Gal Gadot Owns Up to Cringe Factor of ‘Imagine’ Video, Two Years Later

Elizabeth Berkley publicly came to terms with the notorious (and beloved) bomb that derailed her career, Showgirls, at a screening in 2015. After years of disallowing so much as the utterance of the word “glitter,” Mariah Carey has come around to embracing the 2001 flop movie/album in recent years. And now Gal Gadot has mocked and owned up to the “poor taste” of the roundly mocked video of her and a bunch of other celebs singing “Imagine” that she posted to her socials on March 18, 2020, during the early days of covid lockdown. Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this.

In a Q&A with InStyle for the magazine’s February cover story, Gadot recalled her impromptu rendition of “Imagine” while accepting her award at ELLE’s Women in Hollywood Celebration last year. “Might as well. They had a mic there,” she said. Fun!

She went on:

It just felt right, and I don’t take myself too seriously. And with the whole “Imagine” controversy, it’s funny. I was calling Kristen [Wiig] and I was like, “Listen, I want to do this thing.” 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. 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? I felt like I wanted to take the air out of it, so that [event] was a delightful opportunity to do that.

Gadot previously told Vanity Fair in 2020, a few months after the video’s release, something similar (albeit less self-critical): “Sometimes, you know, you try and do a good deed and it’s just not the right good deed. 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…I meant to do something good and pure, and it didn’t transcend.”

“Imagine’ is Gadot’s Cats—it’s better to embrace its badness than let the stain settle in. Looking back on the video, it’s almost quaint how all the celebrities thought they could cheer us up by just showing up and singing badly. Hilarious, really!