"Deserve to be paid": Revisiting Rachel Zegler’s bold Snow White comment during the writers and actors strike in 2023

Snow White is a film that garnered attention even before its release due to various reasons. The musical fantasy film premiered at the Alcázar of Segovia and was subsequently released theatrically on March 21, 2025, by Walt Disney.

The film is a live-action adaptation of Disney's animated flick Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which came out in 1937; the latter was itself inspired by a German fairy tale. The official synopsis reads,

A princess joins forces with seven dwarfs to liberate her kingdom from her cruel stepmother the Evil Queen.

Before its release, the film's lead actor, Rachel Zegler had hit the picket line during the 2023 writer's strike where she asserted that she deserves to be fairly paid. She said,

"If I’m going to stand there for 18 hours in a dress of an iconic Disney princess, I deserve to be paid for every hour that it is streamed online.”

---

When Snow White star Rachel Zegler made a statement during the strike

During the 2023 Hollywood strike of actors and writers, Snow White star Rachel Zegler stated that she would want to be paid for every hour of streaming if she is standing for hours in a Disney princess costume.

Earlier, the actress also shared her views on the original 1937 film and stated that the current version is different.

"The original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. There's a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird! Weird. So we didn't do that this time. We have a different approach to what I'm sure a lot of people will assume is a love story just because we cast a guy in the movie, Andrew Burnap, great dude. But it's really not about her love story at all, which is really, really wonderful. All of Andrew's scenes could get cut, who knows? It's Hollywood, baby!"

Besides this, Zegler's casting as Snow White in the film had also sparked some controversy earlier as the character in the source material was named as such because her skin was supposedly "as white as snow." In an interview with Variety, the actress addressed this issue, saying:

“It (the 2025 movie) fell back to another version of ‘Snow White’ that was told in history, where she survived a snowstorm that occurred when she was a baby,” she says. “And so the king and queen decided to name her Snow White to remind her of her resilience. One of the core points in our film for any young woman or young person is remembering how strong you actually are.”

---

Stay tuned to Soap Central for more such stories.