Rachel Zegler Won’t Be Muzzled, No Matter How Hard Disney Tries

I have no interest in seeing Snow White — I’m not the demo, and the reviews have been mixed to bad, especially the performance of Gal Gadot — but I am impressed with Rachel Zegler, who most reviews have singled out as the lone bright spot in the film. Zegler raised a lot of fuss over the last several years with her social media posts and did so despite a giant studio basically breathing down her neck and telling her to keep her opinions to herself.

She refused. As Variety recounts, she began to be a “problem” for the studio as far back as 2022, when she raised hell after not initially being invited to the Oscars, even though the film she starred in, West Side Story, earned eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture (the Academy ultimately relented and invited her to be a presenter). That controversy put Disney on notice.

Then, last August, when Zegler posted the Snow White teaser to X, she added to the same thread, “and always remember, free palestine,” a postscript that was actually viewed four times more than the trailer itself. That, apparently, got her a handler: not only did Disney have a talking-to with her social media manager, they sent studio executive Marc Platt out to talk to Zegler personally about the post.

Did that stop her? It did not. Because three months later, after the election, Zegler posted to Instagram, “F—k Donald Trump” and “May Trump supporters … never know peace,” which got her another talking-to.

“She didn’t understand the repercussions of her actions as far as what that meant for the film, for Gal, for anyone,” one insider told Variety. Or maybe she did, and didn’t give a rat’s ass, because this is America — or at least it was — and she wasn’t going to be muzzled by a studio more interested in box-office grosses than the plight of five million people suffering in Gaza or the future of this country’s democracy.

She wasn’t wrong about her criticisms of the original 1937 Snow White, either. Disney, meanwhile, continues to scapegoat Zegler for the underwhelming performance of Snow White and apparently cannot fathom the possibility that it is underperforming because no one wanted to see a live-action Snow White — that audiences have hit their limit with Disney live-action remakes, and that the overall box office has suffered this year because the country is on fire.

And you know who doesn’t care about anti-Trump sentiment? Europe. It underperformed there, too. Yet it still had a bigger domestic opening than The Lion King last December, which eventually legged out a profit. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to release yet another live-action remake four months later, especially when every parent already knows the film will be on Disney+ soon enough.

Personally, I applaud Zegler and other young stars like Melissa Barrera, who — unlike everyone else in the media — aren’t muting their opinions because of who’s in the White House, even if it personally hurts their careers. Not that it’s put a dent in Zegler’s — she’s starring in Evita in the West End this fall — or in Barrera’s, who has one film, The Collaboration, in the can, and a forthcoming sci-fi spy thriller alongside Simu Liu coming soon, too. Ayo Edebiri and Jenna Ortega haven’t exactly been quiet, either, and they remain two of the biggest young stars on the planet (and good luck to Scream VII, which chased off both Barrera and Ortega and is now scrambling to bring back older stars to recycle tired storylines).

Source: Variety