Gal Gadot admits what we were all thinking about her ‘Imagine’ celebrity singalong
Will Gal Gadot ever live down the horror show that was her March 2020 celebrity cover of “Imagine”?
The “Death on the Nile” actor is still explaining herself, though now the explanation has moved from “I had the best intentions” at the beginning of the pandemic to an admission that the video was misguided.
“It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing,” Gadot told InStyle in a new interview published Tuesday. “It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye, right?”
She also explained how the celeb-packed Instagram post — which featured Will Ferrell, Natalie Portman, Zoë Kravitz and other famous friends — came to be.
“I was calling Kristen [Wiig, her ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ co-star] and I was like, ‘Listen, I want to do this thing,’” she said. “The pandemic was in Europe and Israel before it came here [to the U.S.] in the same way. I was seeing where everything was headed.”
Actress Gal Gadot meant well, but her famous friends — including Will Ferrell, Zoë Kravitz, Sia, Kristen Wiig — singing “Imagine” has irritated some.
The singalong was released, in Gadot’s own words, on “Day 6 in self-quarantine.” That was March 18, 2020. The world was in a panic, and the video landed with a thud. To her credit, she hasn’t taken it down, despite the outpouring of criticism.
Since then, of course, Israel has become a test case for the performance of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine. And the pandemic has evolved: Israel began administering a fourth dose of the vaccine to its most vulnerable people last week. The world is now focused on the nuances of the Omicron variant, not freaking out about a mysterious new disease we knew nothing about.
Gadot realizes, in hindsight, that the “Imagine” effort was “premature” — though she said nothing about it being musically atrocious.
And she acknowledged singing a bit of the tune — tongue in cheek, of course — when she gave a speech at the Elle Women in Hollywood event in October 2021. “It just felt right,” she said, “and I don’t take myself too seriously.
From celebrities caterwauling “Imagine” to COVID-19 denialism wrapped in decrepit blues-rock, these are the foulest sounds we heard in 2020.
It’s a bit of an evolution since she talked about the video earnestly with the Los Angeles Times more than a year ago, right before “Wonder Woman 1984” came out on Christmas Day 2020.
“Sometimes you want to do a good deed and it’s just not the right good deed,” she said at the time. “I had the best intentions, and I wanted to share my love and to show that we’re in this together and we’re all one. And sometimes it just doesn’t work. ... I know you can never please everyone.”
Kenneth Branagh’s “Death on the Nile,” featuring Gadot, opens in theaters Feb. 11.
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