I don’t think it’s that simple. If you look at things in context, the things she said regarding feminism or female empowerment were right in line with most of the people she worked with and she was likely echoing exactly what the company, the screenwriter, and the director would have said too, (privately, which was Rachel’s big mistake.) When you’re in the echo chamber, you don’t think you’re making stupid comments because everyone around is saying the same thing, and you’re likely not going to get the axe unless you rock the ideological bandwagon, like Gina Carano did the year before Rachel started making her comments. I think the flaw here is that she was fast-tracked into Hollywood so she doesn’t have the self-awareness to understand her relationship to the audience and doesn’t really grasp the value of bypassing the grind into lead roles in mainstream films.
I’m going to approach this as a former actor and performer: Hollywood is a pretty big bubble and if you want to succeed, you learn to say what people want to hear. That’s in every layer of the industry, from the A-List celebrities down to the lowest non-union production assistant. You don’t rise in this industry without making friends, and making friends means learning how to say ‘yes’ a lot.
But Rachel has a VERY different Hollywood story than most actors and actresses here: she was ‘discovered’ during the open casting call for West Side Story and hasn’t done really any ‘resume builder’ types of acting work. She’s never guest starred in TV shows, got small parts in films, or did commercials. She literally went straight into Hollywood’s upper echelon and started starring in films. I think a big reason she doesn’t have a press agent or monitor what she says is because her road to stardom was so relatively easy that she doesn’t feel the weight of responsibility or gratitude from ‘earning’ it.
Getting cast in an open call and going straight into leading a Hollywood film for STEVEN SPIELBERG is so phenomenally rare that I don’t even have the words. I can think of one other actor in my lifetime that got this lucky, and that actor went down in flames: it was Noah Ringer in “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, the live action production.
So Rachel hasn’t had to fight for a place in Hollywood, she’s never had to play the game with the agents, she’s never moved to LA and suffered for years as she ground her way through auditions. This is why when I hear what she says, I hear the voice of someone living in the echo chamber and who has no self-awareness or coaching because she didn’t have to earn her place in Tinsel Town the way many other people struggle to. I hear the voice of someone who may not have lived enough life to know any differently, and likely thinks that what she says is what everyone else believes, too. When you’re part of a generation that that shares everything they think on social media and you’ve never had to live your life watching what you say to not get fired or not make waves at your job, you basically will say whatever you want, whenever you want.
For her, it was practically effortless getting into the big leagues of Hollywood… so when she opens her mouth, she says what she says with virtually no fear, but not in the good way, because she has no concept of how difficult it is to achieve what she was basically handed, so she has no concept of what she could lose.
Also, people don’t seem to acknowledge how she’s been protected by Disney, her agents, and the media for the last four years. The ideological tides in the country were starting to turn 4 years ago, but really, when she was bashing on the original Snow White film, (calling it creepy and weird and comparing one of the heroes to a stalker), the general public really hadn’t rallied yet with their massive dissent towards ultra-progressive ideology. So even if it was in poor taste, she was huddled around and protected by mainstream media and her employers… probably all thinking it was a storm that was going to pass and people would just forget.
Hollywood is always looking for new talent, and objectively speaking, she does have talent: she can sing, dance, and she’s easy on the eyes. She’s also still really young and hasn’t really tapped into all her potential yet.
To me, it makes sense that she hadn’t burned all her bridges, because frankly, because most of what she said initially four years ago was reflecting third-wave feminism, which Disney didn’t have a problem with. (The Force is Female wasn’t just a Lucasfilm slogan.)
The people who didn’t like what she said (about Snow White and female empowerment) don’t work in Hollywood. If you share the right ideology and you’re in the room with the “It” crowd, then the stupid things you say only starts to matter when it hits a studio where it hurts, and then changes start getting made. I think she could have weathered the storm indefinitely until she spouted “free palestine” on social media. Disney may not have as much skin in that game, but Paramount, Fox, MGM, Warner Brothers, and Universal all had Jewish founders, and those roots still go deep. Even if Disney tried to keep running interference or do damage control for Rachel because Snow White needed to be released, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the web of connections in Hollywood had already been working to quietly blacklist her behind closed doors throughout town.
She’s definitely put a massive target on her back: she’s headline news and anything she says is free press and free ink, but that pen is mightier than the sword and it swings both ways. The more it swings against her employers or potential employers, the more dangerous she becomes and the closer she gets to the blacklist.
Honestly, what will make or break her career is the box office numbers; you’re only as good as your last film, and it takes a lot of people in the A-List some pretty big successes to have enough of a shield for when something bombs. Guys like Ryan Reynolds or Tom Cruise are fairly insulated at this point, but even they aren’t totally immune to what one bad movie can do to the bankability of their next film. Rachel doesn’t have a huge body of work yet, but she’d do herself a big favor if she tried to cultivate a relationship to the general audience rather than act like she’s immune from prosecution in the court of public opinion. That court never finishes its session and the jury can swing from merciful to vengeful as quick as you can blink.