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‘Snow White’ star Rachel Zegler has apologized for her reaction to the election of Donald Trump, saying she let her “emotions get the best” of her when she wished that the president-elect’s supporters “never know peace.”
“F**k Donald Trump,” Zegler wrote on her Instagram story last week, after Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to become president-elect of the US.
“I find myself speechless in the midst of this,” she continued. “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace. Another four years of hatred, leaning us towards a world I do not want to live in. Leaning us towards a world that will be hard to raise my daughter in.”
Zegler, who won a Golden Globe for playing María in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of ‘West Side Story’, does not have a daughter.
Conservative pundits were livid at her comments. “Hello, Disney! You’re gonna have to redo your film again, because this woman is a pig,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly opined on her radio show. “I’m sorry, Disney, she has to go right now.”
Zegler apologized on Thursday. “I let my emotions get the best of me,” she wrote in another Instagram story. “Hatred and anger have caused us to move further and further away from peace and understanding, and I am sorry I contributed to the negative discourse,” she continued, concluding: “I firmly believe that everyone has the right to their opinion, even when it differs from my own. I am committed to contributing positively towards a better tomorrow.”
Kelly’s reference to redoing the film was likely intentional. ‘Snow White’ was reshot several times, with Zegler demanding that the story be overhauled to include a more feminist message, in which the titular princess is “not going to be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love,” and Disney scrapping the iconic seven dwarves for fear of offending the vertically challenged.
“People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is, because it needed that,” Zegler told Vanity Fair in 2022.
The film is due for release in spring, but its road co completion has been fraught with controversy. ‘Game of Thrones’ star Peter Dinklage called for the dwarves to be cut, but also expressed bewilderment that Disney would “cast a Latina actress as Snow White.”
Animator David Hand, whose father worked on the 1938 version of ‘Snow White’, complained that “my dad and Walt [Disney] would also very much disagree with” the modern retelling of the story.
“They change the stories, they change the thought processes of the characters, they just aren’t the original stories anymore. They’re making up new woke things and I’m just not into any of that,” he told The Telegraph last year. “I find it quite frankly a bit insulting that they may have done with some of these classic films.”
