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The story she tells about winning Miss Israel at eighteen is that she entered the competition on a whim, never expected to win, and then deliberately tanked the Miss Universe pageant out of fear of going further — which says something essential about a woman who has never actually chased the things that found her. What she did choose, deliberately and seriously, was two years of mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces as a combat instructor, followed by law school, followed by a reluctant audition her agent talked her into for a Bond film she didn't get — all of which somehow led to the role of Diana Prince, a character she has inhabited across multiple films with a moral clarity and warmth that turned Wonder Woman into a genuinely beloved superhero for millions of people worldwide. In 2025 she became the first Israeli actor ever to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an honor that lands differently when you know she spent years in school studying to be a lawyer and once told her agent she was not an actress and had no intention of becoming one.

She was supposed to be a scholar — she read French and Russian literature at Oxford with a brilliance that her professors noticed, and acting was almost an afterthought that interrupted what might have been an entirely different kind of life. The daughter of a beloved British television comedian who died of a sudden heart attack when she was five, she grew up shaped by that absence in ways she has spoken about with a rare candor, building a career that moved from period British dramas to the Underworld franchise's leather-clad action heroine with a wit sharp enough to survive both extremes intact. In 2024 she was hospitalized after grief over her stepfather's death burned, quite literally, a hole in her esophagus — and she wrote about it publicly with the same dry, unflinching humor that has always been her most honest quality, reminding everyone that behind the extraordinary face is an extraordinary person who has been through more than most people know.

Jenna Ortega learned to craft a perfect deadpan on Disney Channel sets that never quite understood her, then turned Wednesday Addams into a cultural phenomenon—she choreographed that dance herself, refused to smile on cue, and became the rare young star who seems to genuinely enjoy being strange.