Kate Beckinsale refused to play one iconic superhero: “It would have been a terrible movie”
Since her starring role in the first of 400 Underworld movies, British star Kate Beckinsale has made a name for herself as one of the premier action heroines of the modern day.
In a genre that has been notoriously difficult for women to break into, she has consistently found work at the highest level, and while not all of it has been kick-ass, one thing we’ve never seen Beckinsale do is play a conventional superhero.
During an era where it feels like everyone and their mums is getting a crack at stepping into the pages of a comic book, this action icon has yet to don a cape, which, as it turns out, she has received the call for, she just didn’t answer.
In an interview with Variety, the Oxford dropout revealed that “there was a period of time, a long time ago” where she had been considered for the part of Wonder Woman in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). She had been a favourite of producer Joel Silver but was ultimately passed over in favour of Gal Gadot, but she isn’t bitter about losing out.
“It worked out beautifully,” she said, “That was a wonderful film that Gal did”. When asked if she had any regrets about not taking the role, she simply said, “No. It would have been a terrible movie based on the script that I read”.
The history of the first live-action Wonder Woman film is as long and winding as the Lasso of Truth. A version of the story was originally going to be told by Ivan Reitman in the 1990s, before Joss Whedon was announced as a director during the noughties, but none of those plans came to fruition, and it took until the launch of DCEU for Diana Prince to make her big-screen debut with Gadot, who had missed out on a role in Man of Steel because she was pregnant, first appearing in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Then, one year later, she got her own flick, with Patty Jenkins at the helm.
The controversial Israeli actor was far from the first choice to step into the iconic costume as, when Whedon was in charge, he wanted either Angelina Jolie or Cobie Smulders for the role. Earlier in the process, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lucy Lawless, and (bafflingly) Mariah Carey were also up for consideration, and while Charlize Theron thought she was being asked to audition for Diana, she turned the film down when she found out they actually wanted her to play her mother instead; that can’t have felt good.
While Wonder Woman turned out to be a huge financial success, becoming the highest-grossing movie ever by a solo female director, it didn’t fare so well critically, and Gadot’s performance was, to put it lightly, terrible. Her accent, her delivery, and her understanding of basic human emotions have been mocked roundly by just about everyone, and come up as memes to this day.
With the character’s future hanging in the balance under new management, maybe Beckinsale will get a crack at her one day; at least we know she’ll do a better job than her predecessor.
