Kate Beckinsale Nearly Played Wonder Woman For This Disgraced Marvel Director

Back in 1996, when superhero movies were pretty much the sole purview of Batman, producer Ivan Reitman had the idea to make a live-action Wonder Woman movie. This turned out to be the start of 20 years of development struggles for the character, as various Wonder Woman movies were developed, dropped, redeveloped, passed on, and restarted again multiple times. There was once a planned version of "Wonder Woman" with Sandra Bullock in the part. In the early 2000s, there was a potential production with either Mariah Carey or Catherine Zeta-Jones as the superheroine. Lucy Lawless was approached about the role at one point. Dozens of screenwriters took a crack at a script. 

It was in 2005 that Joss Whedon, then still riding high from his fame on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel," was cobbling together a "Wonder Woman" movie for Warner Bros. Time Warner put out a press release announcing Whedon as the writer/director. Whedon's script was, quite curiously, to be told from the perspective of Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman's mortal beloved, and it was to be set in the modern world. Whedon hadn't cast the role of Wonder Woman, as he didn't want to think about it until he was done with his script. He wasn't ever to perfect it, however, and the project fell apart. 

In 2018, Kate Beckinsale was interviewed by Variety, and she revealed that she had once been approached to star in Joss Whedon's "Wonder Woman." Beckinsale had, at that point, recently appeared as a vinyl-clad vampire warrioress in the action/horror film "Underworld," proving her credibility as an action star. At the time, Beckinsale seemed like a logical choice. She turned the role down for several reasons, however, saying — in the Variety interview — that the script she read wasn't very good. 

Beckinsale was very frank about "Wonder Woman," saying very briefly that she was involved in the project when Joel Silver was attached as a producer. When asked if she regretted that she didn't get to play Wonder Woman, Beckinsale merely said, "No. It would have been a terrible movie based on the script that I read." 

Beckinsale went into a little more detail in an interview with Yahoo! in 2017, noting that playing another supernatural hero character so soon after appearing in "Underworld" wasn't the most desirable idea. Her daughter was born in 1999, and she started to consider how her roles might look to a young girl. Also, she would have felt some parental pressure at home if her daughter knew that she was also Wonder Woman. It would have created an odd parenting standard. In her words: 

"I don't know if I was desperate to be in a leotard. I'd already done the rubber trousers. [...] You have to take in that you have a child at some point and how much could you possibly embarrass them. [...] That's such an oppressive thing. [...] If your mother is Wonder Woman, you're going to have issues."

Whedon would go on to make two ultra-hit "Avengers" movies in 2012 and 2015, and direct Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in 2017's "Justice League," taking over the production from Zack Snyder. It wasn't until 2020 that stories of Whedon's terrible on-set behavior began to make their way to the public at large. He was said to have been cruel, mocking, and abusive on the regular. Many of the young women he worked with on "Buffy" began to confirm that he was abusive to many of his actresses and co-writers; he liked to make women cry. He threatened careers. Whedon never broke any laws, but he was revealed to be a pretty awful person. He hasn't been able to work since. 

So perhaps Beckinsale dodged a bullet. Or deflected it with her bracelet.