“It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing,” Gal Gadot said of her celebrity-filled “Imagine” cover
Gal Gadot knows her viral “Imagine” video was a mistake.
The Wonder Woman star, 36, reflected on the John Lennon cover nearly two years after she first posted it in March 2020, telling InStyle that it was made with “pure intentions,” but admitting it “wasn’t the right timing” or “the right thing.”
“I was calling Kristen [Wiig] and I was like, ‘Listen, I want to do this thing,’ ” Gadot told InStyle Editor in Chief Laura Brown in the magazine’s February 2022 issue. “The pandemic was in Europe and Israel before it came here [to the U.S.] in the same way.”
While Gadot said she “was seeing where everything was headed” at the time, she knows now that the video “was premature.”
“It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing. It was in poor taste,” Gadot told InStyle. “All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye, right?”
Gadot said she later poked fun at herself by singing “Imagine” while accepting an award at the Elle Women in Hollywood awards in October.
“Might as well. They had a mic there,” she said of her decision to sing. She added, “It just felt right, and I don’t take myself too seriously … I felt like I wanted to take the air out of it, so that [event] was a delightful opportunity to do that.”
Gadot’s latest comments come after she addressed the “Imagine” controversy in October 2020. At the time, she told Vanity Fair, “Sometimes, you know, you try and do a good deed and it’s just not the right good deed. I had nothing but good intentions and it came from the best place, and I just wanted to send light and love to the world.”
She added, “I started with a few friends, and then I spoke to Kristen [Wiig]. Kristen is like the mayor of Hollywood. Everyone loves her, and she brought a bunch of people to the game. But yeah, I started it, and I can only say that I meant to do something good and pure, and it didn’t transcend.”
Gadot posted the “Imagine” video on March 18, 2020. She told her followers she had been “feeling a bit philosophical” while in “self-quarantine” for the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which had just begun to spread widely in the U.S. at the time.
Along with Gadot, the three-minute clip features a handful of celebrities taking turns covering Lennon’s famous song, including Natalie Portman, Jimmy Fallon, Zoë Kravitz, Will Ferrell, Amy Adams, James Marsden, Mark Ruffalo, Sarah Silverman, Sia and Maya Rudolph.
