The two roles Rachel Zegler is desperate to play: “That would be a dream come true”
Life comes at you fast, they say, and it’s probably a phrase Rachel Zegler would agree with after going on the kind of dizzying ‘cancelled-not cancelled’ arc that would have normal folk never leaving the house again, thanks to the ire of internet warriors around the globe.
The fact that Zegler is only 24, and that the movie everyone was getting so upset about was a live-action version of Snow White, and specifically a load of CGI little people, probably sums up how ridiculous the whole furore was really.
Yes, Zegler did a couple of red carpet interviews for the film in which she came over as a bit feisty and dismissive, and quite entitled but then, lets not forget she is a major, major talent who has experienced an insanely dizzying rise to fame for someone who was still in high school in 2019, winning a ‘Best Actress’ Golden Globe at 19 for her work on Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake. After all, it’s not like she did anything as egregious as when her co-star Gal Gadot tried to cure Covid by getting her famous mates to sing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ on Instagram.
When Snow White eventually came out, it was fine, nothing to write home about, and so Zegler can now just put it behind her and get on with stuff, which for her means things like selling out one-woman shows in the West End of London. Again, it is worth taking note of just how fast and how much she does in a short amount of time, as in 2023, she not only starred in Shazam: Fury of the Gods, but also The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and the comedy horror Y2K.
Then the following year, she was on Broadway, starring in a Jack Antonoff-directed update of Romeo and Juliet, and continued the theatre work this year by taking the lead in Evita in London, the musical telling the story of Eva Peron, the Argentinian political leader of the 1940s. Somehow, within a few months, Zegler was back on the Palladium stage to do her own show, a mix of songs from her career that’s only about five years long, and Broadway musicals.
So she’s not one to sit around and watch the telly, is what we can surmise from all of this, but even as someone who packs in as much entertainment-providing as she possibly can into any given week, there’s still a famous musical role that she hasn’t yet got her perfectly manicured hands on, and that’s from an Andrew Lloyd-Webber 1980s classic.
Zegler told Glamour, “While I’m still young and sprightly, I would love to do Christine Daaé in Phantom of the Opera. That would be a dream come true because I don’t get the opportunity to return to my soprano operatic training roots. And if ever given the chance, I would love to be Javert in a gender-bent Les Miz.”
First staged in 1986, Phantom tells the story of Daaé, a soprano who becomes the subject of obsession for a disfigured musical genius who lives in the Paris opera house, originally featuring Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford, with its soundtrack recording selling more than 40million copies around the world. As for Zegler’s other dream, Javert is a pivotal character in the form of a police inspector in Les Misérables, which has been running in the West End since 1985, making it the longest-running production in history that was also made into a film starring Hugh Jackman in the role in 2012.
However, not one to waste a moment day-dreaming, Zegler, meanwhile, will continue her domination of the West End next year when she stars in The Last Five Years, a musical about a novelist and a struggling actor, which was also adapted to film starring Anna Kendrick in 2014.
