Gal Gadot has kicked off 2022 by thoroughly addressing the controversial, star-studded “Imagine” video that went viral for all the wrong reasons at the start of the global pandemic.
In an interview with InStyle for the magazine’s February issue, the “Wonder Woman” actress said the video — which also featured the likes of Kristen Wiig, Jamie Dornan and Natalie Portman singing the classic John Lennon song — had “all pure intentions,” but she acknowledged that it was “in poor taste.”
Gal Gadot shares star-studded cover of ‘Imagine’ 01:15
Gadot organized the video in March 2020 — just as countries across the globe entered lockdown for the first time — and posted it on Instagram with the caption: “We are in this together, we will get through it together.”
The clip met with an immediate backlash, as many took to social media to call it “tone-deaf,” and it was widely mocked in the months that followed.
The former Miss Israel told InStyle that she now finds the controversy “funny” and said that, as the pandemic had hit Europe and Israel before it came to the US, she was “seeing where everything was headed. But (the video) was premature. It wasn’t the right timing and it wasn’t the right thing. It was in poor taste.”
Gadot admitted that “sometimes you don’t hit the bullseye,” despite the infamous video’s good intentions.
In October 2021, the star showed that she wasn’t afraid to poke fun at the clip or herself when she received an honor at Elle’s Women in Hollywood awards and used the opportunity to jokingly perform a few of the lines from “Imagine” on stage.
In the same interview, she spoke about the upcoming Cleopatra biopic in which she’s set to star, told InStyle that the film will “celebrate” the story of the Egyptian queen and won’t just show “how sexy and appealing she was, but how strategic and smart, and how much impact she had and still has on the world we’re living in today.”
Before Cleopatra is released, however, Gadot will play a leading role in another classic tale set in Egypt — as Kenneth Branagh’s version of “Death on the Nile” is finally set to hit theaters in February after multiple delays caused by the pandemic.
