Stars are born, not made, we are told. But is that really true? When Rachel Zegler made her screen debut, in Steven Spielberg’s spellbinding 2021 remake of West Side Story, there was certainly a Star-is-Born breeze in the air. Zegler, then a fresh-out-of-high-school theatre kid, was an utterly winning ingenue – with a voice that could cut diamonds. Stephen Sondheim, the monolithic genius of modern musical theatre, said that Zegler sang “like a nightingale”; no higher praise could there be. Fast-forward four years, however, to the release of Disney’s execrable Snow White remake, and you can’t help but feel sorry for Zegler. For this is Hollywood, a place where stars can be un-made just as easily.
Zegler’s starring role in Snow White – a film The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey describes as “lazily conceived [and] visually repellent”, in what might actually be one of the kinder one-star reviews out there – comes off the back of a mixed run for the 23-year-old. There was her small role in Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023), a little-seen and critically sniffed-at comic book sequel; a lead role in the solid Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes– which gave her another opportunity to bust out those pipes – and last year’s Spellbound, a musical children’s animation that debuted on Netflix to scant fanfare. Snow White, though, is a misstep of an altogether different magnitude, a film that, if the press are to be believed, has been swallowed up by a vortex of controversy.
The much-touted “controversy” that has enveloped Snow White is in fact a sort of rat-king’s tangle of different, smaller controversies – most of which are either benign or entirely contrived. The backlash began when Zegler was first cast in the role, as people took issue with the fact that an actor of Colombian descent was taking a role with “white” in the name – a straightforwardly facile and largely racist argument.
Zegler came under fire again in 2022 when she made some pretty innocuous statements about the “dated” gender politics of the 1937 original – suggesting that there was something a bit stalkerish about the character of the Prince, and that the new film would be more “modern”. Again, it’s hard to imagine this eliciting any kind of strong opinion from any reasonable-minded person, but this too prompted an outcry. (She would later diplomatically attribute the backlash to Disney’s “passionate” fanbase, telling Vogue Mexico: “We’re not always going to agree with everyone who surrounds us and all we can do is our best.”)
There were other minor controversies circling the film, including consternation around the vocal pro-Israel politics of Zegler’s co-star Gal Gadot, playing the Evil Queen, and debate over the use – or non-use – of actors with short stature to play the titular “seven dwarfs”. (Peter Dinklage was among the figures to criticise the optics of casting such actors in the roles, while others have argued that sensitivity fears would end up depriving actors with restricted growth of high-profile work. (Ultimately the film opted to render the dwarfs as non-human CGI creations, with one of the seven voiced by an actor of short stature, Martin Klebba.) But read the news headlines surrounding the film – particularly those in the right-wing press – and it’s clearly Zegler to whom the whole mess has mostly clung. She is the face of a fiasco.
Exacerbating matters is Zegler’s own political outspokenness. She has been a vocal supporter of Palestine – a stance that has proven professionally precarious for other actors in similar positions, such as Scream’s Melissa Barrera – and a staunch critic of Donald Trump. After the US president won re-election last year, Zegler wrote that there was a “deep sickness in this country”, adding: “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.” She later apologised for the remarks, but it had already ossified her as a target for the American right. Snow White has become a political film, a battleground for the Trump era’s interminable culture war, and Zegler has been conscripted into the middle of it.
The positioning of Snow White as some kind of “woke” agitprop is laughable. But it’s both farcical and significant that the filmitself is so frivolous and devoid of creative merit. There is no way of re-orienting the conversation, nothing else to say about it – and no one who would really be inspired to leap to its defence. So those involved have been hung out to dry.
Bobbing for poisoned apples: Rachel Zegler in Disney’s ‘Snow White’ (Disney)
Indeed, Zegler seems to have spent much of her short career navigating controversies beyond her control. Ansel Elgort, who played Zegler’s star-cross’d paramour Tony in West Side Story, was accused of sexual assault shortly before the film’s release (allegations he has denied); it was Zegler, then just 19, who faced questions about it. “It was a real gut punch, honestly,” Zegler said, explaining the toll it had taken on her mental health. “I was sitting there having just turned 19, on the precipice of what was promised to be the biggest moment in my life, and was being held accountable [by the public] for accusations that not only had nothing to do with me but were made about a situation that was said to have occurred [five] years prior to when I had met and worked with this person.”
When West Side Story was nominated for seven Oscars, Zegler was not even invited to the ceremony, with Disney having dispensed all its allocated tickets elsewhere. After she revealed this on social media, the Academy were all but shamed into adding her to the year’s roster of presenters, ensuring that she would attend after all. But it set something of a tone. In the aftermath of West Side Story, the film’s other breakout stars got the career bounce you might have expected – Ariana DeBose won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, while Mike Faist, utterly brilliant as the soulful but incorrigible hoodlum Riff, went on to land a plum role in the buzzy tennis romance Challengers. But it’s hard to watch Zegler’s effervescent debut and not wonder if she feels hard done by.
Breakout role: Zegler in Steven Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’ (20th Century Studios)
Just where Zegler’s career will go from Snow White remains to be seen. She currently has no announced film projects squatting on her horizon; her only other film this year – the poorly reviewed sci-fi comedy Y2K – was released in UK cinemas on Friday to scant acknowledgement. It may well be that Zegler’s future lies mostly on stage: between October and February, she starred on Broadway in a musical version of Romeo and Juliet alongside Heartstopper’s Kit Connor, and it was announced this month that she will be starring in Evita at the London Palladium later this year.
For some screen actors, turning to the stage can sometimes feel like slumming it – or else a kind of ego-stroking sojourn to prove their credentials. Zegler, though, is a dyed-in-the-wool musical theatre fanatic; a long career on Broadway is probably, in many ways, a dream come true. And with a voice like hers, she will never want for work there. The psychological insulation of it must seem tempting: the world of theatre is seldom troubled by the sort of contrived political discourses that have buffeted her film career. The rules of engagement are different.
And yet, it would be a shame for Zegler’s film career to be defined by Snow White. Perhaps there is hope in the fact that screen musicals seem to be experiencing something of a revival, through the success of films such as Wonka and Wicked. As long as there’s still a market for young, charismatic actor-singers, it’s inevitable that Zegler will get a second bite at the apple. Let’s hope next time it’s not a poison one.
‘Snow White’ and ‘Y2K’ are in cinemas
