Once upon a time there lived an actress named Rachel Zegler who was plagued by scandal after scandal – without having ever done anything wrong.
You see, the thing with Zegler is that her talent is often outshone by the comments of her co-stars, and in recent times she’s even received backlash for comments of her own (as unproblematic as they were).
The 23-year-old star is set to appear as the title character in Disney’s upcoming live action remake of Snow White, but the film has once again had its fair share of… misunderstandings.
Zegler came under fire after a 2022 interview with ExtraTV where she described the original film as “dated” but it’s the alleged beef between her and co-star Gal Gadot that has fans really talking.
While the supposed feud has never been confirmed by either star, they did recently present an award together for the Oscars without even so much as sharing a glance with each other – something social media sleuths were all to quick to point out.
So, how did Zegler find herself at the centre of so many controversies four years into her Hollywood career?
How Rachel Zegler became famous at such a young age
Rachel Zegler was born on May 3, 2001, to parents Gina and Craig.
She grew up in New Jersey, where she says the skyline of New York City was just out of reach.
After attending a Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast when she was four years old, Zegler knew that she would one day call that skyline home.
“I grew up with the New York City skyline visible from my parents’ bedroom in Clifton, New Jersey. It was the coolest thing to be just out of reach for me,” she said during her speech at Variety‘s The New York Party in late 2024.
Watch the video above.
At 12 years old, Zegler scored her first role in a community production of Fiddler on the Roof, and from there, she went on to star in several musicals throughout high school.
“My sister was always the singer of the two of us, so I kind of shied away from it. I was interested in other things, like fashion, but when I started performing, people started paying attention,” Zegler told Wonderland.
When she was 14, Zegler performed in a production of Les Misérables, deciding to post a recording of her singing to YouTube simple because she “thought it was good”.
“For some reason, people began to subscribe and I gained a huge following,” she shared.
“It made me think that I might have something special to share with the world.”
When she was 16 years old, a friend of Zegler’s told her about an open casting call she’d seen on Twitter (now X).
Steven Spielberg was looking for the stars of his upcoming movie-musical, West Side Story.
“I really believed in my talent very early on, and probably in a psychotic way, to the point where I was, ‘Yeah, I’m in an audition for a Spielberg movie; maybe then I won’t go to college.’ That was the idea I had,” she told Elle.
After almost a year of auditioning, Zegler was plucked from the pool of more than 30,000 to take on the lead role of Maria in the film.
She went on to score a nomination at the Critics Choice Awards for her performance, and even won the award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes – though she notably was excluded from the 2022 Oscars invite list despite being the nominated film’s lead.
From there, she had a role in 2023 superhero film Shazam! Fury of the Gods before skyrocketing to a new level of fame as Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and scoring her first role in Broadway as the lead in the musical adaption of Romeo + Juliet.
