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.
