Gal Gadot Is All 'Wonder Woman' Lensed By Paola Kudacki For ELLE US December 2017

Actor Gal Gadot covers the December 2017 issue of ELLE US, styled by Simon Robins in Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co jewely, Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent, Gucci and more. Photographer Paola Kudacki captures Gadot with an engaging interview by Holly Milea. 

“There’s been a fear for years of her being ‘clean’ and yet still tough,” says Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, who, three-quarters of a century after Wonder Woman made her DC Comics debut, brought the superheroine’s story to big-screen life last year, starring Gal Gadot. “So many people’s assumptions about what would make a tough woman is actually a damaged woman. People were confusing strength with defensiveness, and I was like, ‘Why would she be defensive? She totally trusts people! Why would she be angry? She assumes that she’s going to be treated well. She has no chip on her shoulder!’”

Wait until she finds out she’s getting paid 80 cents on the dollar.

In fact, it's director James Cameron who took it upon himself to issue a negative critique of Gadot's 'Wonder Woman'. After all, a successful man would have the answers, right? Cameron called Gadot "an objectified icon", pointing instead to Linda Hamilton's 'Terminator' character as what a female action protagonist should be. "She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit," Cameron said of the character Sarah Connor.) Gadot's 'Wonder Woman' was "a step backwards" for women. In post-Hillary defeat America, director Patty Jenkins was not amused.  

Jenkins noted that women don't need to be one thing to be a hero. THR shared her counter-argument:

"But if women have to always be hard, tough and troubled to be strong, and we aren't free to be multidimensional or celebrate an icon of women everywhere because she is attractive and loving, then we haven't come very far have we," she (Jenkins) wrote. "I believe women can and should be EVERYTHING just like male lead characters should be. There is no right and wrong kind of powerful woman. And the massive female audience who made the film a hit it is, can surely choose and judge their own icons of progress."