22-year-old actress Rachel Zegler has been facing backlash for her comments about the upcoming live-action of Snow White, made in an interview at Disney’s D23 Expo in 2022.
The interview, in which Zegler says the 2025 version of the story has a “modern edge,” has been infuriating users ever since it was released.
“I just mean that it’s no longer 1937,” Zegler said. “We absolutely wrote a ‘Snow White’ that…she’s not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.”
As reasonable as some of the initial critiques of Zegler’s statement were, criticism quickly turned into outright hate. Some comments are not even directly disapproving of the supposed pseudo-feminism expressed in Zegler’s statement, but the way she said it.
It’s a tale as old as time: a young female artist tells it like it is and doesn’t pretend to be endlessly grateful for the opportunities gifted (never earned) to her and all kinds of assumptions start being made about her. She’s arrogant, she doesn’t understand the character, she doesn’t deserve the part or the success.
Disney has been making one live-action movie after the other, and the dissatisfaction of the public about changes made to the beloved original stories is nothing new. The truth is, there wasn’t a lot of excitement surrounding the Snow White live-action until Zegler admitted she was never a big fan of the original movie; suddenly, the consensus that the public is tired of live-action adaptations manifested as hate directed toward Rachel Zegler, and that is why they won’t be watching the movie.
Of course, Rachel Zegler’s expression of a “woke” feminism in the interview striked some people as outdated and was the origin of much of the criticism of the actress online. But a two-minute interview is not enough time for Zegler’s set of values to be detailed in its entirety.
An underlying hatred for women resurfaces every time someone like Rachel Zegler, and many before her, doesn’t play along with the grateful-all-the-time behavior expected from women in the spotlight. And in Zegler’s case, it’s not about Snow White or combating girlboss feminism anymore, but about focusing all this hate and frustration on one single person: a young woman who is just doing her job, a job she never actually complained about having, but was honest about.
This is just another example of the treatment given to young women in the public eye, like those in the film and music industries, that doesn’t even compare to the treatment given to male artists. Despite most comments about Rachel Zegler being negative, there were also many users speaking up in defense of the actress.
One user writes “It’s so funny how men can get away with hating the movies they star in. And not funny ‘haha,’” to which another replies, “but when Rachel Zegler says a movie from 1937 is outdated suddenly people react like she shot someone.” Zegler liked the original post.
The possibility of being defined as annoying, and therefore unappealing, to the public any time they say something is one of the most common ways sexism is expressed towards female artists, and it’s time it ends.
The comparison of women is also a problem, and an outdated one: one montage with over a million likes on TikTok compares videos of Zegler saying that she was scared of the original cartoon with a video of Halle Bailey (Ariel in The Little Mermaid live-action), saying Ariel was her favorite princess as a child, implying that Zegler is ungrateful and therefore undeserving of the honor of playing a classic Disney princess and Bailey did it better.
In fact, this invention of any sort of rivalry between women is more harmful than any “woke” feminist statement Zegler could have given. In reality, both actresses supported each other after being attacked for being cast in their respective movies.
The thing is, Rachel Zegler is not responsible for the changes made to modernize the original story. She is responsible, however, for promoting it and being passionate about it, otherwise people would complain that she didn’t love the story enough as they did when she claimed the original Snow White was weird for having “a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her.”
Those who claim to be feminists and continue to hate Rachel Zegler for something she said very briefly contradict themselves. The critique of films that preserve overused versions of feminism – such as the “not like other girls” female protagonist – shouldn’t be on the actresses at all, but on studios that continue creating and funding those movies that no one asked for in the first place.
There seems to be an inherent need to villainize women out of all people involved in projects that have generated heated discussions online. Zegler is yet another victim of Hollywood’s Annoying Woman Syndrome – a growing epidemic for women in the public eye who don’t consistently perform the way we want them to, as Laura Brodnik writes for Mamamia, which contributes to the understatement of her actual talent and hard work by those not invested enough to see her as more than what she said in a two-minute interview.
Zegler stars in the recently released adaptation of the Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and has been extensively praised online for recent interview answers in contrast to the feedback for her interview at Disney’s D23 Expo.