Gal Gadot has admitted her celeb-filled viral “Imagine” video in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a mistake.
Nearly two years after posting the video — which showed celebrities singing along to the John Lennon song — the “Wonder Woman” actress said it wasn’t “the right thing.”
“I was calling Kristen [Wiig] and I was like, ‘Listen, I want to do this thing,’” Gadot told InStyle 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. I was seeing where everything was headed. But [the video] was premature.”
The “Fast & Furious” star, 36, added, “It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing. It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye, right?”
She also addressed the controversy in an October 2020 Vanity Fair profile, telling the outlet, “Sometimes, you know, you try and do a good deed and it’s just not the right good deed.”
Gadot added, “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.”
A-listers including Natalie Portman, Jimmy Fallon, Zoë Kravitz, Will Ferrell, Mark Ruffalo, Sia and Maya Rudolph all appeared in the three-minute clip, taking turns singing lines of the ’70s song.
When she posted the video on March 18, 2020, Gadot told her followers she had been “feeling a bit philosophical” while in “self-quarantine” amid the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You know, this virus has affected the entire world — everyone — it doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, we’re all in this together,” she wrote at the time.
“I ran into this video of this Italian guy playing the trumpet on his balcony to all the other people who were locked in their homes. And he was playing ‘Imagine’ and there was something so powerful and pure about this video,” she said before singing the tune herself.