This piece originally ran on Kveller’s Jewish TV Club substack.
Gal Gadot is now synonymous with “Wonder Woman” and big movie glamor. And, well, the move for glamorous movie actors nowadays is to then star in TV shows. Still, the majority of Gadot’s upcoming projects (aside from an exciting Apple TV+ limited series about Jewish inventor and actress Hedy Lamarr) are still films, including “Cleopatra,” emulating the movie that made another gorgeous Jewish woman, Elizabeth Taylor, (even more) iconic, and “Irena Sendler,” in which she’ll pay tribute to the righteous among nations Polish woman who saved thousands of Jewish children during the Holocaust (oh, and there’s that “Snow White” adaptation, but we don’t need to talk about that).
But many might not know that Gadot did start her career by starring in some really interesting TV shows, including “Entourage” where you can see her as Adrian Grenier’s arm candy and joining in on jokes about sex with Seth Rogen (has this scene aged badly? of course it has). I remember the waves this guest role made in Israel at the time, where, before she changed the game completely for actors from the Jewish state, Gadot became one of the very few Israeli stars to have garnered small roles in big American productions.
Before all that, in Israel, Gadot was mostly know as the former Miss Israel of 2004. But she did star in a handful of TV shows. She played a religious girl who escapes to Tel Aviv from Safed in a 2008 telenovela called “Dolls” (you absolutely need to check out this quintessential telenovela scene she was in).
In 2011, she starred in the second season of “Asfur,” from the makers of Netflix’s “Bros,” the streaming platform’s first original Israeli show.
And a year later, she played Yamit in the first and only season of “Kathmandu,” now streaming on Izzy, and watching it now, you can absolutely see that she’s destined for greatness. “Kathmandu” is a surprisingly great if occasionally not PC show about an Orthodox couple, Mushki (Nitzan Levratovsky) and Shmulik (Michael Moshonov), who open the first Chabad house in Nepal. The entire cast is pretty incredible, but Gadot? She already had that old Hollywood glamor, those Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor looks where her angular face and sharp eyes tell the most captivating story. When she speaks, there’s a deep and melodic quality to her voice that is equally entrancing.
