WONDER Woman star Gal Gadot is used to turning heads as one of the world’s highest-paid actresses.

But walking through a London park last summer she suddenly realised it was not her good looks that were causing a stir — but the bruises on her legs and back from filming new movie Heart Of Stone.

The physical toll of her fight scenes for the Netflix film has been intense, and the mother of three, who has also damaged four discs in her back and neck during her punishing career, said: “I had plenty of bruises.

“I remember one Sunday I was walking with the girls in the park in London and someone looked at me weird.

“I was wearing a summer dress, oblivious to the fact my legs and back were completely bruised. I was with my daughters and people were looking at me like something was off.

“But it’s inevitable I have a number of injuries from those physical roles.

“I have two neck herniations and two back herniations. It’s part of the job, unfortunately.”

Gal, 38, grew up in Israel and after keeping in shape by learning jazz and hip-hop dancing as a teenager, she became a fitness instructor for the Israeli army.

Now the actress, who also runs a film and television production company, finds fight scenes are the best bits about her work.

She said: “There are parts to making movies that I don’t like. Fighting and doing the hand-on-hand combat, I really enjoy.

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‘I was like a deer in the headlights on set’

“I think it’s because I was a dancer. A dancer gets to express herself on stage with her only tool — her body, and I feel it’s the same when we do these fights.

“It’s the one thing we do where I feel really in control.”

Given her army experience and physical strength she does many of her stunts, but she is not one of those stars who pretends she does it all.

“I always try to celebrate my stunt men and women,” she said.

“The amount of work and the risks they take, the dedication. Everything they give is just incredible.”

Some of them have been with her for years, and she added: “They’ve become like a second family to me. They really make us look like the best version of ourselves.”

Spy action thriller Heart Of Stone is the streaming service’s No1 film this week, with 33.1million views.

Gal says she sometimes has to pinch herself to believe how far she has come.

She was crowned Miss Israel in 2004, then completed two years of mandatory military service before studying to be a lawyer and working as a model on the side.

Her life changed for ever when the casting director for the 2008 James Bond film Quantum Of Solace noticed her photo on the wall of her modelling agency and asked for her to audition for the role of Bolivian agent Camille Montes.

The job finally went to Ukrainian-French actress Olga Kurylenko, but by then Gal had the acting bug and decided she wanted to move to Los Angeles to try out for more roles.

It paid off the following year when the same casting director who had worked on the Bond film chose Gal to play action girl Gisele Yashar in 2009’s Fast & Furious.

She reprised the role in 2011 film Fast Five and again in Fast & Furious 6 in 2013, performing many of her own stunts.

Her debut as Wonder Woman in the 2016 film Batman v Superman led to her character taking centre stage in the 2017 film Wonder Woman, which grossed more than £500million worldwide.

Gal told podcast Skip Intro with Krista Smith: “I remember my beginning in Hollywood. I never went to acting school and it’s not like I had the tools or the dream in me. I was like a deer in headlights and I just went for it because of the experience — and how many times in life will you have this opportunity?

“Thank you, universe, for showing me the way. I remember doing the interview for Fast & Furious and I couldn’t eat all day.

“There were eight girls and they put us all in a small room at Universal and I couldn’t be with them because it was such bad energy. They were so competitive.

“I came in and was like, ‘Hello, so nice to meet you, I’m Gal’. And everyone was like, ‘Don’t do that, weirdo’. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was too naive and too green to understand it.”

Gal refused to call herself an actress until Wonder Woman was released — the film she says changed her life completely and led to her being recognised wherever she went.

She said: “I was like, ‘OK, I’m not faking it any more’.

“From 2017, I took the reins the universe had given me and I started to navigate my life. It was like, ‘OK, let’s just go for it’.”

In 2020, Forbes magazine in America ranked her as the third highest-paid actress in the world, with annual earnings of around £25million.

In 2019, she set up her production company, Pilot Wave, with her husband of 15 years, Israeli property developer Jaron Varsano.
She said: “We are the type of couple that spends most of our time together. If we are not working together, we are on the phone ten times a day.

‘I want my girls to have a carefree life'

“For us it was a very organic evolution to join forces and work together. There is no one else I can trust more and he brings so much to the table.

“He is so smart. He’s amazing with people, talented and wonderful — and I’m very lucky to be able to work with him.”

Gal, who is about to play the Evil Queen in the upcoming Snow White film, says the couple try to live a down-to-earth life with their three daughters, Alma, 12, Maya, six and Daniella, two, at their family home in Los Angeles.

She says of fame: “I really try to normalise everything. Whenever I don’t have to have security, I try not to. When you have children, you are much more aware of the life you want to give them and the standards you want them to have.

“I don’t want them to feel like they are super-important and there are people protecting them.

“No, I want them to have a carefree life, to feel like they can run in the park and go with Mum to have ice cream.

“We go to the supermarket, I cook all the time at home, we are an open home with neighbours and whatnot coming to our house.

“We love to host and we love people. Our family and friends are back in Israel, so here we want to create our own community, which we do through food.” And if they are on their own, the family love nothing more than settling down to watch Wonder Woman.

Gal added: “Wonder Woman is something that is very alive in the household. For Maya, it was her movie of the year last year.

“Whenever I asked, ‘What do you want to watch?’ she would say, ‘Wonder Woman’. None of these movies are shot in LA, unfortunately, so whenever they happen, the girls have to move schools, so they pay a price as well. Daniella is two so she has no idea. But Maya and Alma, we got them into one of the scenes in Wonder Woman II.

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“We make sure to include them in the experience. They will come to set and come to visit and we will host dinners with the cast and crew and they’re very much a part of it so they feel like it’s theirs as well.

“Wonder Woman changed my life.”

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