#Andrew Burnap Joins Disney’s Live Action Snow White In Mystery Role

Tony winner Andrew Burnap will join Gal Gadot and Rachel Zegler in Disney’s remake of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.

Toward the end of 2021, Disney announced the casting of Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen in their new live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which puts Shazam! Fury of the Gods star Rachel Zegler in the title role of Snow White. The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Andrew Burnap has joined the project in a new undisclosed role. While at first glance it appeared that the Tony Award winner would be cast in the role of The Prince or possibly at a push even the Huntsman, it seems that his role will be a brand new character to the story.

As with many of Disney’s live-action remakes, the original movies wouldn’t manage to sustain a feature-length film in their previous form. The 1937 first feature-length film by Walt Disney set in motion the development of an industry giant but came with a run time of just 83 minutes. When Disney released their live-action version of Dumbo in 2019, the 1941 version of which is one of their shortest animated classics at just 64 minutes, the plot of the animated movie accounted for just the first half of the film, with a new wraparound story tacked on. It is possible that when it comes to Snow White, Disney will return to the original text by the Brothers Grimm to draw out a longer story.

The decision to bring Snow White back to the screen in live-action is one that was discussed by Disney president of production Sean Bailey in an interview with Vulture. He said at the time:

“We were given an incredible opportunity to discover what we wanted to be as a live-action team. We were given a lot of latitude to think about what that was. We thought if Iron Man and Thor and Captain America are Marvel superheroes, then maybe Alice, Cinderella, Mowgli, and Belle are our superheroes, and Cruella and Maleficent are our supervillains. Maybe if there’s a way to reconnect with that affinity for what those characters mean to people in a way that gets the best talent and uses the best technology, that could become something really exciting. It feels very Disney, playing to the competitive advantages of this label.”

Expanding Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs Comes With Many Risks

Disney has managed to avoid alienating a large number of their oldest fans with their recent run of live-action re-imaginings of classic animated stories. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Jungle Book and The Lion King have all managed to pull in huge box office returns in their newest translations, and in the main, their stories have remained mostly unchanged from those of the animated classics that made Disney’s name. However, not all of their new remakes have hit the mark. The aforementioned Dumbo didn’t quite manage to hold the same charm as the original story and found itself in the middle of a row over the removal of the original’s crow characters due to racial connotations, and Mulan stripped away the songs and the dragon Mushu, which didn’t sit well with fans, proving that there are pitfalls to reinterpreting even the most popular properties.


Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is still one of Disney’s most loved movies, and having inspired so much it is not hard to see why that is. In reinventing the story and expanding it to what now constitutes as an acceptable feature length, Disney will have a tricky path to traverse to avoid the mistakes of Dumbo and Mulan and ensure that Snow White hits all the right notes when it is finally released.

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