Due to her part in the impending Disney Snow White remake, Rachel Zegler has unintentionally become the topic of a great deal of online discussion.The West Side Story star will play the title role in the live-action film, which is scheduled for release in March 2024. Gal Gadot will play the Evil Queen. However, All of the remarks that have caused the response are not new. Despite the fact that they are from interviews from the previous year, the West Side Story star is currently the target of several popular TikTok videos that have gone viral. The first thing that seems to have drawn criticism is Rachel’s recollections of watching the original Snow White as a young child.
She told Entertainment Weekly, ““I was scared of the original version. I think I watched it once and never picked it up again. I’m being so serious. I watched it once, and then I went on the ride in Disney World, which was called Snow White’s Scary Adventures [and] doesn’t sound like something a little kid would like. I was terrified of it, I never revisited Snow White again.”
The script for the updated version of Snow White will also be revised to modernise the story’s theme.This was hinted at by Rachel, who told ExtraTV at the D23 Expo in October 2022:
“The original cartoon came out in 1937, and very evidently so. 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.”
“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,” Rachel continued, speaking to Variety at the same event.
Nevertheless, this event usurped a lot of controversies from the vices of TikTok. On the website, a number of films condemning Rachel have gained a lot of attention, one of which was uploaded by the user @CosyWithAngie.
She claims in the video, which has received over 10 million views, “It is not anti-feminist to want to fall in love, to want to get married, to want to stay at home, to be soft, to want to be a homemaker. None of these things makes you less valuable as a person or a woman.”
“Criticising Disney princesses is not feminist,” she added. “Not every woman is a leader. Not every woman wants to be a leader.
“Thinking that a woman is any less valuable because she falls in love or because she accepts help from somebody instead of girl-bossing her way through her problems is not feminist.”
Another viral video criticises Rachel for accepting the lead role in the remake “if you hate the original this much”.
In all, it is not the very first time Disney has faced an issue while making a disney princess remake. It’s only that the live-action versions of The Little Mermaid and The Beauty And The Beast both included changes to make their heroines a little more futuristic. Halle Bailey applauded Disney for modernising the tale of Ariel, while Emma Watson’s Belle was an inventor with a little more initiative and independence than the original. She told Edition,“I’m really excited for my version of the film because we’ve definitely changed that perspective of just her wanting to leave the ocean for a boy,It’s way bigger than that. It’s about herself, her purpose, her freedom, her life and what she wants.”
When it was reported that Halle would be playing Ariel, she too received racist remarks, similar to Rachel. The Chloe X Halle singer said to Variety last year, “I want the little girl in me and the little girls just like me who are watching to know that they’re special, and that they should be a princess in every single way.There’s no reason that they shouldn’t be. That reassurance was something that I needed.”