‘I was able to comprehend these things at a young age.’ Rachel Zegler speaks out about ‘Snow White’ backlash
Rachel Zegler is one of the latest victims of the “woke”-obsessed right-wing culture commentators. When she was cast as Snow White in an upcoming live-action remake of the Disney classic, the usual suspects threw their toys out of the pram, because Zegler is Polish and Colombian.
Zegler was sent abuse and death threats, something no-one should ever have to deal with. Her career has gone from strength to strength and she’s clearly very talented, yet plenty of people apparently hate her for nothing more than her being a woman of color and speaking her mind.
Case in point: her comments about the original version of Snow White. While speaking to Extra in 2022, she mentioned how the original film came out in 1937 (“and evidently so”) and should be updated. “There’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird, weird! So we didn’t do that this time,” she said. Instead, the new Snow White would take a “different approach.”
Despite the fact that Snow White has been considered for a long time to be one of the least feminist Disney movies, those comments brought a lot of ire down on Zegler. Add that to the racist backlash and it was a tough time for her. Now, she’s speaking out about the situation to Variety.
“[Snow White] was my mom’s favorite princess,” Zegler told the magazine. “When she was growing up, there weren’t a lot of dark-haired princesses, and that was the one she could relate to.”
Furthermore, Zegler was inspired by Brandy in the 1997 version of Cinderella. “I grew up in a house where that was Cinderella. Obviously, we watched the cartoon. But a child’s mind is the most amazing thing, where it’s just like, ‘Okay, that’s Cinderella,'” she explained. “But the blond-haired, blue-eyed, blue-dress Cinderella from the 1950s cartoon is also Cinderella. Also, Hilary Duff is Cinderella in ‘A Cinderella Story.'”
She pointedly added, “I was able to comprehend those things at a young age.”
Zegler went on to say that there would be a love story in the remake, it would just be different from the one presented in the 1937 version. Clarifying her 2022 comments, Zegler said, “I would never want to box someone in and say, ‘If you want love, then you can’t work.’ Or ‘If you want to work, then you can’t have a family.’ It’s not true. It’s never been true. It can be very upsetting when things get taken out of context or jokes don’t land.”
She went on, “The love story is very integral. A lot of people wrote that we weren’t doing [that storyline] anymore—we were always doing that; it just wasn’t what we were talking about on that day.”
The movie isn’t out yet and no-one knows what it’ll be like, yet it seems everyone has judged ahead of time. Zegler knows this and she knows a lot of the backlash was misogynist at its core. “I’ve watched women get torn down my whole life, my whole career,” she said. “We’ll watch it in the election that’s upcoming. We’re gonna witness that for a long time, I fear. Sometimes it can feel like we’re going back; it certainly felt that way when that was happening.”
Zegler will no doubt prove the haters wrong, but she shouldn’t have had to put up with them in the first place.
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