Chris O’Dowd Finally Explains Why He Took Part In Gal Gadot’s Notorious ‘Imagine’ Video

Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. That’s basically Chris O’Dowd’s excuse for taking part in one of the first, and one of the most poorly received, pieces of content to emerge during the pandemic: the Gal Gadot-led “Imagine” video, in which an army of celebrities weakly sang their way through the John Lennon classic. The Bridesmaids actor finally broke his silence about taking part in the video, and his excuse essentially boils down to semi-blaming another of its participants.

“I’ll do anything Kristen [Wiig] asks me to do, so of course we just did it,” he said in an interview with the BBC’s “Grounded” podcast, as picked up by ET Canada. “It took five minutes, didn’t think about it. I presumed it was for kids. I know that Gal works for UNICEF, so I presumed it was a charity thing.”

Much like most people, O’Dowd didn’t seem to think very highly of the end results, saying it emerged during “that first wave of creative diarrhea” at the beginning of the nationwide quarantine, when the world was basically “just a bunch of people running around thinking that they had to do something when we really didn’t. We just needed to chill out and take everything in.”

The video had an impressive who’s-who of celebrities wanly singing Lennon’s song, from Mark Ruffalo to Will Ferrell to Natalie Portman to Maya Rudolph to the original screen Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter. Despite their good intentions, O’Dowd conceded that “any backlash was justified,” and said that it was “bizarre to be part of that maelstrom, I’m glad it’s over.” But is it over? After all, he oral history of Gadot’s “Imagine” video that will be done when humanity finally licks this virus should be lots of fun.

(Via BBC & ET Canada)