Jamie Dornan is speaking out about the “Imagine” video he appeared in that was helmed by Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot and received backlash online.
The Fifty Shades of Grey actor, 37, spoke on the Tea with Me podcast with Shane Todd in which he recalled how he came to be involved with the video.
“Kristen [Wiig] and I did a movie together last summer that’s meant to be coming out on July 31 but who knows what will happen,” Dornan said of the coronavirus‘ effect on movie releases being pushed back.
He continued, “We got on brilliantly. I would do anything for her — that’s how highly I think of her. I was the biggest fan of her before anyway. Kristen texted two days before that came out, ‘My friend Gal and I are trying to organize this thing to lift people’s spirits. We basically just want you saying a round of Imagine.'”
Dornan agreed to take part, telling Todd, “So I was like, ‘Of course I’ll do it.’ I thought it was a lovely thing to do. Kristen said, ‘This is great. Whatever happens, happens.’ And then she texted a couple of days later saying, ‘Sorry.'”
The actor said Gadot was “trying to do a good thing,” adding, “I just got dragged along with it.”
As for what Dornan thinks caused the massive online backlash, he said, “I’ll tell you what the problem was. I literally did mine in the toilet of my house. Quite clearly, some people had escaped to their second home. There’s too much acreage in the background, too many beautiful trees swaying in the background, clearly in front of an ocean, that sort of craic.”
“I was quite aware of that whenever I was doing it, to make it normal,” he said.
Gadot, 34, shared the original video on her own Instagram account in March, telling her followers that she had been “feeling a bit philosophical” while in “self-quarantine” during the ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The Israeli actress shared that she had been inspired after seeing a video of an Italian man playing the trumpet on his balcony for his neighbors while the country remains on a nation-wide lockdown.
“He was playing ‘Imagine’ and there was something so powerful and pure about this video,” she said before the cameo-ridden song began.
The video included Natalie Portman, Jimmy Fallon, Zoë Kravitz, Will Ferrell, Amy Adams, James Marsden, Mark Ruffalo, Sarah Silverman, Sia, Maya Rudolph and more.
However, Gadot’s video received some criticism online from people who said that celebrities should be donating to aid in COVID-19 relief rather than simply singing about a better world.
John Mayer hilariously trolled the video after it was posted saying he’d been asked by Gadot to star in the montage but he “totally misunderstood the assignment.”
“Hey everyone, John here with a Current Mood Mini, So this week, Gal Gadot and a bevy of other celebrities released a rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’ It went far and wide across the internet,” Mayer explained in the clip.
“I have to come clean about something,” he continued. “They actually asked me to be a part of it, and I totally misunderstood the assignment, and thought they wanted me to sing ‘Imagine‘ by Ariana Grande, from her 2019 smash hit album, Thank U, Next.”
As of Friday, there are 1.6 million cases of coronavirus worldwide, according to World Meter. Of those cases, there have been over 102,000 deaths and over 375,000 recoveries.
In the U.S. there are a little over 500,000 cases of the virus, with over 18,000 deaths and over 27,000 recoveries.
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