Gal Gadot on Life, Love, Wonder Woman 1984—And How She and Her Family Are Coping With Crisis (2024)

This story, reported before COVID-19 began to take hold in the U.S., went to press as profound changes to daily life were being seen across the country. Gal Gadot, like every one of us, has been affected—her children’s school closed, her projects on hold, including the June release of Wonder Woman 1984 (as of now, it has been postponed to August 14). Reached in Los Angeles in mid-March with her family, she was upbeat: “Obviously the circ*mstances are horrible and frightening, but we’re home and we’re trying to make the best of it—to enjoy the quality time. It’s so surreal. I’ve never been through times like these. But I’m also full of hope for when it will be behind us.”

SPENDING TIME WITH GAL GADOT is an exercise in nonchalance. She is the coolest of customers, so unperturbed that you get a kind of contact high: Anxieties dissipate, defenses drop, tensions drain. Even as she goes about the business of a hectic, two-kid, big-career life—maneuvering her sleek Tesla (toys on the floor, half--eaten sandwich on the seat) through the precincts of show business (Hollywood to Burbank to Beverly Hills and back again)—she manages to make it seem like she’s just meandering on a Sunday afternoon. Indeed, it feels wrong to impose any sort of agenda, anything so uptight as an interview. It’s a hang, really.

Part of this is nature—born that way—but Gadot is fundamentally a creature of her environment. She grew up in Rosh Haayin, a city near Tel Aviv, but lived most of her adult life with her husband among friends and family, just a couple of blocks from the beach. She speaks Hebrew to them, English to most everyone else. Her English is not perfect, but close, her fluency such that you can see the wheels turning as she searches for the right words—and discovers new ones before your eyes. She will sometimes stumble on a phrase or an idiom, question it, then either commit or find the right one.

Which is why spending time with her feels like picking your way through a new world looking at all the pretty flowers. One morning after a workout, still in Capri tights and a loose tank, she’s driving from her gym to a photo shoot at the Montage Beverly Hills. “I will always feel foreign in L.A.,” she tells me, and I nod in agreement, though distracted by the novel experience of gliding noiselessly along the surface streets of Los Angeles in her Tesla. There’s a screen in the middle of the dash the size of a television, which feels like an extension of the windshield that disappears somewhere behind your head, all of which conspires to create the sensation that we’re levitating.

“I love this car,” she says. “It’s like driving an iPhone.” Suddenly, a deep, otherworldly sound—boop...boop...boop. She looks at the screen. “Just a second—that’s my mom in Israel, where it’s 8 p.m., and this is literally the only window I have to talk to her.” She touches the screen and speaks in Hebrew—one mother to another. Are you okay? How was yesterday? Don’t work too hard. Take it easy next week! “Okay, Ema,” she says, and they blow kisses to each other. This is what she misses. In many ways, the success of Wonder Woman has stranded Gadot in Los Angeles, a 15-hour flight from home. “You can’t walk anywhere here,” she says, but that is the only complaint she will lodge because complaining is not her style. But she does relate this story, about how she came back from Israel recently and on the endless drive from LAX to her house in the Hollywood Hills, her eight-year-old daughter, Alma, said, “You know what I like about home in Israel? Everything is five minutes away. Five minutes walking to the gelato place, five minutes to the beach, five minutes to our cousins’ house. And all of our neighbors are our friends.” Gadot sighs wistfully. “But there’s always give-and-take. How do you say in English? Eat the cake and leave it whole? Eat the cake and…. There’s something with a cake.”