‘Total shock’: How Kristen Wiig became ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ villain
ALEXANDRIA, Va. – In the top level of an old mall turned into a vibrant 1980s shopping center for “Wonder Woman 1984,” Kristen Wiig has poured herself into a lacy, form-fitting black dress accessorized with some seriously high heels. She’s light years from the drab discount-store couture she wore as Target Lady on “Saturday Night Live.”
“You look amazing,” an employee tells Wiig’s character, Barbara Minerva, who’s doing some shopping for a gala event and checking herself out. “Do you think it’s too tight?” Wiig asks, leading her helper to confirm that “it’s just right.”
“Wow,” a self-impressed Barbara tells the woman. “I’ll take it.”
The sequence in “1984,” now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max, is a small but key evolution for Wonder Woman’s newest archnemesis, the Cheetah. Barbara, a mousy geologist who befriends our heroine Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), makes a fateful wish on a mystical rock to be powerful and more confident like her new Smithsonian co-worker, and the resulting transformation changes her fashion, physicality and ferocity.
“She was so surprised that she looked like that, but she was also kind of unaware. And she just looks totally different than she did 10 minutes before in the movie,” Wiig says now, two years after that filming day. “That’s kind of her biggest jump, except of course for the very end.”
The dowdy clothes and glasses Barbara dons at the start of director “Wonder
Woman 1984” ultimately give way to a cheetah-print leather look she wears while tossing around Wonder Woman in the White House and later going full primal as the animalistic Cheetah in the film’s action-packed climax.
Getting to be a comic-book supervillainess is a definite departure from Wiig’s comedic efforts, from “SNL” to movies such as “Bridesmaids” and “Ghostbusters.” Wiig, 47, seems to have a hard time believing she’s actually in the film.
“Honestly, when Patty talked to me about it, I was like, ‘Do you have the right Kristen? Are you talking to the right person?’ ” Wiig says with a laugh. “I was obviously pleasantly surprised that she thought about me for this character. I love superhero movies and I do watch them like, ‘Wow, I wish I could be in one of these.’ And the fact that it happened, I’m still in total shock.”
To throw down properly with Gadot, Wiig did stunt training for the entire eight months of filming plus two months before, “so I was actually physically getting stronger as the movie was being shot,” Wiig says. “I was feeling different as Barbara was feeling different, which was kind of a cool thing that I wasn’t expecting.”