Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman: 13 thoughts on the bombshell-casting bombshell

 
1. Wonder Woman is a larger-than-life icon, a character who has existed for more than 70 years. She will probably still be important when everyone breathing now is dead. But for the last decade, she has existed most prominently as a casting rumor. They tried making a movie out of her, or several movies, or a Justice League movie that would’ve produced a Wonder Woman spin-off — a process that engulfed geek demigod Joss Whedon in a mid-’00s Dark Period so painful he has (maybe accidentally, maybe not) devoted years of his life to DC’s comic-studio archnemesis. They tried making a TV show out of her, a process that served no purpose beyond squandering Adrianne Palicki’s post-Friday Night Lights glow; they tried making another TV show out of her, this time a prequel sans costume, and that didn’t work either. For more than 10 years, the idea of a human female playing Wonder Woman onscreen has been a hotly contested debate, conducted in dark rooms between producers and in the internet echo chamber.

2. Now, the casting rumor has become a casting fact: Gal Gadot is playing Wonder Woman in the Man of Steel sequel, alongside Henry Cavill’s Superman and Ben Affleck’s Batman and probably inevitably playing Martian Manhunter.
3. The first question almost everyone asks is: “Who is Gal Gadot?” And the easiest answer is: “The actress from Fast & Furious who isn’t Michelle Rodriguez or Jordana Brewster.” And an unusually astute moviegoer might say: “Oh, you mean Gina Carano from Fast & Furious 6? The martial artist who starred in the underrated Haywire, who actually briefly dated Henry Cavill and looks basically exactly like the generally-agreed-upon idea of Wonder Woman as a very attractive but also very muscular woman? That’s great casting!” And the response to that is: “No, no, no, the other actress.”
4. I want to make one thing clear: I think Wonder Woman is basically an impossible role to cast, which is another way of saying that I think anyone at all should just play Wonder Woman already. She’s a feminist icon who predates the last several generations of feminism, a style icon who generally wears almost nothing at all. She’s sort of immortal but she looks very young, she’s sort of a badass warrior but she’s also a stranger-in-a-strange-land neophyte eternally adjusting to the outside world. And she’s sexy, a fact which, in the wrong hands, can veer sexist almost immediately. (See Also: Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, a movie that is clearly trying to be a deconstruction of fanboy sexism and which also utterly succumbs to fanboy sexism.) Her costume is problematic, a fact that DC Comics has implicitly admitted to by regularly forcing her to put on more clothes, but Wonder Woman without her costume doesn’t really look like Wonder Woman.
5. I would imagine that part of the problem with casting Wonder Woman is that Hollywood is mostly run by guys who each have their own inaccurate and occasionally offensive perspective on what the Ultimate Vision of Womanhood would be. But honestly, you could put Sheryl Sandberg, Camille Paglia, Hillary Clinton, Lena Dunham, Tina Fey, the women from American Horror Story, and the writing staff of Jezebel in a room for a week and ask them to cast their ideal Wonder Woman, and the net result would be the same. Because Wonder Woman is in some ways less defined than Batman and Superman — her origin changes constantly — she is arguably way more interesting than either of them, a free-floating idea that hasn’t been nailed down yet.