STACK #195 Jan 2021

FEATURE CINEMA

was just a no-brainer of who could play your best friend; a girl you really love and think is so great, but she’s so hard on herself all the time. Meanwhile, inside she is brewing a resentment, which is dangerous.” Even if they end up in a catfight in WW84 , it’s certainly a mutual appreciation between the two leading ladies. “We’ve become very, very close friends and it was instant,” says Gadot.

herself from the world and her only goal is to help and guide mankind and try to do good.” Jenkins was given a wide reign to choose which era she wanted to drop Wonder Woman into, but the ‘80s made the most sense. “The 80s was like, ‘This is it, this is who we are and how we live’, and now we’re living in the results of a lot of that,” she says, referring to the era of opulence, big hair and big everything. “So it was an interesting way to see humankind at its best and what we still aspire to be before we knew any of the price. And the villains are very much born from that, so it ends up being a way to talk about now without having to literally be now.” Jenkins also felt that Wonder Woman is synonymous with the ‘80s because of the popular TV show. “I always loved that Wonder Woman, and I wanted to jump forward far enough so that now she’s full blown Wonder Woman in the world. She’s at the top of her game.” Audiences will recall that Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor died at the end of the first film, and without spoiling the plot of how WW84 conceives to return him to life, we will say that Pine is almost the chick in the movie, subjected to the indignity of the classic rom-com changing room montage featuring the worst of ‘80s fashion. But we’ve seen Pine poke fun at his macho image before, as he did to great comic effect in the musical Into the Woods , so it’s no surprise that he rose to the challenge in WW84 . “It was fun to play the proverbial fish-out-of- water role, which is usually played by the wom- an. The greatest actor challenge of all time is to pretend to be a baby or a child seeing everything new for the first time,” says Pine, lamenting over a particular denim fanny-pack that failed to make the final cut. And as WW84 ’s main baddie, Max Lord, actor Pedro Pascal brushed up on ‘80s fashion and found Donald Trump to be an inspiration. “Trump was such a presence in the ‘80s; such a representation of that ‘have it all’ kind of mentality. Go after it and by any means necessary,” says the Chilean-born actor, best known for his roles in Narcos , Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian . “Sadly, I think somebody like Max Lord probably would’ve idolised Trump in the ‘80s. And then he would’ve grown out of it and not voted for him.”

Chris Pine as SteveTrevor

“She’s one of my favourite people in the whole world

and I just love her. We had an

amazing time and she’s so funny and warm. I just feel really lucky that she’s in my life.” While STACK chatted with the cast over Zoom, we also met

with Gadot and Wiig in person earlier in the year; the actresses insisting on being interviewed together and literally finishing one another’s sentences. Back when we were first introduced to Gadot’s Wonder Woman in the 2017 blockbuster, it was at the end of WWI, the star and director spending much time debating where

KristenWiig as Barbara Minerva/Cheetah

to pick up Diana Prince/Wonder Woman’s story for this sequel before settling on the 1980s.

“We talked a lot about the history of Diana and how her life had been since we last saw her in 1918, all the way to the 1980s,” Gadot tells us. “She lost all her team members and she’s been very lonely. She doesn’t really want to engage and make new friends, because they’re only going to

Wonder Woman 1984 is in cinemas now

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realise that she doesn’t age. So she kind of isolated

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