Gal Gadot made a name for herself in Hollywood playing Gisele Yashar in the Fast & Furious movies, but she was propelled to new levels of fame last year when she was cast as Wonder Woman in the DC Extended Universe. However, that wasn’t her only opportunity to appear in a DC movie. It turns out she was almost cast as one of the villains in Man of Steel.
During an interview with Israeli website XNet (translated via Batman-News.com), Gadot revealed that before she was cast as Diana of Themyscira, her pregnancy prevented her from playing a character in the 2013 Superman reboot, who sounds a lot like the rogue Kryptonian Faora. Gadot said:
When I was a month pregnant with (my daughter) Alma, I got an offer to be the evil Superman character. If I wasn’t pregnant I’d take the job, and there’s no way they would take me now to be Wonder Woman.
Gadot is almost certainly talking about Faora, Zod’s second-in-command. Like the Kryptonian general and the rest of his followers, she was banished to the Phantom Zone shortly before Krypton’s destruction, but when they were accidentally freed from the prison, they made their to Earth years later to find Jor-El’s son, Kal-El, and retrieve the codex to create a new Krypton. She and the rest of Zod’s minions were sent back to the Phantom Zone during Man of Steel’s latter half, thus leaving any future appearances from the character in question. Antje Traue ended up playing Faora in the film, but despite having to pass on that role, whatever cosmic forces are at work in the universe led to Gadot being looked at for, and later cast as, Wonder Woman.
Gadot’s experience is similar to what her DC costar Jason Momoa went through. The former Khal Drogo was originally being looked at to play Drax in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, but he turned the role and it ended up going to Dave Bautista. At the time, Momoa stated that he passed on that opportunity because he had played similar characters before, but by the end of 2014, it was officially revealed that he would play Aquaman in the DCEU. While Guardians of the Galaxy has since become one of Marvel’s biggest hits, career-wise Momoa made the right choice, since Aquaman will not only appear in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the two Justice League films, but will also lead a solo film in 2018. In Gadot’s case, her pregnancy led to an even bigger DC opportunity, and she’ll get to appear in just as many films as Momoa.
We’ll see Gadot’s debut as Wonder Woman when Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is released in theaters on March 25, 2016, followed by the Amazon’s solo film on June 23, 2017.
