The day I meet Wonder Woman by the seaside is a perfect beach day, bounded on each side by unbroken chains of perfect beach days. The sun is splendidious. The sky is a show-off blue. The people of Israel are wearing white sneakers and performing vigorous calisthenics in the free fitness parks that stipple the Tel Aviv shoreline in primary colors. The water is as warm and as salty as a basin of tears. The egg sandwich is unexpected.
Wonder Woman has brought me the egg sandwich wrapped in cellophane, and when she arrives, she delivers it to me as confidently as if I had specifically requested it. She also packed me a fluffy white bath towel from her own home. Wonder Woman is used to taking care of everything because she is the protector of mankind.
Here in the real world, Wonder Woman is Gal Gadot, and off-camera Gal Gadot's personal style is like that of a desert-island inhabitant who receives regular airdrops of au courant garments from the world's top luxury fashion houses. She arrives at the beach with her hair in a bun, wearing old rubber flip-flops, denim cut-offs so distressed as to be inconsolable, and a couture black swimsuit boasting cap sleeves; leather; a deep, plunging bustier neckline; and a field's worth of laser-cut and embroidered flowers and leaves. It's a bathing costume designed to be worn more in theory than in practice, yet it also seems to function as Gadot's casual swimwear for bumming around. I recognize it from a recent Instagram post of Gadot in a pool with friends. When I mention this, she contorts her face in mock misery: "I cannot believe I wore the same swimsuit twice!" I express my concern she'll be spotted by fans, because she has essentially arrived at the beach wearing a Gal Gadot costume. She laughs and flops down under the shade of a public cabana.
The most beautiful thing about Gal Gadot is her smile—a real one, devastating, whipped out frequently to the peril of those around her—but the other stuff is very good, too. She has features that make the notion of cosmetics seem garish, like using Hi-Liter to trace over a butterfly's wings. Her height—she's just over 5'10"—and her leanness behave like complementary colors, her stature emphasizing her slenderness and vice versa. Gadot's thinness doesn't make her seem small, though. She has the bone structure of a delicately carved statue, but her physical presence is more akin to the rod that runs up the statue's back to absorb lightning strikes.
She is spotted. She is spotted over and over again, probably a dozen times before we leave. She obliges virtually everyone, perhaps calculating that it will take longer to disappoint a fan than to smile and pose. Her trick is to offer an immediate "Thanks!" the instant a photo has been taken—her polite signal the interaction has concluded.
It's already as hot as a charcoal grill in an attic on the sun, but at 10 A.M., there are few enough people at this beach on the far outskirts of Tel Aviv that everyone can fit within the cool, gray squares of shade provided by a smattering of tented canopies. The catch is that you have to share your square with strangers, which is why Gadot and I are joined first by an old man and, a little later, by a woman in her late 50s, who sits behind Gadot and faces the sea. How do the logistics of personal safety change when you abruptly become a global public figure?
"I'm much more aware and alert," Gadot says, stretching out on the sand. "I don't want to seclude myself from society. I want to be part of everyone, and I enjoy talking to random people sometimes. It's easier for me here [in Israel], 'cause profiling people is really easy for me." She gestures toward a group of about 20 young people in a neighboring cabana, many of whom have already asked her for photos.
"Like, I can tell you that this group—they're good people. They're calm, nice. They're gonna clean after themselves when they leave. They don't look for trouble." She jerks her head back. "This woman," she says in the same breezy tone, "is probably from Russia."
The sea-facing woman, who has been out of Gadot's line of sight since she sat down—I'm not even sure when Gadot saw her—has short blonde hair and a blue bathing suit. Nothing about her demeanor brings visions of the Bolshoi to mind.
"Why do you think that?" I ask.
"I just know," Gadot says with a shrug. "I just know."
The truth is that Gadot is not just alert but hyper-alert. Her relaxed, casual manner belies a sharp awareness of strangers' proximity in public. Often during conversation, Gadot's head whips quickly around, seeking out the source of intruding sounds or movement. The demeanor is not skittish but vigilant. Whenever she senses someone approaching—a detection she can perform even from yards away—she falls still and quiet, like a swimmer bracing for a wave. At one point during our conversation, she abruptly wheels around, catching off guard both myself and two women slowly picking their way through the sand to approach her from behind. "Wow, girls!" she calls out, beaming brightly. "I'm just in the middle of an interview, could you come back?" They smile, and back away.
I ask Gadot if she is the most famous person in Israel who is not currently running Israel.
She considers the question for a moment, then answers in an even tone. "Probably."
When Wonder Woman made her debut in 2016's critically abhorred Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, she vivified scenes as if she had defibrillator paddles strapped to her high heels. Based on fewer than ten minutes of screen time, Gal Gadot was hailed as the savior of the DC cinematic universe, and so it was a rare instance of the best-laid plans actually turning out to be the best-laid plans when Wonder Woman's standalone film—a prequel set during World War I, a century before the events of Batman v. Superman—began annihilating box-office records this past summer: highest-grossing superhero movie led by a female character; highest-grossing live-action film directed by a woman; highest-grossing fantasy that also educates teens about the horrifying realities of trench warfare.
The reviews for Wonder Woman glowed with the blinding luminosity of a CGI Lasso of Truth. Audiences were delighted that a story about chemical weapons had so much heart. Because Wonder Woman is a girl, Girl Scouts of America bragged about the movie's success on the organization's official Facebook page. The film was a swirling vortex of goodwill.
The most obvious change from antecedent underperforming comic-book movies was the insertion of an armor-clad female into a landscape populated almost exclusively by spandex-clad males. (Fine, Wonder Woman's costume was actually rubber, but it looked approximately like armor.) The result, crafted by director Patty Jenkins, was a high-octane, estrogen-fueled thrill ride. The timing also helped, coming as it did on the heels of a female presidential candidate's staggering loss to a hectoring sexist. Studio projections suggested the film would gross $65 million in its opening weekend in the U.S. Instead, it earned $103 million, as female moviegoers turned out in record numbers for the chance to see even a fictional woman who was not at the mercy of men; many reported tearing up during Wonder Woman's battle scenes. (Kids, too. In a video that went viral weeks after the film's release, Gadot consoled a sobbing, deliriously happy girl dressed as Wonder Woman at a fan convention. "There's no reason to cry, all right?" Gadot said generously. "Here we are together.")
Yet despite its favorable circumstances, it must be said that the actress herself carried Wonder Woman. Prior to the film's release, hands were wrung into mangled mounds as people worried that men might not like a superhero if she wasn't also a man. Gadot's Wonder Woman was brutal with Germans and gentle with babies. She was dignified and occasionally deadpan funny. She was capable of delight (rare in the era of emotionally tortured superheroes) and compassionate beyond human capacity. She was relentlessly, mercilessly charming. It turns out men like that stuff, too.
Although Gadot was the face of the summer's biggest movie, relatively little is known about the woman behind Wonder Woman, apart from a small collection of facts repeatedly re-examined like treasured exotic curios on the late-night-talk-show circuit: Gal Gadot won the Miss Israel beauty pageant in 2004. Gal Gadot completed two years of service in the Israeli Defense Forces (mandatory for Israeli citizens). Gal Gadot went to law school for one year. (A beauty-pageant soldier with a cunning legal mind? Kind of sounds like Wonder Woman.)
"It's funny," says Gadot, “’cause I feel like I'm just in my beginning. After ten years [of acting], now I'm starting."
Gadot's first mission was to propel Wonder Woman to box-office glory through the sheer force of her charisma. Her new challenge is trickier: making sure she doesn't get swallowed up by the superheroine she'll be playing on screen, virtually uninterrupted, for at least the next 24 months. She'll reprise the role next in November's Justice League, again in her 2019 standalone sequel, and possibly again in 2020, in a movie centered on The Flash. If she's worried about being locked into a comic-book-movie carousel for the foreseeable future, she doesn't show it. "As long as the story's good," she says, "every genre is legit." All the same, she would prefer to move on from this job eventually.
"It's not that all I want to do for the rest of my life is Wonder Woman," Gadot says. "Obviously no."
Gadot grew up in the water—gal is the Hebrew word for "wave"—and after an hour of talking on the beach, she suggests we go for a swim. A few moments later, there is Gal Gadot, in black couture leather-flower Gottex, floating in the lapis-blue Mediterranean, eyes closed, with her face turned up to the dazzling noon sun, and also, uh, me. She chose this floating spot scrupulously, picking her way around underwater rocks until there was only soft sand beneath her feet. Little fish flick silently around her body. "Tell me what you like to eat," she purrs, breaking the calm quiet of passing swells. Then she springs her observation trap: "BECAUSE I NOTICE YOU DID NOT EAT THE EGG SANDWICH THAT I BROUGHT YOU."
I am dumbstruck. I have been pretending, I thought convincingly, to eat the egg sandwich since we unfurled our towels.
Back on dry land, the air is so warm that it towels you off. Once out of the water, I have a request: Wonder Woman is the strongest, bad-guy-tackling-est, most confident female combatant in pop culture, and I want to learn how to fight from her. I ask Gadot to put her six months of Wonder Woman defense training to use by taking me down on the sand. She enumerates all the ways it can go wrong. She's worried I'll get hurt—"I put you down, you're like, 'Oh, my back! Oh, my God!' " She insists that I won't know how to fall properly. She doesn't want people to think she is prone to random acts of violence. No, no, she won't do it.
I propose we ease into the prospect of a full-blown attack by having her teach me a different move: the slow-motion power saunter Wonder Woman unleashes when singlehandedly taking on a German platoon in order to save some members of the Belgian peasant class. It comes at almost the exact middle of the movie and is, in many ways, the film's defining shot. It's the first time viewers see Wonder Woman in full battle regalia, and it kicks off a sequence that lays bare the essence of her character: She's alone, fearlessly charging a line of men with weapons, deflecting their stupid bullets with her bracelets, and risking her life to help hapless strangers. Fans refer to this moment reverently as "the No-Man's Land scene."
Gadot scrunches up her face, as though the idea of sand strutting pains her. "Okay," she agrees. "But you have to write in the article that"—here Gal switches to my perspective, dictating my entire paragraph, so I'll just give you what she tells me to write: "Gal felt really awkward being pushed to teaching me how to walk the walk of the no-man's-man—no-man's-man? Haha!—no-man's-land. And she was really, really, really feeling awkward doing it, but since she was the hostess, she figured she'll cut me some slack and da da da."
She rises up on her tiptoes in the hot sand (Wonder Woman wears wedge sandals, she explains) and strides slowly forward, shoulders back, deliberately shifting her weight from hip to hip, ready to take on a German platoon, ready to march all the way to the beach parking lot if she has to, until she is interrupted by a man who would like a photo, please.
Gadot's grasp of English is strong, if not quite a death grip. Her words often come out sounding faintly connected, like they're all coated with honey and sticking together. (One of the top five best sounds on Earth is Gal Gadot saying "Leonard Cohen," which she says like this: leh-ow-hu-narhd cuh’wen.) Her first language is Hebrew, and because she speaks English with an Israeli Hebrew accent, all the women from Wonder Woman's mythical island home of Themyscira speak English with an Israeli Hebrew accent—even Robin Wright. Gadot's school instruction in English began in third grade, but she didn't really focus on mastering it until she wanted to watch Seinfeld and Friends. In speech, she sometimes translates Hebrew idioms into English ones that don't exist, which gives her conversation a poetic flair. (Her description of acting: "It's going with but feeling without. Do you have this term?" We should.) American English has more vowel phonemes than Hebrew, which means lines sometimes require Gadot to produce sounds that simply don't exist in her native language. This can lead to confusion, as when, at the emotional climax of Wonder Woman, our heroine unleashes an anguished cry of "Stiv!" to the heavens while witnessing an incident that imperils her boyfriend, Steve.
"I fought my accent for so long," she says. "Like, I gotta sound more American. I was a little bit shy about my accent. Until I let it go. My dialect coach told me, 'Just own your accent. As long as you're clear and understood, own it.' And since I've started to own it, I feel free. It's funny, 'cause language is about communication, and if you don't feel comfortable with your accent, you don't feel comfortable to communicate. If you learn that you're different and it's okay and you feel comfortable with it, then slowly other people start to feel comfortable with it.
"I like it that it's a vulnerable place, and I expose it because I learn more [from] it. I wouldn't want to be in a place where I say wrong things and people are afraid to correct me… [Sometimes] I feel so stupid. Because in Hebrew, whenever I take interviews, whenever I speak to anyone—I read a lot growing up, and it's important for me to sound eloquent and have good vocabulary, and be really precise with what I intend to say—I have the grammar. But in English, it doesn't matter how many times I'll read—you know, I'll make a list of words that I like to use—it's just not in my DNA yet."
In other words, she speaks English not well enough to avoid occasionally mangling colloquialisms, but well enough to say, "It's just not in my DNA yet."
A native grasp of English is not a requirement in Hollywood—Sofía Vergara is the highest-paid actress on TV—but having a foreign accent limits the roles you'll be offered. In her pre–Wonder Woman American film career, Gadot played a spy, a former spy, the wife of a spy, a henchwoman, a member of a Jewish Mob family, and a sexy woman who, in the words of another character, "is Israeli" and "doesn't speak much English."
The most distinctive characteristic of Gadot's voice, however, is not her accent but its perpetual deep raspiness—a mesmerizing quality that makes it sound like she's just rolled out of bed at all times.
"When I was a girl," she says in between sips of coffee with extra sugar syrup, "I went to speech therapy because I had a rusty voice. I used to lose my voice very easily. They taught me how to breathe, 'cause I was not breathing right."
"It's funny to imagine a little kid with such a husky, sensual voice," I say.
She cocks an eyebrow and playfully lowers her voice until it is practically dragging on the ground: "Do you want to play hide and seek?" I dissolve in laughter. She leans in close to whisper in my ear. "Come find me."
There comes a point, in every expository piece of writing about Gal Gadot, when an attempt must be made to explain the correct pronunciation of her name. If you think you already know how to pronounce her name, you likely don't, and if you know you don't know how to pronounce her name, you will never get it exactly right.
"I'm, probably 60 percent of the time, still Gadoh," says Gadot. It is not Gadoh. But it's also not quite Gah-DOTT. Her confusing advice is that the T is pronounced as "a lighter T...a softer T." She appreciates that everyone is trying their best.
As we're packing up to leave the beach, the possibly-Russian woman in the blue swimsuit behind us makes a call on her cellphone, giving us a chance to test Gadot's powers of observation.
"What language is she speaking?" she asks me under her breath, rhetorically, as she folds her towel. She knows the answer—she just wants me to notice: The woman is speaking Russian.
Gal Gadot is very hands-on. As in: When you meet her, she will put her hands on you many times, in many different places. Israeli culture is so touch-oriented that guides for Americans traveling there warn they may feel their personal space is constantly being violated in formal settings. Gadot might wordlessly reach out to brush a crumb off your face while you are eating, or lightly rest her palm on your thigh for half a minute while she tells you a story. She might scrunch up her hands into little claws and tickle you with quick finger flexes, the way you would a baby's tummy, if something about your demeanor suggests to her that you need to be tickled in that moment. Even as Wonder Woman sequels and spin-offs propel Gadot to new heights of global stardom, she probably will not lose this habit of touching, because she is a charming, beautiful woman, and it will never occur to people to shrink away from her. In speech, too, Gadot has a compulsive tendency to create intimacy, like when, the morning after the beach, she smiles conspiratorially and tells me she is taking me to a little place near her house that she loves, and it turns out to be a small store where she buys laundry detergent.
At her neighborhood bakery, Gadot patiently translates literally the entire menu for me, without skipping or summarizing any items. "This is mushroom quiche, sweet-potato quiche, tomato-and-olives quiche, pretzel, cinnamon pretzel, pistachio-chocolate Danish, raspberry Danish, vanilla-and-raisins Danish, chocolate brioche, almond-chocolate brioche, just almond brioche, chocolate croissant, butter croissant, chocolate-and-almond croissant, which is wow..." It takes a few minutes. She knows every employee of the bakery, as well as many of the patrons, and just about everyone in Israel comes up to say hello. The employees talk to her about yeast. Her hot husband swings by and kisses her on the lips. She has a long conversation with the son of a neighbor, regarding a fish recipe.
"I'm sorry!" she groans in between catch-ups. We haven't had more than two minutes of uninterrupted talking time since entering the shop, and she's beginning to worry that coming to the most popular bakery in her neighborhood that all her friends and family love was a bad idea.
"It's like your Cheers," I tell her. Everybody here does know her name.
She bursts out laughing and corrects me: "It's L'Chaim!"
We depart before any more people she loves can show up and, rounding a corner onto her gently sloping home street, run smack into a gaggle of tourists from Miami. Gadot raises a hand to her forehead, as if to shield her eyes from the sun, and leaves it there to obscure her face as she walks. It's not until she reaches her own stone threshold that someone gasps, "Gal Gadot!" Gal turns and waves before ducking inside her front gate.
"If you turn around when you hear your name, they're gonna know it's you," I say.
"But this is my house," she explains. She mimes disappearing through a doorway: "See ya!"
In Gadot's small courtyard, we encounter her dog, Lola, who is ambling around on her hind legs in a bid for attention. It's time for Gal and me to part, but I have a lingering regret from yesterday: I never got to take on Wonder Woman in hand-to-hand combat. I make a final plea.
"You're very embarrassing," she says, smiling.
"We have total privacy."
"I knew it was a mistake." Gadot raises her eyes dramatically to the heavens, but she is already flip-flop-walking to the center of the courtyard, and bracing for my attack.
This is what happens when you attempt to ambush Wonder Woman: The instant your hands fall upon her, she's already holding them—your hands are her hands now. The next second is a blur, with several feats occurring in such breakneck succession they seem simultaneous: Wonder Woman swaps places with you, your body goes earthward, and your arms get trapped by hers, forcing you to crumple over. You can't see what she's doing because, somehow, inexplicably, your glasses are no longer on your face and have resurfaced in Wonder Woman's hands. Wonder Woman's poodle mix regards you in mute horror. You are at Wonder Woman's mercy.
"Then," she coos, in a rasping sing-song, pulling you backward into a cuddle, cradling you as gently as a dove she wishes to immobilize, "I give her...a huuuug!"
Caity Weaver is a GQ writer and editor.
This story originally appeared in the December 2017 issue with the title "Gal Next Door."