West Side Story's Rachel Zegler on Reimagining the Classic Movie Musical
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is what happened while Rachel Zegler was busy making other plans. It was the summer of 2018, and a casting director for West Side Story—directed by Spielberg! Written by Tony Kushner!—was asking Rachel Zegler, then just 17, for her availability. “I think I said, ‘I’m doing my spring musical in March, and then I’d like to goto college,’” Zegler says today. Her reply was short, because, well, what do you say when Spielberg is maybe asking you to maybe make time for his movie? Surely the director of Jaws can bump a high school production of Shrek the Musical off the calendar.
College was going to have to wait. The day after Shrek closed, Zegler was caught in traffic, racing to the first West Side Story rehearsal in Brooklyn. After a year—and a half-dozen reads, self-tapes, and workshop intensives—Zegler had won the lead in the new film. The casting process started with an open call for a Latina actress between the ages of 15 and 25 (“My friend Makena sent it to me and literally said, ‘Thank me when you’re famous,’” Zegler, whose mother’s family is Colombian, says of her pal’s supportive shove into the spotlight) and ended with Zegler poised to be the breakout star of the year’s most anticipated movie musical. (How good West Side Story is I can’t say, because the film—set to open December 10—is still under lock and key. Zegler herself hasn’t seen the movie that’s set to turn her into a star.)
Of the pack of big-screen musicals opening this year (Dear Evan Hansen, the summer’s In the Heights), none is as keenly anticipated as West Side Story. It’s the group project of icons—Spielberg, Kushner, executive producer Rita Moreno—and an update of one of theater’s most sacred and sentimental Romeo and Juliet retellings. While the musical has been revisited on Broadway three times since its 1957 premiere, this will be the first film version since the 1961 hit (co-directed and so memorably choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with music byLeonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), which won 10Academy Awards. That production starred Natalie Wood, who is said to have won the part of Maria thanks to early footage of her turn in Splendor in the Grass. That Zegler was plucked from obscurity (well, New Jersey) for the lead this time around only adds to the magic.
We’re talking over Zoom. The actress is crouching at a computer in her childhood home in Clifton, New Jersey; she’s there for a few days before she has to head to the Atlanta set of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, in which she’s co-starring with Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu. On her to-do list: Taylor ham and egg on an everything bagel from Bagel Station on Van Houten Avenue; time with her mom, dad, and older sister; and, she adds with a laugh, “Hopefully, my abuela can pencil me in!”
Pre–West Side Story, Zegler was just a theater-obsessed teen from Clifton. She listened to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande. There was a photo of Rita Moreno in her locker; she played volleyball and the saxophone. She had the same dreams and anxieties as every high school student. Then she uploaded a video of herself singing “I Feel Pretty” and sent it to [email protected]. She got called back, and back again, and then back a few more times.“When we got Rachel’s self-tape, I don’t really think I’d ever heard Sondheim sung like that before,” West Side Story’s casting director Cindy Tolan says. “The technical skill, her emotional presence, her grace and charm were just so unusual for someone who was 17 years old.” (Zegler, meanwhile, can’t bear to think about that initial self-tape.“I haven’t watched it since I did it. I would probably want to pull my teeth out if I did!”)
Her first role was in the Theater League of Clifton’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. A director, her friend and mentor, pulled her aside and said, “You could understudy every role in this show, and you’re 12.” Zegler’s future suddenly snapped into focus.“That’s when I kind of took a step back and was like,‘I think I could do this for the rest of my life.’ That’s a weird moment to have when you’re 12, but I did. I had that moment. I was like, ‘I’m going to do it, and I won’t rest until I do.’ ”
She never set deadlines for her career, but she did upload videos of herself to YouTube singing songs she liked; she ended the videos with updates from her regular high school life. (“I’m pretty sure people have found little clips of me being like, ‘I auditioned for Steven Spielberg.’ ”) When her older sister was choosing a high school, Rachel was just hoping for a glowing New York Times review one day. “The endgame was a Tony Award; that was what I wanted,” she says. “I just wanted Ben Brantley to write me a good review. That was my idea for the rest of my life.” She felt a little strange about her certainty—career goals at 12!—but she leaned in: “Musical theater and that’s it.”
At 14 she went to an open call for School of Rock on Broadway. Her voice, she was told, was too big. (“Like, 600 kids showed up that day. I got seen by a group of interns, and they were like, ‘You sounded like an adult.’ ”) It didn’t feel like a rejection but instead the start of something.“I was like,‘Okay, that happened. I got to sing for people in the Broadway community at the Winter Garden Theatre—and I’m 14!’ This is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
Spielberg’s West Side Story isn’t a remake, Zegler reports, it’s a reimagining of the original musical. (In this version, Tony is played by Ansel Elgort, who was accused of sexual assault after the film had wrapped, a claim he has denied.) “We’re not trying to recreate, frame for frame, the 1961 film. That film exists as this incredible piece of pop culture that everyone has seen and been affected by in some way. I don’t think any of us would ever try to recreate that,” she says. “There are things to improve on and things to address. It’s such a cultural phenomenon, that film and the musical in general. I think the way Steven and Tony framed it to all of us when we were auditioning, when we were rehearsing, when we were shooting, was, ‘We are making a movie of the original Broadway musical. This is our take on a story that every-one has heard, and knows so well, and really loves.’ ”
The prospect of Maria, for Zegler, was the crystallization of a long-held dream—or as long-held as a dream can be when you’re barely old enough to drive. She had played the role in a local production the summer before she auditioned, and she had read for Ivo van Hove’s 2020 Broadway revival. The character, in Zegler’s view, shouldn’t be so virginal and pure and, well, flat and one-note. “Every Juliet-based character is pure and innocent. She’s the Virgin Mary, and she can do no wrong,” Zegler says. “But in reality she’s 18. She’s discovering so much about herself and the way she thinks about the world.”
Maria’s coming of age mirrored Zegler’s own, and Spielberg encouraged her to explore that connection. “What does it mean to be an 18-year-old discovering all of these things about herself in 2019—or in 1957, which is when West Side Story takes place? There are layers of being an immigrant: How long has she been here? How long does she plan to stay? She plans to stay forever. Does Bernardo want her here?”
The character is coming into herself as an adult, and experiencing the fullness of her first love. “I Feel Pretty,” for Zegler, was the character’s thesis. “So many people see that as this two-dimensional song about, Oh, she’s just in love and it’s great. But it’s so much more than that,” she says. “It really irks me when people don’t see it as this cultural definition of how she feels beautiful as a Latina. The love she feels is what makes her beautiful, not the love from the man. It’s not ‘This white boy likes me, so I must be beautiful.’ It’s ‘I feel all of these emotions right now. The only thing that I can do is sing about how it’s a beautiful feeling.’ ” How beautiful it is, she emphasizes, that she can feel so big and so great.
On January 9, 2019, Zegler found out that she had gotten the part. She wasn’t allowed to let anyone know, but how soon did she tell the friend who encouraged her to audition in the first place? She grins: “I definitely broke protocol and told her immediately.”
The night before shooting started, Zegler had trouble feeling as confident as her character. Her first day of work—apart from the year of auditioning and two months of rehearsals—was the scene where Maria meets Tony. “I texted [a friend]: ‘I think I’m going to vomit. I’ll check back with you later.’ I could not sleep, could not anything. I was just...Oh my god, terrified.”
Those nerves are part of growing pains she’s still feeling. Moving to Atlanta for the Shazam shoot is the first time she’s ever had to live alone. She documented the move-in on her You-Tube channel: “My mom stayed with me for a couple of days. Then she had to obviously come back here and continue living her life, because I’m 20 years old and I shouldn’t need my mom for everything.” Although she may not be giving herself enough credit: “Rachel is a ray of sunshine: effervescent and fun,” says Lucy Liu, via email, from the set of Shazam. “She is so nurturing and loving toward the younger kids on set, which is so sweet. She loves what she does from a very deep place, and that is the seed to all success.” David Alvarez, who plays West Side Story’s Bernardo, adds, “Rachel is always on it. I’m still mesmerized by how she can juggle all these different skills and use them with confidence. She’s an incredibly hard worker and truly cares about bringing some-thing special to the table.”
Next she’ll play the title role in a live action Snow White movie for Disney, but she’s still adjusting to the scale and scope of her life. “I haven’t done any other film projects, but I’m constantly pinching myself—there’s no way this is my life. That comes with a lot of gratitude and a lot of anxiety and a lot of impostor syndrome. I do have moments when I’m like, ‘I am worthy, and I got this job for a reason,’ ” she says. And then, a beat later, with a playful gasp: “But then it immediately fades into, ‘Oh god, Helen Mirren!’ ”
Photographs by Pamela Hanson styled by Anne Christensen
A version of this story appears in the September 2021 issue of Town & Country.
You Might Also Like
Solve the daily Crossword
