Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is an exhilarating viewing experience. It opens with a riot of colour, movement, music and passion as the 1950s New York City setting is established, the dramatic conflicts between street gangs the Sharks and the Jets are outlined and the key characters introduced. The first genuinely affecting moment, however, occurs roughly 30 minutes in, at the cross-community dance when Maria, allied with the Sharks and played by newcomer Rachel Zegler, first meets Tony, a former Jet leader, played by Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver).
The pair duck behind the bleachers while their respective gangs engage in a vigorous and synchronised dance-off. There, out of sight, our nascent lovers begin an exquisitely choreographed pas de deux. Wordlessly, Maria lifts her arms out from her sides, holds them horizontally, and clicks her fingers. Tony follows. They step carefully, slowly, around each other, arms still outstretched, in an ornate routine inherited from the 1961 Robert Wise movie, via the original 1957 stage show, and repurposed here in fine style by Justin Peck, the choreographer.
It’s the performance in the dance, however, that carries emotional weight (your heart will stop). Tony wants to talk, but Maria wants to move. The camera closes in on her, and in Zegler’s face, in her eyes especially, we see tremulous self-doubt alternating with defiance, assurance and also something close to unfettered joy. We feel this, as viewers, and we somehow share that moment. And now, it transpires, it was real.
“I had so much fear that day, but it was an incredible day for me,” Zegler says, revealing that the bleachers sequence was the very first scene she shot in the movie, in July 2019, and that when Spielberg saw her that morning, in the film’s Brooklyn studio, he offered her some much-needed guidance. “He took me by the shoulders and said, ‘Are you scared?’ And I said, ‘I am absolutely scared.’ And he said, ‘That’s good. You should use that!’ And I did, for the rest of the day, and it worked. Because Maria would be petrified.”
Zegler adds that shooting that scene was extra special because it was about more than the scene itself. It was about starting the movie, finally, after a year of auditions and six months of pre-production. It was about beginning her professional journey, at 18 years old, and transforming herself from a New Jersey kid with a YouTube channel and a penchant for singing in her bathroom into, well, a fully fledged star. “It was a turning point in my life,” she says. “I had never imagined myself as a film actor, and suddenly it was all I wanted to do after that first day of filming.”
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Zegler, now 20, is speaking via Zoom from New York, which is at present home and frequently features as the backdrop to the confessional YouTube vlogs that she regularly posts, after her seemingly sudden and stratospheric rise. Since snagging Maria out of 30,000 hopefuls, Zegler has already shot a comic-book movie opposite Helen Mirren (Shazam! Fury of the Gods), has been chosen to play Snow White in the eagerly awaited Disney live-action reboot (from the team that brought you La La Land) and is lining up a slew of projects that she jokingly, and yet not, refers to as being, “in the ‘can’t talk about it’ stage”.
She says that Spielberg, a canny director of inexperienced actors (from ET’s Henry Thomas to Jurassic Park’s Joseph Mazello), deliberately focused on Zegler’s status as a young performer on the cusp of greatness to create an indelible connection to Maria (also on the cusp of something huge). Yes, he also smoothed out the rough edges from her acting style. “He said, ‘I need you to stop doing it with all of this [she gestures towards her face and makes wild over-exaggerated expressions] and just do it here [she makes a small circle around her eyes]. Get off your face, get into your eyes!’ ”
But he consistently emphasised the many links between the actress and her screen alter ego, connections that had, until then, never crossed Zegler’s mind. “It was really tough to realise what parallel lives we were leading,” she says. “We were both 18 years old. We both just moved to New York City for the first time. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and so going into city life was a lot different. We were both working, both managing our personal relationships and our careers. I couldn’t believe how Steven had picked up on it so keenly, and how it ended up informing the way that he directed me in the emotional scenes.”
The finished result is a transformative central turn, raw yet mesmerising, the delicate heart of a movie that could easily have been lost in the razzmatazz of high-powered anthems (America and Tonight especially) and ballet-fuelled punch-ups. And if the performance, the film and the subsequent top-tier movie roles (does it get more iconic than Snow White?) set Zegler up nicely for a future career of megastardom she will be unlike any A-lister that the industry has yet known. She will, in fact, be the first star to have emerged from, and been defined by, the social media era. Other young stars, such as Zendaya and Tom Holland, have hugely popular Instagram accounts (good for them!), but Zegler is a different beast. She lives online, has been posting YouTube videos for six years, went viral in 2018 with her version of Lady Gaga’s Shallow and, crucially, unlike her predecessors, she doesn’t believe in the existence of barriers between “them” (online users) and “us” (celebrity content makers).
One of her most recent vlogs is a 24-minute confessional, recorded during the pre-release hype for West Side Story, where she regularly bursts into tears, complains about being “a mess”, and keeps viewers up to date on the minutiae of her life, her menstrual cycle and her sleeplessness. I tell her that, after 20 years of interviewing Hollywood heavyweights who flinch at the idea of revealing anything beyond how great it is to make movies, this approach to celebrity seems almost revolutionary.
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“It is very important in my eyes to break down this barrier that so many people build up between celebrity and human being,” she says. “We’re just all out here making decisions the same as anyone else on the street. We just happen to be under a microscope. And I think there’s no need for that microscope any more.” On the crying vlog, she says: “I wanted to share that this is not always the greatest time in your life. You’re faced with the sudden realisation that you’re being perceived by so many people. I can’t walk through the streets of Manhattan without running into a taxi cab with my face on it. That’s not normal... I didn’t want people to think that I was complaining about these incredible moments in my life. I was crying out of happiness, I was crying out of stress, out of being overwhelmed and being sad.”
Zegler has also received a substantial amount of online abuse (about her voice, her looks, about being “not white enough” to play Snow White), but is remarkably phlegmatic about it. “When you’re someone like me and you’ve been on social media since it’s been a thing, you have to come to terms with the fact that people are going to use your most vulnerable emotional moments that you share with the world, they’re going to use them against you. And you have to come to terms with that first, before you share them.” She was also savaged by the eerily possessive fans of co-star Elgort, who claimed, in 2019, that she was becoming “too close” to their idol. And then, after Elgort was the subject of a sexual assault allegation in 2020, which he denies, Zegler was slammed for having the temerity to continue to promote West Side Story in his company.
Of the Elgort backlash she says: “We made a movie two years ago, and a lot has changed since we made that movie. A lot has been acknowledged very publicly. It’s not my place to speak on an experience that I didn’t have, and a lot of people have asked me for my statement, not knowing my own experiences in my own life, and I truly think it’s a question for those involved, and hopefully those questions are asked of the proper people in a respectful manner.”
Zegler was never supposed to be in films. Growing up in New Jersey, she was taken across the river to her first Broadway show, The Lion King, when she was three years old, and says that musical theatre was her only love and her destiny. In her early teens, she played in local productions of Fiddler on the Roof and West Side Story, and auditioned for a Broadway production of School of Rock (she was rejected because her voice was, she was told, “too big”). And so, typically, she thought nothing of it when a friend, in January 2018, sent her a screenshot of the Spielberg casting call with a message reading: “Thank me when you’re famous!”
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She recorded herself singing I Feel Pretty in Spanish, emailed it in, and the rest is 12 months of auditions, a starring part and a turning point film production in the summer of 2019. Then, just as the movie was ready to be released to the world, Covid struck. “By September 2020 we still hadn’t heard anything,” she says, about the film’s release. “There was no trailer, there wasn’t even a poster. It wasn’t until the end of that month that they postponed it for an entire year. And it was at that moment, for me at least, where I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something else!’”
She went to Atlanta to make Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Of her co-star Mirren, she says: “She’s perfect. She’s everything. We went out for sushi. She bought me a pair of jeans. She is the coolest person!” She then bagged the Snow White role, opposite Wonder Woman’s Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen (“We intend to start shooting in London next year”).
Yet as the future roles (the “can’t talk about” movies) continue to pile up, and West Side Story fades into the background, and the online hysteria bubbles away around her, Zegler says that Maria will never leave her. She says that Maria’s got fire, she’s got agency, and she’s not afraid to speak her mind. And that role, that character, she has incorporated into her daily life.
“Maria is a part of me,” she says, in conclusion. “And I carry her with me in my heart every day.”
West Side Story is out now
