a three-season TV show. Of course, this was the ’70s and the show exudes all the cheesiness of that decade in television and couldn’t be more tonally different than Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
Other actresses who wanted to portray the Amazonian heroine aren’t so lucky. Adrianne Palicki portrayed Wonder Woman in a 2011 pilot, ordered by NBC. Clad in blue slacks as opposed to her traditional hot pants/gladiatorial skirt and set in 21st-century LA, it looked as though the show would be a sure hit. However, NBC eventually decided not to go ahead with the series whole. Palicki, a comic book fan herself, said to EW in 2017, “it was devastating when it didn’t go. It was so big”, commenting that “maybe if it had been [made] one or two more years [later], it would’ve been a shoo-in”, given that the Arrowverse took off not long after that, cementing superhero television as a staple in contemporary television.
Are you looking forward to watching Gal Gadot kick some more butt in Zack Snyder’s Justice League? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
