Walt Disney Pictures has officially found its leads for its forthcoming live-action adaptation of the 2010 animated hit Tangled.
Australian actor Teagan Croft, best known for playing Raven in the DC series Titans and the Netflix film True Spirit, will be playing Rapunzel, while American actor Milo Manheim, familiar to Disney audiences from the Zombies franchise, will play the roguish Flynn Rider who helps her escape from captivity, according to a report in The Hollywood Reporter.
The original animated film was first released in 2010, and saw Mandy Moore as the voice of Rapunzel, Zachary Levi as Flynn Rider, and Donna Murphy as Mother Gothel.
Loosely based on the Brothers Grimm folktale Rapunzel, Tangled follows Rapunzel, a princess with magical long blonde hair who is kept hidden away by Mother Gothel in a secluded tower. When an outlaw named Flynn Rider comes across her, Rapunzel accepts his help to discover the world outside her tower and find where she really comes from.
Made on a budget of $260m, the animated Tangled went on to gross $592.5m worldwide and garnered mostly positive reviews from critics and audiences alike.
Disney first announced the live-action remake of Tangled in December 2024, stating that The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey and Thor: Love and Thunder writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson were both on board.
However, the disappointing box office performance of 2025’s big-budget remake Snow White resulted in all pre-production plans for Tangled being halted for a while.
It appears that the studio quietly resumed development in the second half of 2025, since the search for the leads was conducted across the US and UK and finalists were screen-testing in London in December last year.
People familiar with the matter told The Hollywood Reporter last year that Zombies 4 star Freya Skye, The White Lotus star Sarah Catherine Hook, and Invasion star Olivia-Mai Barrett had also been up for the role of Rapunzel. The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Lola Tung too was reportedly in the running, but may not have ended up doing a screen test since she’d be busy with the forthcoming film continuation of the series.
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Gigi Hadid revealed last year that she auditioned for Rapunzel, saying that she even took singing lessons during fashion month to prepare.
Manheim on the other hand was up for the role along with Julie and the Phantoms star Charlie Gillespie and Scottish theatre actor Gilli Jones.
Last year, original Tangled star Zachary Levi suggested he was too old to play Rider and put forward Timothée Chalamet for the adaptation.
“I mean, he is already getting every other job, but probably Timothée Chalamet,” Levi said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. “Unfortunately I feel like I’m a little old and I don’t know all of the younger actors that could be that guy. I think it would be fun if Mandy and I got to be Rapunzel’s parents. I think that would be a really fun little cameo for us to pop into.”
Moore shared similar thoughts, pitching “Espresso” singer Sabrina Carpenter for Rapunzel and hoping to herself return as her mother.
“I could see her with 50 feet of hair or something. She looks like a Disney princess in real life,” she told Elite Daily. “Maybe I could be Rapunzel’s mom. Let’s have a real mother-daughter duet, and have someone write an original song so we can talk about our differences and how hard it is to be a young person in this world.”
