Actress Gal Gadot's greatest challenge filming "Wonder Woman" reshoots and "Justice League" wasn't battling a supervillain.
It was battling morning sickness.
The Israeli actress told Rolling Stone that the she and the filmmakers went to great lengths to hide her pregnancy on-screen — and, for a time, from her fellow superheroes.
"We cut open the costume and had this green screen on my stomach," she said in the magazine's latest cover story. "It was funny as hell – Wonder Woman with a bump."
To avoid being coddled on the set by her male castmates, she waited to tell her "Justice League" co-stars that she was pregnant. (Maya Versano, Gadot's second daughter with husband Yaron Versano, was born in March.)
"I didn't want attention," she said. "The default should be that women get the job done, but there's a long way to go and a lot of reprogramming that needs to be done to both genders."
No one has done more to reprogram gender stereotypes in the superhero genre. "Wonder Woman" has passed the $800 million mark at the box office worldwide, and become the top-grossing movie directed by a woman (Patty Jenkins) in the process. In a single bound, albeit one that comes 75 years after Wonder Woman's comic book debut, Gadot's Amazonian warrior has become a role model for girls and women.
"People always ask me, 'Are you a feminist?,' And I find the question surprising, because I think, 'Yes, of course. Every woman, every man, everyone should be a feminist," the 32-year-old action star said.
"Because whoever is not a feminist is a sexist.' "
Gadot credits some of her strength to the upbringing she had in the small central Israeli city of Rosh Ha'ayin, where she and her younger sister were raised "to believe that we're capable, to value ourselves" by their engineer father and physical-education teacher mother."There was no TV-watching. It was always 'Take a ball and go play," Gadot told Rolling Stone. "In general, I was a good girl, a good student, a pleaser, and I was a tomboy. Always with wounds and scratches on my knees."
Now that she's a mother herself, she values the "really simple moments" off-screen. A relaxing day, she said, involves cooking an Italian dinner and listening to music, particularly "Zero 7 because it's superchill."
The real super-team for Gadot is her family.