Rachel Zegler

Lucy answers her reaping by singing to the cameras, and Rachel Zegler makes her sound unguarded. In The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023), her plain country voice gives us a reason to care about the romance. We stopped taking notes when she first sang. Everyone else seems to be guarding something, and that moment of openness caught us off guard. Zegler is at her most persuasive when she is allowed to be this direct.

Her screen breakthrough was María in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021), and singing-heavy parts have remained central to her work. The skill is in making a song feel like something the character needs to say. She performed Lucy’s songs live on camera, while composer James Newton Howard left room for them in his quieter score. Tom Blyth’s watchful Snow helps too: his habit of filing away what he hears gives her openness someone to play against. Francis Lawrence’s film loses its way in its last forty minutes, but the singing is not what lets it down.

The quieter evidence comes in David F. Sandberg’s Fury of the Gods (2023), where her Anthea takes an interest in Jack Dylan Grazer’s Freddy at school. A corridor, a lunch table and a walk are enough for them to suggest two teenagers trying to seem cooler than they are. Neither actor pushes the awkwardness, and their scenes have an ease the larger film lacks. The grey computer-generated finale gives us much less reason to care. We would not recommend the film on the strength of these scenes alone.

Her subsequent choices include the title role in Snow White (2025) and a move into stage work, as Juliet in Romeo + Juliet (2024) and Eva Perón in Evita (2025). Those are substantial parts, but we would also welcome more of the ordinary conversations she plays so well with Grazer. A film need not keep her singing to make good use of her. Start with Lucy’s first song, but bring patience for the rest of the film.