Once upon a time, Vanessa Hudgens was crowned the queen of Coachella. The 33-year-old actress, who first found fame in her teens as the star of High School Musical, spent the majority of her twenties refining her “boho chic” look at the annual music festival and making headlines in the process. But then, the pandemic happened, Coachella was cancelled indefinitely, and Hudgens made headlines again for questioning the wisdom of coronavirus lockdowns, probably because she was so upset about the no-Coachella thing.
Hudgens’ beloved desert musical festival is scheduled to return this coming April. But I suggest she avoid a potential super-spreader event and lean into her association with a much more wholesome celebration: Christmas.
Since 2018, Hudgens has emerged as a millennial Christmas star, thanks to her surprisingly dedicated performances in Netflix’s Princess Switch film series, the third of which was released this November. If you haven’t seen them, you have a beautiful six hours of viewing ahead of you: Hudgens stars as 1) Princess Stacy, a Chicago-baker-turned-royal, 2) Queen Margaret, cousin to Stacy and ruler of the fictional Montenaro, and 3) Lady Fiona, another vaguely royal relative with a blonde wig. Yes, she plays all three characters. Yes, they all have different accents. And then there’s Netflix’s criminally underrated 2019 offering The Knight Before Christmas, in which Hudgens plays a high-school science teacher in Ohio who falls in love with a time-traveling medieval knight.