As I come to find out, Zegler has long been a Disney devotee, so being able to take her parents to Disney World at the drop of a hat feels like the perfect success metric for someone who is really just a fan at her core. Growing up, her favorite princess was Belle from Beauty and the Beast, but she also remembers snagging the Hunger Games books from her school’s Scholastic Book Fairs and lining up outside movie theaters to see the films as soon as she could. “I wasn’t going to midnight screenings yet because I was a bit young to be out so late, but I was going Sunday morning,” she says. “Obsessed, absolutely obsessed.”
Now, Zegler is immersed in universes that have their own devoted followers. She made her film debut playing Maria in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated rendition of West Side Story. She’s playing Anthea in this month’s DC action flick Shazam! Fury of the Gods. She’s tackling the role of Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which debuts in November. And of course, there’s Snow White, which is set to be released in March 2024.
When Zegler was cast as Maria in early 2019, she soared from “theater kid who auditioned via Twitter” to a name that even your parents might recognize. Zegler owes her rise to Spielberg, who she says believed in her when no one else did. “The fact that I was given such a platform for my first film out the gate is really unheard of,” says Zegler. “It’s such a Cinderella story that you don’t really hear about anymore. It’s such an Old Hollywood trope—something that you see in movies like Singing in the Rain, not in real life.”
Her role as Maria defined the kind of actor you’d assume Zegler to be: theatrical, musically inclined, and, to borrow her own phrase, “a Broadway baby.” Now, as she figures out her own wingspan, she’s flocking to characters that challenge her image. Anthea from Shazam! is a particularly sharp departure from the roles we’ve come to expect from Zegler. Not only does the film fall squarely in the action realm, but Anthea is also a different type of character than Zegler is used to portraying. “A lot of the characters I’ve played before have a wonderful arc, but they’re a bit straightforward,” she says. “With Anthea, it’s a bit more complicated because she’s lived in the shadow of her sisters for X amount of years. … I’ve just really loved playing her because she was way more layered than I even expected her to be.”
