Fans have been wondering for a while who West Side Story star Rachel Zegler is playing in Shazam! Fury of the Gods. We know the rest of the cast and also have a fairly good idea that Zegler will be joining Lucy Liu and Helen Mirren as a trio of goddesses – the Daughters of Atlas – who’ll be the antagonists to the Marvel family.
Liu is playing Kalypso and Mirren is Hespera, but for some mysterious reason Zegler’s character isn’t confirmed and that absence of information has fans gossiping. Now director David F. Sandberg has responded with a very funny Twitter video in which he hints Zegler has been cast as Shazam! mainstay Tawky Tawny, an anthropomorphic talking tiger:
Tawny has been around since the late ’40s, but DC has often struggled to fit the bizarre, cartoony character into more serious contemporary stories. That didn’t stop Grant Morrison from using him in Final Crisis, where Tawny was instrumental in stopping Darkseid: slaying his lieutenant Kalibak and earning the respect of the fearsome Tigermen.
More recently, he’s appeared in Geoff Johns’ Shazam! comic, and has turned up in various modern adventures. Whether this means he’ll also make a live-action appearance is unknown, though Shazam! dropped a subtle reference to him when the hero handed a stuffed tiger to a girl during the battle at the winter carnival (Billy’s backpack also has a tiger on it).
Shazam! Fury of the Gods was recently brought forward and will now hit theaters on Dec. 16, 2022, so let’s hope we get confirmation of Zegler’s role soon.