Rachel Zegler is an immensely talented actor and singer. She proved that with her turn as Maria in West Side Story, a role she was handpicked for by Steven Spielberg from a pool of 30,000 applicants when all she had on her resume were YouTube videos and high school theater. It was a star-making performance and since then, she’s been cast in a slew of big projects, includingShazam: Fury of the Gods!,The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, andDisney’s live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
You would think that Zegler’s sheer talent and musical theater background would be enough to warrant her casting as the original Disney Princess, but it turns out there’s a second criteria. According to people on the Internet, it is equally important that she worship at the altar of Snow White.
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If you look at comments about Rachel Zegler online, you’ll find a lot that’s immensely critical. Some of this stems from comments she’s made about the new Snow White’s attempts to modernize the character, to give her agency, and to reimagine the story through a feminist lens. Some have found her tone condescending, and too dismissive of the original work. And, for people inclined to be irritated with her,her statement from a SAG picket line— “If I’m gonna stand there 18 hours in a dress of an iconic Disney princess, I deserve to be paid for every hour that it’s streamed online” — will seem tone deaf.
I’m not going to tell you how to feel about any of those things (though I would cut a 22-year-old woman who has come of age in the public eye while starring in two movies withmaleleadswho created far more consequential publicity problems a little more slack!) But, Zegler has also received a ton of criticism for saying that she had only watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs once before she was cast in the film because it scared her when she was a little kid. Those comments have caused her detractors to call into question whether someone with so little affection for the source material should be starring in this adaptation of such an important, iconic film.
But, if you’ve ever heard Harrison Ford mockStar Wars, you know that there is no correlation between how much someone adores a character and how good they are at playing it. Passion can help, but it’s no guarantee of success.
Like a lot of millennials, I grew up watching American Idol. At least once per episode, you would see a contestant give an awful, tone-deaf performance in the first round of auditions and, after being rejected, they would plead with the judges about how much theywantedit. In their minds, spending every waking minute dreaming about competing on the show was enough to qualify them for it. But you saw their performance. You knew they weren’t good enough. Passion for a project can motivate you to work hard, but it can’t give you the talent you need to have, whether you watch American Idol religiously or are the biggest Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs fan in the world.
The inverse is also true: having a dismissive attitude about something doesn’t mean you can’t do something great with it. Stanley Kubrick thought that The Shining was just an okay novel, and turned what he felt was second-rate literature into a first-rate horror film. Francis Ford Coppola similarlydidn’t love Mario Puzo’s novel when he first read it, and had to be persuaded to make The Godfather. It wasn’t a passion project, but he made one of the greatest movies of all time.
In fact, being really passionate about something can be a hindrance. When you really love a project, it can make you obsess over every detail. It can turn you into a perfectionist, give you tunnel vision so that you can’t see the project for what it is. You’ve spent so long loving it that you can’t see why someone else wouldn’t love it. We live in an era where the people making franchise entertainment often grew up as fans. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni loved Star Wars as kid, but haven’t made a series anywhere near as good as Andor, whose creator, Tony Gilroy, has said that he was never a fan of Star Wars. Fandom doesn’t have any correlation to quality.
So, was Rachel Zegler the best person to play Snow White? Who knows! We’ll see when the movie comes out next year. But whether she is or if she isn’t will have nothing to do with how she feels about the original film.
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