Gadot organized the video in March 2020 — just as countries across the globe entered lockdown for the first time — and posted it on Instagram with the caption: “We are in this together, we will get through it together.”
The clip met with an immediate backlash, as many took to social media to call it “tone-deaf,” and it was widely mocked in the months that followed.
The former Miss Israel told InStyle that she now finds the controversy “funny” and said that, as the pandemic had hit Europe and Israel before it came to the US, she 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.”
Gadot admitted that “sometimes you don’t hit the bullseye,” despite the infamous video’s good intentions.
In October 2021, the star showed that she wasn’t afraid to poke fun at the clip or herself when she received an honor at Elle’s Women in Hollywood awards and used the opportunity to jokingly perform a few of the lines from “Imagine” on stage.
Before Cleopatra is released, however, Gadot will play a leading role in another classic tale set in Egypt — as Kenneth Branagh’s version of “Death on the Nile” is finally set to hit theaters in February after multiple delays caused by the pandemic.
