Wonder Woman 1984 star Pedro Pascal has admitted he briefly forgot he was cast in NBC's failed 2011 Wonder Woman TV pilot.
Developed by David E. Kelley, NBC's Wonder Woman pilot featured Adrianne Palicki as Wonder Woman and Pascal as Ed Indelicato, her liaison to the LAPD. "Getting Wonder Woman 1984 blew my mind so much that anything that had ever happened to me prior, I don’t recall; I had no association," Pascal admitted in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "And that’s not to say that getting the Wonder Woman pilot from 2011 wasn’t a party for me, and I was devastated it didn’t get picked up."
Pascal felt the cultural impact of 2017's Wonder Woman movie was the reason his role in Kelley's failed TV pilot temporarily slipped his mind after being cast in Wonder Woman 1984, noting, "In terms of our current era of superhero movies, it seems like there was nothing before this Wonder Woman." The Wonder Woman sequel actually marked Pascal's second collaboration with director Patty Jenkins after 2015's Exposed, a failed TV pilot for a drama series about an investigative journalist who goes to questionable lengths to shine a light on the truth.
Kelley's Wonder Woman TV pilot was a dramatic re-imagining of the Wonder Woman mythology that made several big changes to the titular character, like having her alter ego, the L.A.-based Diana Themyscira, run a corporation that creates merchandise based on the Wonder Woman brand as a way of funding her crime-fighting on the side. "I love Adrianne Palicki. I love David E. Kelley," Pascal told Entertainment Weekly. "And I thought it was a very, very risky and interesting take in terms of what they were trying to do."
NBC's Wonder Woman pilot ended up being the first of two failed attempts to bring the DC superhero to the small screen in live action in the 2010s. The other one was The CW's Amazon pilot, which was a relatively faithful retelling of Wonder Woman's origin written by Young Avengers comic book co-creator Allan Heinberg in 2012 and later redeveloped by Ultimate X-Men writer Aron Eli Coleite. However, although The CW formally passed on the Amazon pilot in early 2014, Heinberg would go on to write the screenplay for the Wonder Woman movie three years later.
Directed and co-written by Patty Jenkins, Wonder Woman 1984 stars Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal and Natasha Rothwell. The film is currently in theaters and on HBO Max.
Source: EW