As I come to find out, Zegler has extensive been a Disney devotee, so currently being able to get her mom and dad to Disney Environment at the drop of a hat feels like the excellent achievement metric for someone who is genuinely just a admirer at her core. Increasing up, her favorite princess was Belle from Beauty and the Beast, but she also remembers snagging the Starvation Video games guides from her school’s Scholastic E book Fairs and lining up exterior film theaters to see the films as shortly as she could. “I was not heading to midnight screenings nevertheless simply because I was a little bit youthful to be out so late, but I was going Sunday early morning,” she says. “Obsessed, absolutely obsessed.”

Now, Zegler is immersed in universes that have their have devoted followers. She manufactured her movie debut actively playing Maria in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated rendition of West Aspect Story. She’s enjoying Anthea in this month’s DC motion flick Shazam! Fury of the Gods. She’s tackling the part of Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which debuts in November. And of training course, there’s Snow White, which is set to be introduced in March 2024.

When Zegler was cast as Maria in early 2019, she soared from “theater child who auditioned through Twitter” to a identify that even your moms and dads may possibly acknowledge. Zegler owes her rise to Spielberg, who she says believed in her when no a single else did. “The point that I was specified these a system for my initially film out the gate is definitely unheard of,” suggests Zegler. “It’s these types of a Cinderella story that you really don’t truly hear about any longer. It is these an Previous Hollywood trope—something that you see in flicks like Singing in the Rain, not in actual daily life.”

Her part as Maria defined the type of actor you’d assume Zegler to be: theatrical, musically inclined, and, to borrow her possess phrase, “a Broadway child.” Now, as she figures out her possess wingspan, she’s flocking to figures that problem her image. Anthea from Shazam! is a particularly sharp departure from the roles we’ve occur to expect from Zegler. Not only does the movie fall squarely in the action realm, but Anthea is also a unique kind of character than Zegler is utilised to portraying. “A great deal of the people I have played just before have a wonderful arc, but they’re a little bit uncomplicated,” she says. “With Anthea, it’s a little bit much more complicated mainly because she’s lived in the shadow of her sisters for X amount of several years. … I’ve just really liked playing her simply because she was way far more layered than I even expected her to be.”