Gal Gadot Confirms She Was Threatened By Joss Whedon
Gal Gadot has now confirmed that the director threatened to make her career miserable. Here's what she did next.
This article is more than 2 years old
Joss Whedon’s cut of Justice League released in 2017. All these years later, we’re still slowly getting more details about what happened on the set once Whedon took over. While Ray Fisher has been sharing details about his negative experiences early on, actress Gal Gadot has been very slow and careful about sharing her own experiences with the director. A month ago, she had only one sentence to say about her experience. Now, she’s opened up a bit more during an interview with Israel’s N12 News.
There’s a video of the interview here, but Gal Gadot is speaking Hebrew. Translated to English, she says, “I had my issues with Joss, and I handled it. He threatened my career and said that if I do something, he will make sure my career is miserable and I took care of it on the spot.”
She has spoken about this previously, but only to say, “I had my issues with [Whedon] and Warner Bros. handled it in a timely manner.” This was a very diplomatic response from Gal Gadot, but hardly tells us anything. In the new interview, we’re confirming that he did threaten her career. The combination of these two statements also clarifies that he said if she told anyone he would make her career miserable, and yet she went and spoke to Warner Bros. anyway and they handled the situation.
Gal Gadot has not said what she was arguing with Joss Whedon about, but others have surmised that they were in disagreement over something pertaining to her character, Wonder Woman. It will be interesting to see if she’ll share more about this in the future, since she is slowly sharing small pieces of information on her experience. However, it is big news that she has now confirmed he directly threatened to make her career miserable. It’s another confirmation of Joss Whedon as a director who was on a power trip, felt he could bully the people he was working with, and willing to threaten them to make them do what he wanted. Unfortunately, there’s an emerging pattern of behavior coming out about the director. Most believe that he is now blacklisted and won’t be working in Hollywood again.
It’s good to see that Gal Gadot spoke to the studio despite Joss Whedon’s threats and that she spoke up when he told her to stay silent. It sounds like she was able to handle things well for herself. Her experience with Warner Bros. executives was apparently very different from Ray Fisher’s. He has spoken at length about racism on the set, in editing, and has said that WarnerMedia executives did not help resolve these issues. The actor has said that DC President Walter Hamada interfered with investigations at WarnerMedia involving his claims. WarnerMedia has denied these claims.
In recent months, actresses who worked with him during the filming of his television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel have spoken about his abusive behavior. Sarah Michelle Gellar, the star of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, said that she is proud to be associated with her character, but doesn’t want to always be associated with Joss Whedon.
Most of the abuse stories surrounding Whedon end up with a lack of justice. While we don’t know much about what happened with Gal Gadot on set yet, it’s good to see that, at least in this case, a studio stepped in and stopped the director to the actress’s satisfaction. Still, with Gadot saying he threatened her career, and Ray Fisher making claims, it’s hard to understand why Whedon wasn’t pulled off the project or otherwise reprimanded from the reports that have come out so far about the actions he took on Justice League.
