Rachel Zegler and Halle Bailey compare notes on surviving online harassment
It's pretty grim that this is what young women in Hollywood can bond over
Variety’s “Actors On Actors” conversation series is designed to create fun, viral-friendly moments, and it’s actually quite good at it: Just putting Cillian Murphy and Margot Robbie in a room together will get some clicks, even without the two of them bonding over Barbenheimer. Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo also had fun in their recent chat, with Downey commenting on how “bangable” Ruffalo looks in Poor Things. So it’s depressing that a portion of the “Actors On Actors” conversation between The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes star Rachel Zegler and The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey had to be spent with the two of them comparing notes on how they’ve dealt with online harassment.
The two have good attitudes about it, but it’s just such a grim indictment of the entertainment industry and our society in general that Variety gets two young women together and one of the things they can both relate to is the fact that people say terrible shit about both of them on the internet. Ruffalo and Downey were able to just chat about their work, they didn’t have to comment on how the other gets through the day when strangers criticize everything they do.
But at least the conversation itself was positive. Both Zegler and Bailey are impressed with how the other handles online harassment, with Zegler saying that Bailey “proved them wrong with grace,” saying she was “so inspired” by the way Bailey handled anyone who “had anything bad to say about it” (the “it” being a Black person playing Ariel in The Little Mermaid). Bailey responded by saying that it turned out to be a “beautiful lesson,” learning how to shut out the “naysayers” and the “negativity.”
Zegler explained that “choosing thankfulness and gratefulness” over engaging with people who just want to be cruel is “choosing peace,” and it helps her accept that they are “probably just having a really hard day.” Bailey then quoted the saying, “You throw stones, and I’ll build a bridge out of them,” which brought the duo around to talking about more positive interactions with people—like the videos of Black kids seeing Bailey in the Little Mermaid trailers and going nuts.