Gal Gadot Was In The Running To Play A Major Guardians Of The Galaxy Member

After watching the original "Guardians of the Galaxy" in 2014, I wouldn't have predicted that Karen Gillan's Nebula would become my favorite character by the trilogy's end. Yet, here we are.

Nebula has the most dramatic and transformative arc in the "Guardians" trilogy. In the first movie, she's a mere henchwoman for Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace). But there are hints of pain beneath her half-metal skin, particularly when she shares the screen with her adopted sister Gamora (Zoe Saldaña). Both were raised to be assassins by the "Mad Titan" Thanos (Josh Brolin) and pitted against each other.

Only by breaking away from Thanos do the two truly grow into sisters, which is what their arc in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" is all about. By "Vol. 3," Nebula has evolved into an outright hero and become a member of the Guardians. Her old personality isn't totally gone, though; she's still the short-tempered straight woman, and her seriousness brushes up against her dorky teammates. Writer-director James Gunn wrote Nebula more and more to Gillan's strengths as an actor; she makes you feel Nebula's pain with how her voice trembles, but she's also a hilarious grump.

To play Nebula, Gillan's makeup routine involved painting her skin blue, thick contact lenses, and shaving her head (for the first movie) or a bald cap (in the subsequent ones). However, she wasn't the only actor willing to face that to play Nebula.

Gal Gadot, in a 2013 interview aired on the Israeli TV network Reshet (and later reported on by E! News Online), revealed she had been up for a role where she would've had to shave her head and be painted blue. Gillan's casting as Nebula was announced weeks later, so it's a safe bet that was the part Gadot was up for.

This was also before Gadot became most famous for portraying the DC Comics superhero Wonder Woman. Gadot was previously up to play a Kryptonian warrior in 2013's "Man of Steel." That didn't pan out either, but she must've impressed director Zack Snyder enough that he cast her in the sequel.

We've no word on what Gunn thought of her "Guardians" audition, but I'll just let it hang that he is not bringing Gadot back as Diana for his new multimedia DC Universe. (We've got our own ideas for a new Wonder Woman actor here.) It makes sense, because Gadot has proven herself to be a rather... limited performer, to put it politely.

Back in the late 2010s, Gadot earned quite a bit of praise for her turns as Wonder Woman in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" and 2017's "Wonder Woman" movie. Every performance she's given since, however, has proven that the empress has no clothes. Indeed, her struggle to deliver even basic dialogue properly has made her a meme several times ("Kal-El, no!", "Enough champagne to fill the Nile!", etc.), and the latest proof of that was her disastrous performance as the Evil Queen in Disney's live-action "Snow White" remake.

Some of Gadot's life off-camera has also earned her public backlash. There was the ill-conceived video in 2020 when she led numerous other celebrities in singing John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Imagine." More gravely, Gadot is a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF); the controversy around that has been magnified by the army's ongoing campaign of destruction against the people of Gaza since 2023. (Service in the IDF is compulsory for Israeli citizens, but Gadot has spoken positively about her time in the army.)

Gadot has even claimed that "pressure on celebrities to speak out against Israel" contributed to "Snow White" bombing at the box office. As /Film's Pauli Poisuo previously noted, Gadot's "Snow White" co-star Rachel Zegler is a supporter of Palestine, which did make the movie a micro-locus for the controversy around the conflict.

Pushing aside how Gadot's public reputation has fermented in the years since "Guardians of the Galaxy" came out, how would she have done as Nebula based solely on her merits as an actor? I think she would've been fine in the first "Guardians" film. Nebula doesn't do too much there aside from fighting and pouting, and Gadot is of similar height and physicality as Gillan. But in the "Guardians" sequels, where Nebula's character really starts to blossom, she would've been out of her depth. I can't see Gadot nailing the emotional honesty of Nebula's scenes with Gamora, or the character's comedic moments, like Gillan did.

So, all things considered, it's for the best that Gadot didn't get the part of Nebula. Still, it wouldn't have been as big a catastrophe as her playing Furiosa in "Mad Max: Fury Road."