What many people didn’t know (myself included) is that her name isn’t pronounced the way you probably just read it.
Gisele explained how to correctly say it in a recently resurfaced episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
“It’s Gisele-y,” she said, noting that in Portuguese, “you say ‘I’ at the end of the ‘L.’ Here [in America] you eat the ‘I.’”
Gisele, who was born in Brazil, said she adopted the American pronunciation of her name because casting agents could never get it right.
“I’d be like, ‘This is not a difficult name!'” she said. “So, I would just write it down, and they’d be like, ‘Gisele!’ I’m like, ‘No [it’s not] Gisele. [It’s] Gisele-y.'”
“They could never say Gisele-y, so whatever. It just became Gisele.”
