Sadly, we never did get to see an onscreen team-up between Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman before the DCEU collapsed, with The Flash serving as the final nail in a coffin that fans had long since thrown into a landfill along with all those unsold Black Adam Blu-Rays. But it turns out that offscreen, we almost had a very different kind of team-up between Margot Robbie and Gal Gadot. Specifically, Deadline reports that Robbie (who was also a producer on the film) initially campaigned for Gadot to play the title role in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

Margot Robbie, as the producer for Barbie, wanted her DCEU co-star Gal Gadot to play the title role of Stereotypical Barbie.

Part of what makes this revelation so shocking is that Margot Robbie is Barbie, both in the sense that she so memorably played the iconic character onscreen and that everything from her build to her blonde tresses meant that she was destined to play this Mattel’s favorite toy mistress. Why, then, did Robbie initially want Gal Gadot, someone who looks so completely different, to play Barbie?

According to Margot Robbie, even though the very brunette Gal Gadot doesn’t physically resemble Barbie, she embodies “Barbie energy.” This Barbie energy (presumably very different from Kenergy) comes from the fact that “Gal Gadot is so impossibly beautiful, but you don’t hate her for being that beautiful because she’s so genuinely sincere, and she’s so enthusiastically kind.” While we don’t yet know how much of Barbie’s script was completed when Gadot was seriously considered for the role, it’s worth noting that this exact combination of beauty, sincerity, and kindness is how Margot Robbie chose to play the character.

Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman never interacted on the big screen, but someday we’ll get Margot Robbie and Gal Gadot on screen together.

And even though it was Margot Robbie who ended up headlining this summer blockbuster movie, Gal Gadot was frankly honored that Robbie went to bat to cast the Wonder Woman actor as Barbie. In a recent interview, Gadot was very effusive in her praise of the other woman, saying that “I adore Margot” and that Robbie “warmed my heart with everything that she said about me.” And while Margot Robbie and Gal Gadot didn’t get to work together on the Barbie movie, Gadot was very clear that “I would love to do anything with Margot” in the future.

If Margot Robbie was a producer on the film and really pushing hard to cast Gal Gadot in the title role, then how is it that the Suicide Squad star Margot Robbie ended up playing Barbie? It all comes down to director Greta Gerwig, who wanted Robbie in the role from the beginning. And Robbie said that Gerwig (who was also a co-writer on the film) told her “I really wanna write this for you” and that afterward, Robbie was very grateful to Gerwig because “she wrote me an amazing part.”

According to Margot Robbie, even though the very brunette Gal Gadot doesn’t physically resemble Barbie, she embodies “Barbie energy.”

For as much as Margot Robbie wanted Gal Gadot to play Barbie, it certainly seems that Greta Gerwig had the right idea in making Robbie the face of this film. The movie went on to earn over a billion dollars at the box office, and credit for this goes to Robbie’s killer performance as much as the ambitious script and the tight directing. With Gerwig and Robbie making movies, it looks like Barbie was right: for the foreseeable future, every night in Hollywood will be girl’s night.