Rachel Zegler sat down with Harper’s Bazaar and tried to paint her Snow White flop as some kind of personal victory/victim story, even though the film bombed and cost Disney around $170 million. She complains about mixed messages on her looks, saying critics called her too white for West Side Story and then not white enough for Snow White, while she stubbornly declares that she refuses to change herself for anyone else’s comfort. Snow White has always been depicted as the fairest in the land, meaning white, but Zegler acts like that’s just other people’s problem.
Disney bears most of the blame for this mess, because they chose to cast a half-Colombian activist as their most famous princess, knowing full well it would invite backlash from the start, and they just let her run wild until her comments defending Palestine created real tension with co-star Gal Gadot, who needed extra security because of it. They even flew an executive to Zegler’s New York home to beg her to stop talking, but she kept going with her rants about the prince being creepy, her girlboss feminism takeovers, and political jabs that alienated fans everywhere. The whole project was a bad call from Disney right out of the gate, since they ignored the obvious risks of handing their iconic character to someone so eager to rewrite it.
Zegler admits that therapy and anxiety medication helped her cope with the fallout, and she somewhat blamed her youth by claiming her frontal lobe wasn’t fully developed yet, wishing she had gained more maturity before the spotlight hit her so hard. She still refuses to fully own her role in the disaster, because instead of apologizing she doubled down on nastiness like wishing Trump supporters no peace, which turned off half the country and contributed to the film’s global failure at the box office. Disney cast her without a strong handler in place, allowed her spoiled “theater kid” energy to dominate every interview, and watched as audiences stayed away in droves.
These days Zegler dodges direct political questions in interviews, which shows a tiny bit of learning on her part, but it’s probably too late to repair the damage to her image as that insufferable theater kid who skimmed a few activist talking points and thought she could lecture the world. Hollywood producers now see her as a walking box office risk, someone whose unfiltered mouth could sink any project, and she clearly needs a tough manager or handler who will give her the hard truths she does not want to hear but would respect enough to follow. Without that kind of guidance, she will keep coming off like a spoiled brat who puts her foot in her mouth at every turn, and her career will suffer for it just like Snow White did.
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English (US) · 