DVDizzy Forum

“Honestly, I’m a duck,” she says today of criticism. “It rolls right off my back these days.” Her candour hasn’t been dented — this is a woman who clearly feels and cares deeply about the world. Zegler still thinks it’s important for actors to speak freely. “We just need to normalise our hearts’ not having boundaries,” she explains. “I think that there’s this idea that we as public figures can’t have thoughts or feelings because we are like paper dolls to a majority of the public.”

For the audacity of having opinions while being good at her job, she’s been branded “controversial” by tabloids. What keeps her grounded, despite all the noise? “My love for the work. I am the one who showed up and did my work every day. Nobody can ever take that away from me. I made lifelong friends on that job,” she says of her experience of Snow White. “That kind of family doesn’t get dissipated by online discourse.”

Every experience I’ve had so far has been such a wonderful lesson learned. I loved working on [Snow White], and I love that film. I’ve seen it a few times, and it [became] number one on streaming on Disney+, so I know that it’s celebrated. It was one of those experiences of sometimes negativity being louder than positivity. What I took away from it is just to really, really soak in when it feels good and understand that it’s possible when it feels bad. The beautiful thing about Evita for me – beyond all of the wonderful people I met and all of the wonderful work we’re doing – is that I never thought I would be a part of something so celebrated, because of the way that I’ve been conditioned to believe that I wouldn’t be.