It’s a crisp morning in New York City, and Rachel Zegler is giving modern-day Juliet. “If I open up my window and I shout, you might be able to hear it,” she says in a video call. The actor is on the Lower East Side, her interviewer in Chelsea—unrealistic for a makeshift balcony scene—but improbable optimism is to be expected from a performer made famous for playing the ingenue Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. In that tale of star-crossed lovers—set in 1950s Manhattan and immortalized by a Tony-winning musical (1957), an Oscar-decorated film (1961), and the buzzy 2021 adaptation—distance is bridged by fire-escape duets and gymnasium dances. In this case, a shared connection arrives via dogs just out of frame. “This is Leonard Bernstein Zegler,” she says, panning over to the sandy-brown fluff beside her. (Lenny celebrated his first birthday last week; my hound mix, Pina, chewing a bone, is a month younger.) “I got him in June, right before the strike, and he is my best friend. I talk to him as if he understands me,” Zegler says, describing a silver lining of that industry-wide freeze. “We were all kind of miserable, but I got to train my dog. I feel like he’s got this human soul.”
With the Hollywood machine back in gear, Zegler the dog whisperer has returned to her day job. In Y2K—the directorial debut from SNL alum Kyle Mooney, which premiered this month at SXSW—Zegler slips into cusp-of-the-millennium fashion, playing the high school cool girl at a New Year’s Eve party where technology goes rogue. Spellbound, an upcoming animation with Zegler voicing the lead princess, is in post-production. More classical, more serene is her turn in the Rouge Dior campaign, set amid marble statuary in a French chateau. The original lipstick appeared on the Dior runway in 1953, a few years before West Side Story took the stage; the new incarnation—reborn under Peter Philips, creative and image director of the house’s makeup range—abides by industry “clean” standards while serving up exacting shades. “Our director, Bardia Zeinali, was so wonderful and fun,” Zegler says of the wintertime shoot, down coats layered over couture until the very last moment. “I have never instantly connected with somebody like I did with him because of our love of Lady Gaga and Boygenius and Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift.” Zegler, filmed in a red two-piece confection by Maria Grazia Chiuri and a matching lip, telegraphs restraint and verve: Maria and Anita in one.
Zegler, devoted to her craft, appreciates beauty through the lens of character development. Decisions about makeup offer clues to off-script motivations; in a similar way, her work with Dior ties back to her own roots, via her Colombian mother’s lipstick. Here, Zegler gets personal and professional, revisiting a pivotal West Side Story scene and looking ahead to next year’s cherry-lipped Snow White.
Vanity Fair: What was your early introduction to lipstick? Was it through your mother, say, or a movie you remember watching as a kid?
Rachel Zegler: I was always very obsessed with Monica Bellucci, and so the very, very iconic scene of her [in Malèna], when everybody’s trying to light her cigarette—that frame is in my brain forever. I probably shouldn’t have seen that as a child, but I was very obsessed with it. I feel like my mom really was my introduction. Funnily enough—I was telling Peter Phillips this when we were working on the commercial—999 was the first shade she ever bought in the States. She spent a lot of her childhood in Barranquilla, Colombia, and when she had the money, she went to, like, a Macy’s here in the States and bought it. That was the first lipstick that was ever her own, not my abuelita’s. It’s such a cool, full-circle moment to be the face of [Rouge Dior]. It definitely means a lot to her. I used to borrow my mom’s makeup all the time, sometimes without asking. That’s where my love of doing my makeup came from. I would sit and watch her do her makeup before we’d go out.
Something tells me she now has a lot of 999.
It was the stocking stuffer of the season.
Definitely 777, which is Fahrenheit. I’ve been described as a fiery personality, and so I think that really kind of embodies it. I love an orangey red color. For everyday, I wear 100, which is their nude color, because there’s an element of natural subtlety that I really love about it. I don’t tend to wear a lot of makeup; I really save colors for occasions. But when I do wear red lipstick, it is 999. I love a red lip. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. I think it’s just the most iconic beauty moment for any person who wants to feel gorgeous.
Onscreen, small gestures like applying makeup have storytelling potential. In terms of Maria in West Side Story, when does red lipstick come into play?
I love that, now, working with Dior, the red lip has become a really big part of my career, because one of the first scenes I ever shot for that movie was putting on red lipstick before the dance. It’s her sign of womanhood, getting to wear lipstick. She hears her brother coming and hurriedly takes it off with a tissue. Then she meets Chino—who is played by my boyfriend now [Josh Andrés Rivera], which is crazy to think about—and when Maria and Anita leave to go to the dance and he’s out of sight, [it’s] her sign of rebellion: This my night, this is my first time dancing in New York. She has this very iconic scene where she puts red lipstick on in the mirror. I love it. It took forever to film. It was my first movie, so Mitch Dubin, our A camera operator, was like, “I need to catch everything you’re doing. You need to do it very slow.” He would pan down and then I would open my palm and there was this lipstick there, and then I would open it and slide it up and do it. It was like I was prepping for this commercial that I just did for Dior.
