Holding Court With Gal Gadot

by Natasha Wolff | March 10, 2025 12:46 pm

When Gal Gadot told her 8-year-old daughter Maya that she’d be starring in a new live-action musical version of Snow White for Disney, the girl was thrilled.

“She was so happy,” Gadot recalls. “She said, ‘Mommy, you’ll be a perfect Snow White.’”

Then her eldest daughter, Alma, revealed that their mother wouldn’t be playing the porcelain-skinned princess with a penchant for singing with bluebirds, aka the fairest of them all. “She told her, ‘She’s not playing Snow White. She’s playing the Evil Queen.’ My 8-year-old was devastated.”

For the Israeli-born Gadot, getting to show up every day as the Evil Queen opposite Rachel Zegler as Snow on set in London was a kind of dream.

“It’s something that I’d never gotten to do before, and it’s different from anything I’ve ever tried to go for. It was really, really fun,” says Gadot. “She’s not dark dark. She’s theatrical and vain. She’s a drama queen. She’s grand. She’s bigger than life, and she loves it. Kooky, campy, unhinged. And I enjoy the camp.”

Even though the character is called the Evil Queen, Gadot doesn’t see her that way. “I can’t think about a character as scary and bad,” she says. “I have to find a way to love her.” To develop the notorious villain’s dimensions, she did a lot of research about the psychological underpinnings of the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

“I tried to find the vulnerable places in this envious relationship between a mother and daughter. I knew what triggered her, and from that I fell in love with her,” Gadot continues. “There’s something liberating about an out-of-the-box character that doesn’t always make sense.”

For the big-budget tentpole remake, which opens in March, Gadot gets to do two things she’s never done before onscreen.

The first: sing a big musical number.

“Who knew she could sing?” you might ask. So did the film’s director, Marc Webb.

Growing up in Israel, Gadot didn’t have a lot of experience onstage or in musical theater. At 23, she appeared in Festigal, a kind of Hanukkah pantomime extravaganza for kids where she played the Little Mermaid. “I sang and danced,” she recalls. “There might be footage of it online.” (There is. It’s amazing, if reminiscent of a Eurovision contest.)

Showing up on the Snow White set for her big number, a song called “All’s Fair,” “was definitely jumping into some new uncharted waters,” says Gadot. (Mermaid pun unintended.) “But once you commit to something, you just go with the flow and trust the process. You do it once and then twice, and you become comfortable with it. It was actually really fun. I’m my biggest critic. Whatever I do, I always have a hard time hearing my voice. But I think it works for the character.”

“She’s having so much fun and can sell that delicious song,” explains Webb. “Her performance is both dangerous and fun, the perfect combination for a Disney villain. The kids are a bit scared, but they love it and want more. I think there are going to be a lot of Evil Queen costumes at Halloween this year, and we owe a lot of that to Gal.”

The second first for Gadot is that she gets to play ugly.

Like, really ugly.

When she transforms into the Old Hag to trick Snow White into eating a poison apple, “that was the part that I most enjoyed playing,” says Gadot. This includes the four hours of prosthetics necessary to transform from beauty to beast. “People had no idea it was me. There’s something so interesting about completely erasing the way people react to me. It’s about disappearing and getting to be able to really do whatever you want to do. No expectations. It’s like you’re a blank page. I loved it.”

It’s very easy to imagine Gadot as superhuman. She’s certainly embodied it on screen, because she’s best known for her many years playing Wonder Woman in two films directed by Patty Jenkins and several ancillary DC movies. As for whether the character returns in James Gunn’s new DC universe, “I have no idea,” Gadot says. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Now 39, Gadot served in the Israeli Armed Forces after winning the Miss Israel pageant at 19. She co-owns a healthy macaroni and cheese company called Goodles because she loved the boxed Kraft macaroni and cheese her aunt and uncle would give her every summer they visited Israel when she was growing up. “I loved it,” she recalls.

With her husband Jaron Varsano, a real estate developer-turned-film producer, Gadot is also the mother to four daughters. Ori, their youngest, turned 1 in January, but it was a challenging pregnancy. She was born during emergency surgery Gadot needed for a blood clot in her brain which Gadot discovered after pushing for a simple MRI.

“I had major, major headaches,” Gadot says, adding that similar clots happen to three out of 100,000 women. “I was literally the statistics. All it takes is to be aware of the symptoms.”

The point, Gadot adds, is she’s not indestructible. “I’m not superhuman. I’m not perfect. I’m not a cyborg,” she says. A year later, “I’m feeling great. I came out of it with not even a scratch. And the emotional, physical and mental growth made me all the more grateful for life and the simple moments.”

Of course, most of those moments involve spending time with her husband and kids. Though Gadot is extremely close to her much younger sister, the house “was very, very quiet” when she was growing up, she says. Because of the age difference, it often felt as if they were only children. She was jealous of friends with big families and lots of siblings.

“I wanted to have a messy home with mayhem and all that,” Gadot explains.

And, indeed, with four daughters between the ages of 1 and 13, “it’s mayhem,” Gadot laughs. “If you come to my house, they laugh, they fight, they cry. It’s a whole range of emotions, and I love it. Yes, it’s a lot. I juggle. I do my best and we have help and my husband does the best job as a dad. I don’t sleep a lot.” (She says she’ll get six hours “on a good night.”)

A major takeaway from Snow White is that beauty is only skin deep.

“I think what the movie challenges is how exactly to define beauty,” says Webb, the film’s director. “For the Queen, beauty is external. For Snow White, beauty is measured by a feeling of kindness and connection to her people.”

With four daughters growing up in a TikTok-obsessed world, it’s a distinction that must resonate in Gadot’s house. “I always tell my kids that for me, growing up was so much easier than it is for you,” Gadot says. “They grew up with all these filters. With curated postings. They think it’s real, not knowing that it’s been totally filtered and retouched. I tell them, ‘Whatever you see out there, it’s false, not true.’ It’s a very confusing world for a girl.”

To that end, Gadot tries to find iconic female characters to play, in part to create indelible onscreen role models that transcend time. She’s been developing a project about Cleopatra for years. Another series in development was about the Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr, who not only had a storied career in Hollywood but also co-invented a radio guidance system to prevent radio jamming during WWII.

“It was too expensive to film,” says Gadot of the Lamarr project. “But I’m drawn to strong, inspiring, groundbreaking women. I have this urge to celebrate them and tell their story the right way.”

Gadot is currently learning how to run for a project she’ll start filming this spring, The Runner. “I’m very athletic and I grew up doing all types of sports, but if there’s one thing I’ve tried to avoid, it’s running,” she says. “If there’s one way for me to learn to do it properly, this is it.”

Olympic sprinter Malachi Davis is coaching her, and she’s discovered that she does like it. “It’s not like suffering. I enjoy the challenge. There’s a whole science behind how to do it right,” she says. “To be honest, I’m just so grateful. I get to do what I love, and I get to learn a new skill by the best of the best.”

During her recovery, Gadot’s doctor told her to break a sweat every day. Then she found the script to The Runner, but knew she couldn’t recover in time. The film’s director, Kevin Macdonald, said they’d wait for her.

“So for the past seven months, I’ve been training and working and the universe just heard my doctor,” Gadot says. “I don’t want to sound too mumbo jumbo, but I do believe that, if we’re in movement, the path of the universe will show itself.”

Hair: Jenny Cho-Semple
Makeup: Mary Phillips
Manicure: Shigeko Taylor for Apres Nail at Star Touch Agency
Set Designer: Michael Wanenmacher
Production: Arzu Koçman by Productionising
Shot at Studio Stropa in Los Angeles

Source URL: https://dujour.com/news/gal-gadot-snow-white/