The Surprising Place Gal Gadot Spent Her Time During Wonder Woman's Premiere Day

After experiencing several delays as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wonder Woman 1984 is finally out for the world to see in theaters or on HBO Max. The film once again features Gal Gadot in the role she made famous in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and 2017's Wonder Woman. She's joined by Chris Pine, who returns in the role of her love interest, Steve Trevor, as well as a duo of powerful new villains to go up against, namely Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) and Cheetah (Kristen Wiig).

The film has all the action fans of the first movie have come to expect, and in fact, it even opens with two back-to-back action sequences to set the tone right from the gate. While Gadot admits to utilizing a stunt double in certain scenes, the film definitely required her to embrace a ton of personal physicality, making good use of her background in the Israeli Defense Force. Gadot is no stranger to dangerous stunts. In fact, some of her work on the first Wonder Woman left her feeling the pain long after shooting had wrapped.

As Gadot recently revealed in an interview with iHeartRadio, when the first Wonder Woman premiered, Gadot wasn't living it up with her co-stars. She was in an operating room getting pretty significant medical work done. 

Wonder Woman is a massively intensive role, and it's not a character Gal Gadot only has to play for a few months once every few years. During her recent interview, she explains how she filmed the first Wonder Woman movie back-to-back with Justice League. Shortly after the two films wrapped production, Gadot gave birth to her daughter, Maya. After all that action, Gadot experienced a hernia in her back, and as she explains, "The whole six weeks of press that we did, I couldn't sit. I could only lie down or stand up. So if you go back now and you see all of my interviews, I'm always standing." Now, that's comittment.

In fact, when 2017's Wonder Woman premiered in June of 2017, she spent the day in the operating room getting her back fixed. Fortunately, she was able to get in good enough shape to continue performing many of her own action sequences in Wonder Woman 1984, though she did apparently sustain additional injuries: "I hurt my neck and my shoulder ... It is what it is. It's such a physical role, like the physicality is another character that I have to play. But it has its toll."

Injuries aside, it appears as though Gadot has no intentions of hanging up the Wonder Woman mantle any time soon. She's set to reprise the role in Zack Snyder's Justice League, which is set to come out on HBO Max in March of 2021. She's also signed on to return, along with director Patty Jenkins, for a third film in the Wonder Woman franchise.