written by DOUGLAS GREENWOOD
photography RICHARD KERN
styling RON HARTLEBEN
Rachel Zegler is spinning on a desk chair eating sushi. She’s spent the morning living out her dream and, after lunch, will do it all again. For the past month, Zegler—the clear-voiced, internet literate, Golden Globe-winning actor—has been holed up in a rehearsal studio in deep East London, preparing to play the lead in the London West End revival of Evita.
It’s a Friday, the final day Zegler and the team will spend here before moving into the city’s prestigious Palladium theater, to play the musical out in situ. She’s just completed a full run-through of the show, start to finish. “Thank you for coming to my place of work,” she says casually, as if her workplace is just like everyone else’s. Her hair is slicked back, and she’s wearing light linen shorts, a tank, and red sneakers. In one hand is a can of Arizona ice tea the size of her head. A bracelet, beaded the colors of the Palestinian flag, spelling out ceasefire, sits on her wrist.
Zegler is in beast mode. She has yearned to play Eva Perón since she was a child. The proof exists online, where videos of her singing its most famous number, “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” during a TikTok live in her bathroom four years ago still circulate. She’ll wince a little when you mention it—“It’s giving 2021,” she deadpans—but to an outside eye the videos are lovely and prophetic. Eight times a week for the whole summer, she’ll belt out the song for over 2,000 people per show. She’s too young to have seen any previous live productions of Evita, but she’s aware of the legacy she’s inheriting from the greats of the game: Patti LuPone, Madonna, and Elaine Page. This summer, though, Eva is hers to put her stamp on.
There’s this thing called “marking” she tells me, in which vocalists that are rehearsing take it easy to preserve their precious instrument. But Zegler is belting big, going for it even without a crowd. “What I just did down there,” she says of her runthrough, “that’s what I want to give every night.”
The production is directed by Jamie Lloyd, the bold theatrical agitator whose revivals of old plays and musicals are catnip to famous actors. With Sunset Boulevard, currently on Broadway, he helped propel Nicole Scherzinger from a wandering pop star to a Tony award-winning actor. Last summer, he cast Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland, in a production of Romeo + Juliet that replaced doublets and codpieces with vests and hoodies. His work is big, full of ideas, and divisive, dubbed both “confusing” and “triumphant” by critics.
In an industry of safe stuff, like IP-driven “content” and streaming-friendly movies and TV shows, part of the fun for Lloyd’s actors must be figuring out which side of the critical consensus their collaboration with him will land on. The big swing stuff. For Zegler, it was an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“I was really dying to do it, my whole life,” she says of Evita, “and I was supposed to do a production of it a while ago that just kind of fizzled out and never happened.” When her agent reached out, she was part of the way through a long stint on Broadway, where she’d been playing Juliet in a punkish take on Romeo + Juliet opposite Heartstopper’s Kit Connor. That too felt revolutionary: Each night, the company danced and sung to songs written for the show by Jack Antonoff. It attracted the youngest crowd ever in Broadway’s recorded history. Playing Juliet was her entire life for the better part of a year, through preparation to rehearsals and finally to her performance. But when Jamie Lloyd asked to meet her, she knew passing wasn’t an option. He’s worked with legends and Oscar winners like Sigourney Weaver and Jessica Chastain. Zegler stands out: “She is one of the most talented artists I have ever worked with,” Lloyd tells me.
“I’m a theater kid that got everything she wanted.”
RACHEL ZEGLER
“I came back [to theater] on my own volition, which is just crazy,” she says, laughing. “I’m the type of person that can only be bored for, like, two weeks. After Romeo + Juliet closed, I was doing the odd press here and there for Snow White, and was sitting there for a bit going, ’What am I supposed to do?’”
There was also the feeling that she had this might be her first and last chance. “I think the reality of being a woman in this industry, as archaic as it seems, is asking yourself, ’When will I get the chance again?” It’s been 13 years since the last Broadway revival, she points out. “By the time it comes back again, I may be considered aged out.”
She recorded a self tape singing three songs from the musical (“Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” “A New Argentina,” and “You Must Love Me”) and after Lloyd saw it, the pair met in New York. They talked about what was important to them and how to bring a biographical story of a real Argentinian woman—a philanthropist, a First Lady—who was revered and reviled in her time to the stage in 2025. (Perón died of cancer at the age of 33 and her legacy is very much maintained because of the musical Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote.)
In divisive times politically, it feels like the show to do now. “[It’s a show about] retreating the politician as the pop star,” Zegler says, “as tends to happen throughout all of history. The whole point of reviving shows is to show us that history repeats itself, and that it’s up to us to learn from or to break that cycle.” One way this production breaks from past ones and elevates the everyday? Footage from previews suggests that “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” will be sung from the balcony of the Palladium onto the streets of London in each performance, while ticket-holding audience members will see it on a screen inside.
Unlike other 20-somethings, Zegler never had a normal job. When she was 17, a precocious high schooler and self-confessed theater kid, her mom let her submit a self-tape for an open call for a Steven Spielberg project. He chose her, out of 30,000 young women, to play Maria in his adaptation of West Side Story. She spent her final year of high school filming the part, returning to Immaculate Conception High School just in time to play Princess Fiona in the school’s production of Shrek the Musical. When West Side Story came out in late 2020, Zegler became the youngest ever winner of a Best Actress in a Motion Picture prize at the Golden Globes, at just 20 years old. “I’m a theater kid that got everything she wanted,” she says, owning the label that some consider cringe. “It’s not an insult, it’s a passion.”
Spielberg’s film, and her Golden Globe win, led Zegler into more excellent opportunities for a young actress on the rise. She played the vagabondish co-lead, Lucy Gray Baird, in The Hunger Games reboot The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and the headstrong romantic interest in last year’s A24 sci-fi comedy Y2K. Even the jobs that didn’t fare so well, like the critically maligned Shazam: Fury of the Gods (a part she jokingly revealed she took because she “needed a job”), helped put Zegler on the map. And then there was Snow White.
Zegler’s journey with the film was never easy, despite the fact she’s proud of it. Shakiness of the film’s narrative aside, she is great and commanding as its titular princess. Through it, she became the subject of internet schadenfreude, every lip curl, paparazzi photo, and pull quote torn apart. She is, in some ways, a living example of the sensationalist power of tabloid media, where facts are bent and sources say whatever, knowing there’s little chance of them having to deal with the consequences. A prominent Variety article spun things out so publicly that a petition was created to defend Zegler against online hate.
The public relations drama imploded when she posted “and always remember, free palestine” on X the same day the Snow White trailer dropped. Zegler’s post supposedly sent reps at Disney into such a spiral that, according to the Variety article, the film’s producer Marc Platt flew from Los Angeles to New York to ask her to delete it. (Platt’s 38-year-old son Jonah corroborated this online.) Whether that conversation happened or not, Zegler’s message remains on the platform. It was the last thing she posted on X. She doesn’t use it anymore.
Zegler is someone who harbors the political stance of a generation that doesn’t buy into the gleaming and digestible image of Disney princesses. She’s maybe the most based princess the House of Mouse has ever had. She was scolded after posting “Fuck Donald Trump” in the wake of last year’s election results on Instagram (and apologized for it).
“It’s interesting,” she says at first, when I ask her about the opinions formed about her online, and then: “It’s really alarming at times.”
She’s one of the few actors in Hollywood who was willing to ask questions about how we were collectively responding to the atrocities in Gaza, and ask herself what really mattered. “I can really only echo [the Hacks actor] Hannah Einbinder in saying that a platform becomes a responsibility, and that responsibility is ours to use as we please,” she says.
If she’s been a scatty and punchy conversationalist so far, her tone is now direct. “My compassion has no boundaries, is really what it is,” she says, “and my support for one cause does not denounce any others. That’s always been at the core of who I am as a person. It’s the way I was raised.” Has she ever worried about the consequences? “There are obviously things that are at stake by being outspoken, but nothing is worth innocent lives. My heart doesn’t have a fence around it, and if that is considered my downfall?” She shrugs off that as a fear. “There are worse things.”
Zegler was pinned with the blame for the film’s commercial failure, despite the production’s creative issues and its lukewarm reviews. Her thoughts on the original film, made nearly 100 years ago, which highlighted how its now-shaky gender politics were being reimagined for a new generation, became additional fodder for trolls to call her ungrateful for the part. She was also a young woman of Colombian descent, playing a part that right-wing pundits felt was destined for a white woman. The combination of online vitriol and watching a dream role turn into a nightmare affected her deeply.
“There are obviously things that are at stake by being outspoken, but nothing is worth innocent lives. My heart doesn’t have a fence around it, and if that is considered my downfall? … There are worse things.”
rachel zegler
When shit really hit the fan, she left New York to go home to New Jersey, spending time with her family and her dog. “My fucking psychiatrist has seen me through all of it,” she says. She needed someone to remind her that, “’What you’re going through isn’t normal’,” she says. “That sentence did such wonders for me in multiple situations in my life.” She got medicated for her anxiety too, “which was truly a game changer, because I just wasn’t functioning. And I wanted to function in a way that made me feel confident in the way I was moving through the world.” Soon, she was able to rationalize things that previously felt big and insurmountable.
There’s a framing online of Zegler as a self-defined victim of it all. “I think a victim mindset is a choice, and I don’t choose it,” she says pointedly. “I also don’t choose nastiness in the face of it. I don’t choose negativity in the face of it. I choose positivity and light and happiness. And I do believe at times, happiness is absolutely a choice, and every day I wake up and I think I’m very lucky to live the life I live.”
There have been many people who have helped ground her and offer support. Since making Shazam: Fury of the Gods, she’s grown close to her co-star Lucy Liu. “[I was impressed by] her knowledge,” Liu says of their first encounter. “Of the world, of cinema, of storytelling. At her age, I certainly didn’t have that kind of global perspective or cinematic fluency.”
During Romeo + Juliet, Antonoff helped introduce Zegler to people who’d understand her. “I know that Jack’s not going to steer me in the wrong direction when it comes to new people in my life,” she says. And during the filming of Snow White, she’d call her West Side Story co-star Mike Faist while he was on the set of Challengers. They both felt a sense of professional precarity, as if the rug was about to be pulled out from under their feet: “I talked to him on the phone, and we’d be like, ’Well, that’s it!’”
Then, there’s her north star: Lady Gaga. Zegler’s phone is wrapped in a Chromatica case, and she’s been wearing Gaga-branded tank tops to rehearsals. Videos online from 2018 see her covering songs like “Shallow” and the Joanne track “Angel Down”. There’s a paparazzi photograph of Zegler in New York wearing a Born This Way t-shirt. When she listened to that record, a die-hard theater kid raised just across the Hudson River from Gaga, “I just felt so seen and loved by someone I had never met before,” she says. “Talk about the rise of the theater kid. Like, she was the OG!” Zegler calls her “the loveliest, kindest person.” They met at the Critics’ Choice Awards in 2022, and when Zegler got up to leave, she went to say goodbye. Zegler says Gaga fixed her dress, and said, in her perfect raspy tone: If I see your boobs in the Daily Mail, I’m gonna be really pissed! Zegler bursts into laughter. That night, she kept her promise to her idol.
She takes stock of that almost absurd situation, meeting her childhood hero at a Hollywood awards ceremony. “When I was a kid, there was part of me that just really, really wanted [to be an actor] so badly, and therefore I didn’t see it as a possibility, because does everyone’s dream come true?” she says. “There’s a wistfulness about being a kid with a big dream that feels just out of reach. Like, ’It’s a one in a million shot. Why would it be me?’” Nowadays, when young people ask her for advice from the other side, she offers one line: “Why not you?”
Three weeks later, I’m standing outside the Palladium in central London, an ornate building flanked today by a Pret-a-Manger and a Five Guys. There’s a haze in the air as the sun sets. Zegler hangs over the balcony, belting that iconic chorus from “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” The swelling strings of the orchestra, and the chorus of the ensemble, spills out onto the streets. Some militantly unbothered London commuters have stopped, enraptured by the sound. Zegler looks regal, like she’d reached her final form.
“I lost a lot of opportunities for joy by thinking ’there’s no way I could possibly survive this’,” she had said to me a few weeks earlier, “and it’s like, you’re fine. Okay, drama queen, you’re cool. Don’t worry. You’re all right.
“When those things are going on,” she said, “you just want to push it away because it’s a bad feeling. I realized as I got older that sitting in it is so much more important than pushing it away.” Zegler took a swig of her iced tea and smiled. Good things were coming—she knew it. She just had to keep telling herself: “The only way out is through.”
hair DYLAN CHAVLES USING BUMBLE AND BUMBLE AT MA+ GROUP
makeup GRACE AHN USING MAKEUP FOR EVER AT DAY ONE
nails MAMIE ONISHI USING APRÉS NAILS AT SEE MANAGEMENT
set design JENNY CORREA AT WALTER SCHUPFER MANAGEMENT
photography assistant ZOE DE BLASIS
styling assistant ASHLEY WEILER
hair assistant OLIVIA MAIREAD
set design assistant LULU SMITH
production THE MORRISON GROUP
production assistant MAIAN TRAN
post production NORA MITCHELL
location GARY’S LOFT