Rachel Zegler and the Fall of a Woke Princess
By Kimberley Tait
In December 2021, Steven Spielberg’s remaking of the classic, star-crossed love story, West Side Story, enchanted millions of movie-goers. The young female star Rachel Zegler—a sparkling inconnu selected from 30,000 hopefuls considered for the role of Maria— transported audiences with her songbird voice, red-belted wasp waist, and sheen of innocence.
While Zegler infused much more pluck into her Maria than Natalie Wood in the 1961 adaptation— she even made the first move kissing Tony— the film felt eternal. Refreshing and spellbinding because of it. Robbie Collin, a film critic for The Telegraph in the UK, put it beautifully: “Relevance is easy: timelessness is the real artistic feat.”
Steven Spielberg’s film was a triumph of timelessness. Timeless filmmaking and a timeless love story— the kind Hollywood rarely makes any more. It was destined to be a box office hit.
Except it wasn’t. The movie grossed $76 million worldwide against a production budget of $100 million. What doomed it to fail? Two big factors: contagion and culture.
First, the movie was released in theaters only just as the new omicron strain of Covid began spreading. People were also beginning to realize— hang on a second, this isn’t what Dr. Fauci and President Biden promised!— vaccinated people were still contracting and spreading the virus, prompting many to wait to stream it at home.
Second, by that time identity politics were holding the arts in a death grip. Even artists trying to be hyper-sensitive about minorities were lambasted for not being sensitive enough. Though Spielberg only cast Latin American actors in relevant roles and traveled to Puerto Rico to hear what changes college students would like to see in his remake, critics said Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner, both white men, got it wrong.
The Cut’s Andrea González-Ramírez slammed the film as “struggl[ing] to engage with the elephant in the room: Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and most of what the Sharks experience is directly linked to imperialism on top of your classic American racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. There are weak attempts to address this.” Puerto Rican film critic Josie Meléndez concluded: “It feels like a betrayal of the culture you’re using for your art.”
Zegler was part of the problem. She is an American of Polish and Colombian descent (her maternal grandmother immigrated from Barranquilla to the U.S. in the 1960s), born in Hackensack, New Jersey with no connection to Puerto Rico. Buzzfeed skipped over these details when interviewing her: “How does it feel to be part of this push for authentic Latinx representation in Latinx roles?”(It’s worth noting a November 2021 poll found 40% of voters of Latin American descent at the time considered the gender-neutral term Latinx offensive.)
Zegler did not bat an eyelash, explaining: “My experience as a Latina in Hollywood is just not having seen myself a lot growing up. And if I did see myself, I wasn’t necessarily portrayed in a positive light.” The Daily Beast’s assistant managing editor Mandy Valdez was not buying it, publishing an article “Why Can’t ‘West Side Story’ Just Cast a Puerto Rican Maria?”
Regardless, the film catapulted Zegler to fame at the tender age of twenty. She was cast in her next major Hollywood project, once again transcending ethnic constraints. As the star of Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Zegler would portray the young woman described as having “skin as white as snow” in the original story. (The Daily Beast did not publish an article “Why Can’t ‘Snow White’ Just Cast a White Snow White?”)
Sticking with good, old-fashioned gratitude for scoring the iconic role was not enough for Zegler. She openly mocked the original Snow White (released as a cartoon in 1937) with a toothy grin, condemning its “big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her” as “weird.” This might have been Tim Walz’s kernel of inspiration for dubbing anything conventional as weird— one of the surreal and unsuccessful marketing tactics used in the early stages of the Harris-Walz campaign.
To put a fine point on it, Zegler gushed that the Snow White remake— co-written by Greta Gerwig, who reworked Louisa May Alcott’s masterpiece Little Women in 2019 to cater to modern sensibilities— is “really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful.” Zegler clarified that Snow White is “not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true.”
According to Zegler, a powerful woman cannot be in love! To focus on love is to be weak and weird. Zegler walked back her comments, telling Variety magazine the criticism she received “made [her] sad.”
All the while, David Hand said his father and Walt Disney, who worked together as the animators of the original 1937 film, “would be turning in their graves” over the disrespect of the remake. But no matter— in the school of woke, rewriting classics and shredding unfashionable values is necessary and praise-worthy. As a rising Hollywood starlet, Zegler was emboldened by the trend. She played the part of the enlightened progressive for which she would be rewarded. So why not go further?
Zegler did. When she posted a message on X thanking fans for watching the new Snow White trailer, she casually tacked a “And always remember, free Palestine” message onto the end, showing astonishing insensitivity towards her Israeli co-star Gal Gadot and Jewish director Spielberg who launched her entire career.
Just as the dust began to settle on that PR calamity, Zegler could not resist unleashing her vitriol following Donald Trump’s victory this month, posting on Instagram her hope that Trump and his supporters “never know peace.” That’s upwards of 76 million Americans who are now much less likely to purchase tickets for Snow White when it is finally released in March 2025.
The exasperation of Disney executives— straightjacketed by their own ideological choices— must be reaching new heights. They already revealed the cost of making the movie ballooned to $269.4 million by the end of 2023, blowing its budget more than a year before its release. After a dismal five years of losses from its Disney+ streaming platform, they are desperate to make it a blockbuster winner.
Zegler posted an apology for her post-election outburst: “I let my emotions get the best of me… I am sorry I contributed to the negative discourse.”
On the heels of her previous gaffes, many viewed this as an insincere half-apology only given at the urging of Disney, frantically trying to save their sinking ship. Many are calling for Disney to remove Zegler from the film, which would be a financial impossibility so late in the game. Or promise to never cast her in future productions. After all, Disney fired actor Gina Carano in 2021 after a firestorm following, among other things, her listing “beep/bop/boop” as her gender pronouns on social media.
At this stage, Disney has made its bed and now must face the backlash. Many public figures— from Lex Fridman to Justine Bateman— have declared the death of woke in the wake of Trump’s win. While the Left-dominated arts will no doubt continue to push a progressive agenda— and even double down on it in the near term— producers and publishers will need to navigate a distinct vibe shift. For the first time in years, people feel able to vocalize without apology how tired they are of being force fed identity politics in art. How much they are craving quality and sincerity in cinema and in stories, supporting actors and writers who shoot for timelessness more than easy relevance. How ready they are to vote with their wallets.
Once upon a time, Rachel Zegler was the Hollywood princess who soared to fame on a progressive wave. She has crash landed in a new world. Snow White’s box office figures next March will be her reckoning.
Kimberley Tait is a novelist, business writer and brand builder, and founder of West End Words. Her debut novel, Fake Plastic Love (Flatiron Books), is a story of bright young graduates searching for authenticity in our digital age. Kimberley is committed to free speech and genuine expression that are vital for art to flourish.
