Zellweger on her empathy and adoration for Judy Garland

TORONTO (AP) — For Renee Zellweger, the task of becoming Judy Garland was too daunting to contemplate all at once. Such a character needed to be assembled piecemeal: a bit-by-bit metamorphosis starting with the voice, followed by workshopping the songs and then building in the mannerisms, the hair, the make-up, the stage presence, and so on.

“It was a series of experiments, an exploration that we all shared trying to understand and see what was possible, seeing what we could conjure,” says Zellweger. “It was always in motion.”

The accumulation of all those layers, in Rupert Goold’s “Judy,” can feel like a magic act. There are no signs of the nearly two years of work that went into Zellweger’s Garland, just the dazzlingly detailed final draft. “I felt like we took hundreds of little steps away from Renee,” says Goold, the British theater director.

And yet as much as Zellweger’s performance is a whole-bodied acting feat, it’s not mere mimicry. Her Garland may be show-stopping Oscar bait, but it’s also a delicate and deeply felt character study. Its power lies in the fusion between Zellweger and Garland — how they naturally connect despite diverging in drastic ways. Both were American sweethearts whose public personas, forged at the heights of fame, cleaved away from them.

“I understand the differences between the projections that land on a public persona and the truth of the human experience,” says Zellweger. “There are certain things about her experiences that I understand having lived the life inside Hollywood.”