Gal Gadot Set to Star in the Remake of 'Death on the Nile'

Well, if anyone was concerned that Gal Gadot was going to find herself typecast as the Amazon Princess Wonder Woman, the actress is being extremely proactive in making sure that doesn’t happen. First of all, Gal — who is currently shooting Wonder Woman 1984 — is attached to a Showtime TV series about actress Hedy Lemarr (see below), and now comes word that she is going to be starring in a remake of the Agatha Christie murder mystery Death on the Nile.

Originally published in 1937, the novel focuses on detective Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh, who directs and is expected to reprise the part from the recent Murder on the Orient Express) who, on a luxury cruise on the Nile River, uncovers a murder, but finds his job complicated by the fact that a number of his suspects end up dead as well. Gal, 33, will be playing a rich heiress named Linnet Ridgeway Doyle and, as such, is the first cast member signed thus far.

In speaking with Cinemablend at the time of Murder on the Orient Express’ release, Kenneth, 57, expressed his feelings about Death on the Nile and why he would like to tackle it: “I’d love to play Poirot again, and that’s a very, very passionate book about obsessive love. So it’s very dangerous. And given that we have a Poirot who has this mysterious relationship to [the character] Katherine… Who is she? What is she? And where does he sit when it comes to the world of romance — beyond the hint that it never goes unpunished? I think there’s gold in them thar hills if we get the chance.”

Apparently, they will.

Hedy Lemarr Project

If everything goes according to plan, it looks like Gal is also going to be playing a wonder woman of a different kind as she takes on the part of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr in a new limited series for Showtime created by The Affair’s Sarah Treem.

Hedy Lamarr was born on Nov. 9, 1914, in Austria, and had an acting career — largely through MGM — that spanned from the late 1930s to the 1950s, including such films as Algiers, Boom Town, I Take This Woman, Comrade X, Come Live With Me, H.M. Pulham, Esq., and Samson and Delilah (easily her most popular film). Additionally — and this was highly unusual for a female at the time — she was an inventor. Together with composer George Anthell, she developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes during World War II, which was able to prevent the Axis powers from jamming them. Reportedly the basic idea of what they had developed actually became a part of Bluetooth technology. In 2014, they were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Hedy, whose career as an actress went into decline in the late 1950s, passed away on Jan. 19, 2000.

As noted, this show would be a limited series along the lines of Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman’s Big Little Lies, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Patrick Melrose, Julia Robert’s Today Will Be Different, and Amy Adams’ Sharp Objects.

As aforementoned, Gal is currently shooting Wonder Woman 1984, marking the fourth time she’s playing the Amazon princess after having previously done so in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League, and Wonder Woman. Over the years, she’s starred in a number of TV series, among them 2007’s Bubot (produced in her native Israel), set in world of modeling and exploring a combination of intrigue, conspiracies and (of course) love; 2009’s The Beautiful Life, a short-lived series about a group of models who decide to live together in New York; 2011’s Asfur, a show about four guys living on a Jerusalem farm who have a month to raise $55,000 or they’ll lose their home in foreclosure (she plays a character named Kika), and 2012’s Kathmandu, which, according to IMDB, is about a “young ultra-orthodox couple who volunteer to establish ‘Chabad House’ in Kathmandu for Israel backpackers.”