While reflecting on her decision to plan the celebrity-filled “Imagine” cover amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Gal Gadot admitted that the video was “in poor taste.”
During an interview with InStyle for their February 2022 cover, Gadot, 36, explained that her idea originally came from seeing how COVID-19 was affecting people in other parts of the world.
“I was calling Kristen [Wiig] and I was like, ‘Listen, I want to do this thing,’” the Wonder Woman star recalled about the March 2020 post. “The pandemic was in Europe and Israel before it came here in the same way. I was seeing where everything was headed. But [it] was premature.”
Even though Gadot shared the video in the hopes of bringing hope to others, she now understands where the backlash came from, noting, “It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye, right?”
The Red Notice actress originally made headlines when she was joined by stars including Natalie Portman, Will Ferrell, Sarah Silverman, Zoë Kravitz, Sia, Jimmy Fallon and Mark Ruffalo in the inspirational clip that featured the stars singing a cover of John Lennon‘s song.
“Hey, guys. Day six in self-quarantine. And I’ve got to say that these past few days got me feeling a bit philosophical,” Gadot said in the beginning of the three-minute video. “You know, this virus has affected the entire world, everyone — [it] doesn’t matter who you are, where you are from, we are all in this together.”
Shortly after the idea was slammed online for being tone-deaf, Jamie Dornan weighed in on his choice to participate in the project.
“I’ll tell you what the problem was. I literally did mine in the toilet of my house … Quite clearly, some people had escaped to their second home,” Dornan, 39, said during an appearance on the “Tea With Me” podcast in April 2020. “There’s too much acreage in the background, too many beautiful trees swaying in the background, clearly in front of an ocean, that sort of craic. I was quite aware of that whenever I was doing it, to make it normal.”
The Fifty Shades of Grey actor noted that while he knew that Gadot was “trying to do a good thing,” he wasn’t thrilled that he “got dragged along with it.”
Later that year, Silverman, 51, revealed that she wasn’t shocked by the negative reaction.
“I couldn’t say no, because one, it was the beginning of quarantine. Like there’s no saying no to anyone because you can’t, there’s no excuse for it,” the comedian told Andy Cohen on his SiriusXM show in October 2020. “You know are you going to say no to Kristen Wiig. She is so lovely and she is so cool. … But, yeah it’s funny because she emailed me after and she’s like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ It was well intentioned, but, like, yeah, a little tone deaf, but it really came from a nice place I think.”
