Page Six has alerted us to the very important news that Gal Gadot’s inspiration behind her portrayal as Wonder Woman was none other than Princess Diana. Excuse me?
In a chat during Vanity Fair’s “Cocktail Hour Live,” Godot said that her performance as Wonder Woman was imbued with the “vulnerabilities and heart” of Princess Diana, in whom she found a connection not as a “goddess that’s super strong and has it all and is super perfect,” but as someone with “vulnerability and heart.” If I take this analogy further, I can also see the royal family’s engineering of public sentiment in Gadot’s other starring role as “that person in the pandemic’s cringiest Instagram post,” after she sang “Imagine” with all her friends to heal the world of its sicknesses.
She extrapolated further on her character’s connection to Princess Diana:
“I remember watching a documentary about Princess Diana and there was a part where they said she was full of compassion and always cared for the people and that was like, ‘Ding, ding, ding,’ that should be the Wonder Woman we have.”
Of course, that’s only the media’s initial portrayal of Diana, whose life in the palace spiraled into severe bouts of depression, suicidal ideation, disenfranchisement, and outright emotional abuse at the hands of the Royal Family. Wonder Woman, meanwhile, was turned into a symbol of the colonial empire by the government and propped up as the figurehead of an intergalactic police force. Yeah! I’m starting to see some of the similarities.