‘Wonder Woman’ addresses infamous ‘Imagine’ Covid video

Actor Gal Gadot has addressed her highly mocked ‘Imagine’ cover video, featuring numerous celebrities and released at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. She says she had “pure intentions” but the effort was in “poor taste.”

The video was posted in March 2020, just as government shutdowns and mandates were first taking effect in places such as the US in response to coronavirus. The footage featured Gadot and numerous other celebrities singing lines from Beatle John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Gadot and others were heavily criticized and mocked for it, as it was released amid numerous Covid deaths and to the backdrop of people losing their jobs as businesses shut down.

In a wide-ranging interview this week with In Style magazine, Gadot addressed the video directly, claiming the timing came down to Covid affecting Europe and Israel before the US, and that she was “seeing where everything was headed.”

“It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bullseye, right? I felt like I wanted to take the air out of it, so that was a delightful opportunity to do that,” she said. 

The ‘Wonder Woman’ actor has addressed the video in the past, similarly telling Vanity Fair last year that she had “good intentions” and simply wanted to “send light and love to the world.”

Gadot’s most recent defense of the video, which featured celebrities such as Will Ferrell and Jimmy Fallon, sparked a new round of mockery on social media.

Besides headlining DC and Warner Bros’ ‘Wonder Woman’ franchise, Gadot also recently appeared in the $160-million Netflix film ‘Red Notice’ and can be seen in the upcoming delayed ‘Death on the Nile’ film, based on the Agatha Christie novel and directed by Kenneth Branagh. 

Gadot said her video had been inspired by seeing a clip of a man playing the trumpet for others stuck in quarantine in Italy. He was playing ‘Imagine’ by Lennon. She commented on Instagram at the time that there had been something “powerful and pure” about it.