The Funniest ‘Wonder Woman’ Scene Was Completely Improvised
A few weeks before Wonder Woman hit theaters, film critics took to social media to share their early reactions of the newest movie in the DC Cinematic Universe. And while critics had plenty of great things to say about the film’s overall tone and Gal Gadot in particular, one sentiment above all others kept bubbling to the surface: this movie was funny. When fans got a chance to see the movie for themselves, they were pretty quick to agree. Gadot’s fish-out-of-water take on Diana Prince, combined with Chris Pine’s deadpan delivery as the superhero’s straight man, makes Wonder Woman one of the funniest comic book movies to date.
As it turns out, some of the best lines in the movie weren’t even originally in the script. According to an interview with Pine in Entertainment Weekly (via ScreenRant and Heroic Hollywood), some of the film’s best comedic bits — including the hilarious exchange on the boat when Diana Prince and Steve Trevor leave Themyscira — were entirely improvised by the film’s two leads. Here’s what Pine had to say:
She has to be the straight woman; that’s the harder part. She’s delivering lines like ‘I was brought to life by Zeus,’ that is just ridiculous. And she has to say it with a straight face, with a certain amount of innocence and earnestness. I get to react like any human being would to something as ridiculous as that. So I had it easy.
While everything that happens on Themyscira constitutes the best parts of the film, the boat sequence in particular is a real standout. When Diana Prince explains that men are “unnecessary” for pleasure, one woman in my theater stood up and shouted; it also lead to perhaps my favorite review of Wonder Woman by The Guardian’s Steve Rose, who expressed confusion at that line of dialogue (let him figure that one out on his own, folks). To hear that Pine and Gadot made the entire exchange up on the spot not only speaks to their skills as actors, it also speaks to their deep understanding of the characters they are playing. It would be easy for an exchange like that to come across as a cheap joke, but instead, it’s a battlecry for same-sex couples everywhere.
Wonder Woman is now playing in theaters everywhere.