Wonder Woman. Now, she’s back (at least for now)

PHOTOGRAPHY BY  DUDI HASSON

I remember when I went to see Wonder Woman in the theater in New York City just after it opened in June 2017, all the hooting and cheering erupting from the women and girls in the audience. At one point a woman sitting next to me gripped my hand in some spontaneous show of sisterhood.

Reports soon followed of similar reactions occurring all over the country and the world: audiences clapping, crying, donning their Bracelets of Submission and wielding their golden lassos in public and on social media.

Wonder Woman was a phenomenon. Coming, as it did, months after the election of an avowed pussy grabber to the U.S. presidency, it felt like balm. And Gadot seemed like the perfect incarnation of a beloved female superhero, arriving in time for a feminist wave (her first name, Gal, actually means wave in Hebrew), kicked off by the historic international Women’s March in January 2017.

Today, with Wonder Woman 1984 set to hit theaters in December, Gadot is excited for audiences to catch up with the next installment of Wonder Woman’s story. “I think the first film was the birth of a hero,” she says, talking to me on Zoom, “and this time around we wanted to go deeper in a way.

It’s more about the danger in greed, and I think that it’s very relevant to the era that we’re living in nowadays. It feels like everyone is in a race for more, and when you get what you wanted there’s a new bar—and what’s the price? And do we lose ourselves in this crazy marathon?”

The success of the first Wonder Woman film—for which Gadot was paid only $300,000, a figure that caused outrage in some circles as it paled in comparison to what many male action stars take home—helped catapult her onto the list of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood.

For Wonder Woman 1984, she reportedly earned $10 million—a hefty sum that is still less than half of what some leading male action stars get, yet another sign that in Hollywood, as elsewhere, the gender pay gap still has a long way to go to close…

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