Entertainment Weekly The Ultimate Guide to Wonder Woman

By Meredith Corporation

Diana Prince returns to the big screen in Wonder Woman 1984, a totally rad new adventure that will have fans falling in love with the DC Comic superheroine all over again! In this gorgeously illustrated special issue devoted entirely to the Amazonian Princess, the editors of Entertainment Weekly celebrates Wonder Woman in all her forms: from her groundbreaking girl-power comic book debut 80 years ago to the beloved 1970s TV show starring Lynda Carter to Gal Gadot's action-star spin on the first superheroine in 2017's Wonder Woman. Includes: *Behind-the-scenes photos and exclusive interviews with stars Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal and director Patty Jenkins*The evolution of Wonder Woman's comic roots, from prim skirts to go-go boots to her modern-day armor*The surprising story of Wonder Woman's creator—the man who dreamed up her Golden Lasso of Truth also invented the lie-detector testand much more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meredith Corporation
• Release date: Jan 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781547856343

Book preview

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Inside the Films

Wonder Woman 1984

Goddess in Gold

In Wonder Woman 1984, Gal Gadot’s ultimate warrior princess takes flight in an epic adventure set during the totally tubular decade. BY LEAH GREENBLATT

AT LAST! WW84!

Clad in her Golden Eagle armor, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) prepares for battle.

GAL GADOT IS WAITING FOR THE BOOSH. EYES narrowed, bouncing lightly on her toes—float like a butterfly, sting like an Amazonian Queen—she moves soundlessly through the chilled air of a cavernous studio outside London, her shoulder blades blooming into a set of molten-gold wings.

When the explosion comes, it’s muffled, but the soldiers who emerge from the blast in full combat gear don’t look like they’re here to make friends. As she dispatches them one by one, it’s impossible not to imagine how many of them are experiencing the highlight of their working lives in this very moment: men who will spend the next 40 years telling every first date and airplane seatmate about that one time they were annihilated by the warrior princess of Themyscira.

Ahhh, so uncomfortable! Gadot, 35, says with a good-natured grimace after the scene finally wraps, shrugging off her shiny albatross and slipping into the plush gray robe and Ugg boots that wait for her just offstage. It’s the closest the onetime Miss Israel will come to uttering an uncheerful word, even after long hours spent in a wingspan that defies the natural laws of both orthopedics and most actual birds.

Endurance, though, is built into the brand: A monthslong shoot has already hopscotched from the sunbaked Spanish cliffs of Tenerife to suburban Virginia and now back to the bone-chilling damp of England in early winter. On the set of 2017’s Wonder Woman, Gadot remembers, she and costar Chris Pine would sing Foreigner’s Cold as Ice to each other between takes to stay warm. In the follow-up—due for a delayed release owing to the COVID-19 pandemic—the action moves from the grim gray-scale battlefields of WWI to the neon era that birthed many a hair band—and the movie’s titular star too.

I was born in ’85, but it’s funny, I really do remember, Gadot says in her lightly accented English, settling into a canvas-back chair steps from where she’d just brought a battalion to its knees. "Probably more so because of my parents, but it was such a standout decade as much as it goes with fashion, music, politics. And the look of everything! The colors."

If you had to pick just one from the palette, you might want to start with green: the color of money, of course, but envy too. In 1984 America was at the peak of its power and its pride, says associate producer Anna Obropta. Apple computers and parachute pants, wealth, commercialism, glamour, even violence—everything was larger than life. It was a decade of greed and desire, a time of ‘Me, me, more more more.’

Returning director Patty Jenkins, whose sure hand guided the first film to near-universal acclaim and more than $820 million worldwide, elaborates: It was a time where no cost had shown up yet. There was the fear of the Cold War, she concedes. But it really was like, ‘This is gonna go on forever!’ The feeling that the world was this cornucopia that would never stop giving was so enormous.

Not so much, maybe, for Gadot’s Diana, a woman forged in the last movie’s era of scarcity and sacrifice. Now working at the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C., she lives quietly, still mourning the loves she’s left behind. She has not only had the loss of [Chris Pine’s] Steve Trevor, explains producer Charles Roven (the Dark Knight trilogy). She’s lost nearly all the people that are important to her because they’re not immortal, and her life is actually quite lonely and spartan. In fact, the only joy that she gets out of it is when she’s actually doing something for people, if she can help those in need.

In this decade, though, the line between want and need is easily blurred. Enter Maxwell Lord, a self-made mogul-slash-guru played as a sort of insidious mix of ’80s icons both fictional (Gordon Gekko) and real (Tony Robbins) by Pedro Pascal. Max is a dream-seller, says the 45-year-old actor, best known for his turns on Narcos, The Mandalorian and Game of Thrones. It’s this character who encompasses a component of the era which is, you know, ‘Get whatever you want, however you can. You’re entitled to it!’ And at any cost, ultimately, which represents a huge part of our culture and this kind of unabashed—it’s greed, he breaks off, laughing. "It’s f---ing greed, of course. But it’s also about ‘How do you be your best self? How do you win?’ So he’s definitely the face of that version of