Stirring up the waters seems to be an effortless ordeal for Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, though none of her controversial concoctions have managed to generate quite as much backlash as the cover video of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ did at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
As you’ll recall, the scrutiny began when Gadot and a number of her Hollywood colleagues banded together to deliver a heartwarming message to healthcare frontliners and other people afflicted by the infectious disease. Though intentions always count, the public response was anything but in-kind and reaffirming, and several high-profile commentators like Joe Rogan went so far as to blast the celebrity for her failure to read the situation properly.
The rebound was so overwhelming, in fact, that even Gadot herself had to ultimately address the matter for all the good it did. People are still making fun of that video more than a year later. So, when the star recently graced the February cover of InStyle, the subject inevitably came up once again.
The interviewer asked Gadot why she decided to “take the piss” and sing the song again at the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards recently, to which she jokingly replied: “Yeah. Might as well. They had a mic there.” She further added:
“It just felt right, and I don’t take myself too seriously. And with the whole ‘Imagine’ controversy, it’s funny. I was calling Kristen [Wiig] and I was like, ‘Listen, I want to do this thing.’ 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. But [the video] was premature. It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing. It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bulls-eye, right? I felt like I wanted to take the air out of it, so that [event] was a delightful opportunity to do that.”
While we may never forget the “Imagine” cover video thanks to the numerous memes that reverberated through the online community, I think we can safely say that Gal Gadot has more than made up for that mistake with her unrelenting positive attitude in the past year.