Gal Gadot insists she doesn’t like conflict. Hates it, in fact. While she once harbored fantasies of becoming a “full-blown Ally McBeal type,” she left law school after only a year. “The thought now of me being a lawyer,” she says, her head filled with visions of courtroom soliloquies and miniskirt suits, “dealing with conflict all the time, it’s not for me.”

Advertisement – Continue Reading Below It’s hard to square that with her image as Hollywood’s go-to action heroine. Whether she’s lassoing bad guys as Wonder Woman or, in her new movie Red Notice, wielding an electrocution device as casually as a Jacquemus minibag, she doesn’t exactly seem to dread onscreen contretemps. (Stunt-wise, she says, “I do whatever the insurance allows me to do.”) But offscreen, Gadot does come across as almost preternaturally low-key, mimicking her wide-eyed observation in her early acting days: “ ‘And you get paid for it? Ooh, I’m in. Sign me up.’ ”

If only it were all that easy. After being cast in 2009’s Fast Furious, she kept auditioning until “I got tired of trying,” she says. Just when she’d almost given up, she landed the part of Wonder Woman. As a kid in Israel, Gadot was too young to watch the Lynda Carter TV version; she describes her young self as“[not] a big fan of comic books.” But she knew that a female-fronted superhero movie would be a watershed moment. A blockbuster centered on the character was “overdue,” she says. “People were craving her story.” For the first film, her salary was a mere (by Hollywood standards) $300,000. At the time, “I was extremely grateful. That was my big break.” Then the movie made over $800 million. When the sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, came along, “if you look at it like a card game, my hand got better. I was willing to drop the ball and not do it if I wasn’t paid fairly.” She made a reported 30-plus times that salary for the follow-up. Given her aversion to conflict, was she scaredaout playing hardball? “No, because when I’m righteous, I’m also right.”

Greg Williams

Hair by Renato Campora for Fekkai; Makeup by Sabrina Bedrani for Dior Beauty; Manicure by Shigeko Taylor for Dior Vernis; Produced by Jonathan Bossle at Tightrope Production.