Teagan Croft and Tangled: The Australian Actress Behind Disney's New Rapunzel

What is Teagan Croft's connection to Tangled?

Short answer first, because that is what brought you here: Teagan Croft is the Australian actress playing Rapunzel in Disney's live-action reimagining of Tangled. Disney confirmed it on 7 January 2026 with a simple Instagram post pairing her headshot with that of Milo Manheim, who plays Flynn Rider. The film has been shooting in Spain since June 2026, and on 14 August 2026 Disney unveiled the first footage at its D23 fan event in Anaheim. That reveal is the reason her name jumped into search bars this week.

The clip lasted only seconds. It followed Rapunzel's impossibly long golden hair as it spilled down a cobbled street, then tilted up to show Croft's face, before cutting to Kathryn Hahn stepping out of a doorway as Mother Gothel. The hall erupted, the sort of roar you normally hear when a surprise act walks out at a festival with a stage full of headliners. A few seconds of film, one actress finally seen in costume, and a fandom that had been arguing about this casting since January got its first hard evidence.

Who is Teagan Croft?

Where is Teagan Croft from?

She was born in Sydney in 2004 and grew up in Australia, which makes her the latest in a long line of Australian performers who cross over into American studio work without much fuss about it. Readers who know the city mainly from postcards and the hotels along the harbour tend to picture a beach town, but Sydney also has one of the busiest theatre and television scenes in the southern hemisphere, and that is the world Croft came up in. Like a lot of things that read as quietly Australian from the outside, from the high street chains everyone there actually shops at to the country's steady export of screen talent, the pipeline is far more organised than outsiders assume.

One detail American viewers will notice: she will not sound Australian in the finished film. Accent work is its own craft, and the distance between how someone speaks at home and how they speak on camera can be as wide as the gap between regional turns of phrase that baffle outsiders and flat studio English. Croft has already done it once, at length, on American television.

How old is Teagan Croft?

She is 22, born in April 2004. She was 21 when Disney announced the casting, and she will be in her mid twenties by the time the film reaches cinemas. That gap matters more than it sounds. A big studio musical is a multi-year commitment, and the person who finishes one is rarely quite the person who started it.

What has Teagan Croft been in before?

Her first real stage was closer to a school hall than a red carpet. She played Scout Finch in a theatrical adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird at the age of nine, the kind of part that gets a child noticed by people who cast films. It worked. In 2016 she took the title role in the Australian science fiction film The Osiris Child, a proper lead at twelve years old.

Then came the job most people know her for. In 2017 she was cast as Rachel Roth, better known as Raven, in the DC series Titans, which ran from 2018 to 2023. Raven is a difficult part: a teenager carrying a demon father, an empath who has to play interior weather rather than action beats. Comic book fandom is not a gentle place to grow up in public, and the sheer volume of fandom quizzes and character sorting that follow any big adaptation tells you how closely those audiences watch. Croft did five years of it before turning twenty.

In 2023 she led True Spirit for Netflix, playing the real Australian sailor Jessica Watson, who set out to circle the globe alone as a teenager. It is a film almost entirely about weather, solitude and the kind of boat you trust with your life, and it required Croft to carry long stretches of screen time with nobody to act opposite. If you want to understand why Disney handed her Rapunzel, that film is the argument. Anyone who came to her through a Netflix drama they finished in a single sitting has already watched her hold a whole story on her own.

Why is Teagan Croft trending right now?

The attention arrived in three waves. The first was the January announcement, which split the internet the way these things now reliably do. Plenty of people were delighted. Others had spent months campaigning for different names, McKenna Grace among them, and said so loudly. Reported chemistry reads in London in December 2025 had put Croft up against contenders including Freya Skye, Sarah Catherine Hook and Olivia-Mai Barrett, and once that detail circulated, the casting conversation took on the rhythm of a sports trade rumour cycle, complete with insiders, denials and rival factions.

The second wave came from the set in Spain. Long lens photographs and short clips of Croft in costume circulated before Disney was ready, and the comment threads did what comment threads do, dissecting a wig and a dress frame by frame with the energy of a celebrity gossip thread that refuses to die. Some of what spread was not even genuine footage. In an era when video generators can produce convincing clips from a text prompt, fan edits and real set leaks blur together within hours.

The third wave is the one you are living in. D23 gave everyone an official image, and official images settle arguments in a way leaked ones never do. At fotobreak we keep a running file of the names that suddenly appear in everyone's search history, and the pattern is consistent: a first look does more for a performer's visibility than a year of press releases, exactly the way a first trailer resets the conversation around a film.

Who else is in the live-action Tangled cast?

The film is directed by Michael Gracey, who made The Greatest Showman and Better Man, from a script credited to Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Michael Montemayor. Kathryn Hahn plays Mother Gothel. Milo Manheim, familiar to a younger audience from the Zombies films, plays Flynn Rider. Diego Luna joins as Hawthorne, a character created for this version who did not appear in the 2010 original. Caitriona Balfe plays Queen Arianna, Rapunzel's mother, while Patrick and Hugo McPherson take on the Stabbington brothers and Elliot Cowan fills out the supporting cast.

That line up tells you what kind of film this wants to be. Gracey builds musicals around things you can actually photograph, real sets and real crowds, and the songs are the load bearing wall. The lantern sequence set to I See the Light is the reason a lot of families own the original at all, a scene about looking up and finding one fixed point of light that has outlived most of what the studio released that decade. Any child who has ever picked out that melody on a browser toy that turns clicks into music already knows the tune by heart, which is precisely the pressure sitting on this cast.

Who are Teagan Croft's family?

Acting runs through the household. Her mother, Rebecca McNamee, works as a writer, director and producer. Her aunts are the Australian actresses Penny McNamee and Jessica McNamee, both established names at home and, in Jessica McNamee's case, in American features too. Her father, Tim Croft, has been part of the support system around her career from the start.

Looking up a young performer's parents is one of the most common things people do after a casting announcement, the same instinct that sends readers searching for the family behind a young person suddenly in the news. In Croft's case the answer is unusually straightforward. She grew up around people who do this for a living, which is probably why a nine year old on a Sydney stage read to casting directors as someone worth watching.

How much does Teagan Croft earn, and where can you follow her?

Nobody outside Disney knows her fee, and any figure circulating online is guesswork dressed up as reporting. Salaries for lead roles in studio remakes are almost never disclosed, which is why net worth pages built on estimates rather than filings deserve a healthy pinch of salt. What can be said plainly is that headlining a Disney musical changes the economics of a career permanently, whatever the number on the contract turns out to be.

She keeps a public Instagram account, which is where Disney's announcement was echoed and where the cast have been posting from the Spanish shoot. That is the practical place to follow her. Beyond that, the thing to write on whichever calendar hangs in your kitchen is 31 March 2028, the release date Disney set at D23.

What happens next for Teagan Croft?

Filming continues in Spain, and post production on a film this size will run deep into 2027. Between now and 2028 there will be a teaser, a full trailer, a soundtrack conversation and, given the tone of the last eight months, several more rounds of argument. Croft's job in the meantime is the least glamorous part of the process: long days in a wig, singing to playback, telling the story of a girl who was raised in obscurity and turns out to be royalty.

It is worth remembering how young she was when all this started, and how public the past decade of her working life has been. Whatever the finished film turns out to be, a 22 year old from Sydney is about to spend two years as one of the most looked at faces in family cinema. That is a strange thing to hand anyone. She has at least had the practice.