THE RENAISSANCE OF RENÉE
Red meets Hollywood A-lister Renée Zellweger to discuss her return to the screen and new film, Judy
A STAR TURN AS JUDY GARLAND HAS CRITICS SPECULATING ON YET ANOTHER OSCAR NOMINATION FOR RENÉE ZELLWEGER. AS SHE RIDES HIGH ON A CAREER SECOND ACT, THE ACTOR OPENS UP TO MEGAN CONNER ABOUT THE SIX-YEAR JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY THAT CHANGED HER LIFE, AND HOW SHE FOUND FREEDOM IN SAYING NO
‘I DON’T THINK BRIDGET EVER REALLY LEAVES’
There’s a slightly mortifying moment during my interview with Renée Zellweger, in which I, the journalist, address the Oscar-winning actor (and three-time Oscar nominee) as Bridget. Yup, Bridget. No matter how you look at it, or what lovely conversation we’ve had, in the cold light of day, I have effectively pitched up next to Hollywood A-lister Renée Zellweger and told her that, in my eyes, she will never be anybody but Bridget Jones, the girl with the big pants.
The worst thing is, I lament to Zellweger (while clicking my fingers in frustration and shouting, ‘Renée! Renée…’), I was actually about to pay her a compliment. For a moment, Zellweger is quiet. ‘Well… wow,’ she says. And then she starts giggling. ‘I love that you did that. It was soooo good! No, honestly,’ she adds, clasping her hands together. ‘I love it.’ Whether Zellweger genuinely enjoys the fact people find her synonymous with her most beloved character or is just amused by awkward social behaviour, she may be too sweet to say. In any case – and it’s not that I’m excusing myself – there is a certain air of girl-next-door Bridget today. (I still can’t decide what it is… the half-up, half-down hair? The self-deprecating humour?) ‘Oh, I don’t think Bridget ever really leaves,’ Zellweger says. ‘She’s always there, particularly if I have a live television event or red carpet. And I love her – she makes me laugh. I mean, she’s always a delight.’
We meet at the London hotel Zellweger is staying in on a sunny Saturday. Ultimately, we are here to discuss Judy, the long-awaited film biopic of Judy Garland in which Zellweger plays the singer in the final, testing months of her life. Set in London in the late 1960s, it covers a specific period in which Garland took up a five-week residency in the West End, in an attempt to put an end to her troubling financial circumstances and put a roof back over her children’s heads. Directed by Rupert Goold (best known as the artistic director of the Almeida Theatre) and written by Tom Edge (The Crown), it’s essentially an all-british production, and by Zellweger’s own admission, perhaps the most challenging film she has ever done.
‘It’s sort of been an ongoing research project for me,’ she says, sipping on a glass of mineral water. ‘There was a lot I didn’t know about Judy’s journey, so aside from the rudimentary training – looking at the way she moved, tackling the songs – there was a lot to read. A lot of discovery.’ One of the biggest shocks for Zellweger was the way Garland was treated by MGM, the studio that signed the star up on a multi-film contract aged 13 (her big break came at 16, in The Wizard Of Oz). ‘Because I didn’t know that they were giving her drugs by the time she was pre-pubescent. That every day there were pills: pills to keep her weight down; pills to temper her development; pills to wake her up; pills to go to sleep. I didn’t know that it was those drugs that probably led to her addiction. And so that was eye-opening,’ she says.
Having seen the film a few days before we meet, I tell her that to some degree, it made me angry. ‘Oh, definitely,’ Zellweger agrees. ‘I definitely felt like that. I guess in the same way that I felt angry when I watched the Amy documentary [the 2015 film about iconic British star Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011 aged just 27]. But also, this idea that you should be made to feel like you don’t really deserve the thing that you’ve been given. To the point where you should feel inclined to never complain. And you know, what wouldn’t it take for you to live your dream? Even if it’s destroying you.’
As a study of the film industry, there are certainly interesting parallels to be drawn between Garland’s 1930s experience and Hollywood today. But on a personal level, there were other ways
‘I GOT SOME BAD ADVICE. I MADE SOME BAD CHOICES’
Zellweger felt she could relate. At the time Judy was first mooted, Zellweger had just returned from a self-imposed six-year career break, having decided the industry was having a more negative than positive effect on her health. ‘I was away for a while and, in all honesty, it was because I wasn’t taking care of myself,’ she explains. ‘I looked like I wasn’t taking care of myself. I felt like I wasn’t taking care of myself. And I was so bored with myself.
‘It had got to the point where I felt like I was sitting beside myself when I was filming, watching myself and rolling my eyes. And going, “Oh, shut up!”’ she laughs. ‘And, “Oh, there you are… doing that thing you do again.” And so I decided to go away. Become more interesting!’ she adds, brightly. ‘Do something else. Because, you know, I got some bad advice. I made some pretty bad choices. And, well…’ she looks at her palms, suddenly clamming up. ‘Let’s just leave it there.’
But you do know we can’t, I say. You’ve now made it all sound so terrible; really dark. Zellweger smiles. ‘Well, it was pretty dark. And sad,’ she says. ‘But I don’t look at it as wasted life, because I learned a lot from it – and that’s what I needed, I guess. I learned a lot about perspective. To recognise different patterns of my behaviour. To understand different consequences. And so I’m just grateful. Grateful to have learned and to do something different.’
What that ‘different’ is, she won’t exactly say. But somewhere in the break, she fathoms, it became less about the healing and she started to enjoy herself again. ‘So it was fun,’ she says. ‘At first, I moved to a ranch in Connecticut, then I sorted of bobbed around the East Coast, between places. And then eventually, I went back to Los Angeles and adopted some dogs.
I mean, I hadn’t had dogs for 15 years. It was time.’ And then? ‘I co-wrote a script, Cinnamon Girl [which was turned into a pilot for Lifetime in 2013]. I studied a bit. I saw my family. And then I guess I got curious again.’ She was contemplating her move back into acting when she got the call to see if she wanted to make Bridget Jones’s Baby.
As comebacks go, it was perfect. Like the other instalments before it, the third film in the franchise became an international box-office hit. But if 2016 was the year that brought Zellweger back into public consciousness, 2019 is proving to be the one that has captured the critics. Judy, in all its brutal honesty and splendour, already seems set to make Zellweger an awards-season contender for the first time in 15 years (if her performance isn’t fourth-oscarnomination worthy, I’m not sure what is). Combined with her powerhouse turn in the buzzedabout Netflix drama What/if (a sort of homage to The Graduate and Basic Instinct – put simply, essential guilty pleasure viewing), you can start to see how the term ‘the Renée-ssance’ has become a thing. ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ giggles Zellweger, slightly cringing. ‘I mean, where did that begin…?’ Actually, I tell her, with Rupert Goold, Judy’s director. I believe he’s been touting it. Now, she lets out a long laugh. ‘And that’s because he’s very funny,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘He’s a very funny man.’
With three Bridget Jones films and a biopic of Beatrix Potter on her CV, Britain has loomed large in Zellweger’s career. Could there be a potential fourth Bridget Jones on the horizon? Zellweger smiles. ‘I mean, if that’s what Helen [Fielding] wants to do, it sounds fun.’ But in some ways, she says, the British connection isn’t so random: her parents, a Norwegian midwife and Swiss engineer, both lived here for a brief period; her mother in Guildford, Surrey, and her father in Ealing, west London. After meeting on a cruise ship in Denmark, they eventually moved to Texas, where they settled in small-town Katy. ‘It’s a sweet story,’ says Zellweger, ‘because after they spent time together on this boat, my mum got a job in Houston and my dad said he’d follow her there.’ She rolls her eyes: ‘She was like, “Oh, sure.” But you know,’ she adds, with more than a hint of irony, ‘This guy said he’d be there on this date, at this time, and he was.’
As the daughter of Europeans living in Texas, Zellweger’s perspective always felt ‘a little different’. Moving to LA, a city of immigrants, was the first step change. Then, in 2001, Bridget
‘WE SHOULDN’T ACCEPT LESS THAN WHAT WE DESERVE’
Jones’s Diary came along, and she discovered an affinity with London. ‘I really do feel I have that,’ she says. ‘Every time I come back, it feels like homecoming.’ She thinks this is partly because she has friends here (‘tons of them, all over the place’), but also because in London she feels like she can lead a relatively ‘normal’ existence. Most days, she roams the city incognito with no problem (before we meet, she has been running around Hyde Park). ‘And it’s easy,’ she says. ‘I mean, the geese on The Serpentine are the only thing I worry about – they can stand their ground. But using the Tube is really easy. It’s all really easy, I think, if you just look normal.’ And how does one do that? ‘Well, apart from today,’ she says, gesturing to her all-beige get-up of poloneck and trousers, ‘Gym gear. I look like I’m going to the gym most of the time, and nobody even looks in my direction.’
And yet, at certain points in the past, tabloid attention has felt unrelenting. Particular moments that spring to mind are the media scrums that surrounded her relationships with high-profile stars such as Bradley Cooper and Jim Carrey (to whom she was reportedly engaged) and her short-lived marriage to country singer Kenny Chesney. During her hiatus, she is thought to have been in a relationship with musician Doyle Bramhall II (I choose not to discuss any of this), but nothing seemed quite as heightened as the furore of 2014, in which Zellweger became the subject of various reports and gossip columns insinuating she had undergone cosmetic surgery.
In response to the latter criticisms, she wrote an essay, published in the Huffington Post, to question the intense scrutiny that society places on female appearance. ‘On one level, it was just a bit much, in terms of the false narrative that was going on,’ she explains. ‘But there also came a point where I felt it was time to talk a little bit about the bigger issue at hand… you know, the expectation that we are to be concerned with those things. That we need to be adhering to certain expectations, in terms of how we present ourselves or the choices that we make.’
As the essay went on, and another was published in its wake (this time by Jennifer Aniston, questioning the public obsession with her maternal and marital status), it became apparent that Zellweger had awoken a debate about the extreme double standards served up not just to women in the spotlight, but in everyday life. ‘Because that’s what’s concerning,’ she says. ‘This idea that when women greet each other in society, we will comment on something about our physicality. “Oh my god, you look great. Oh my god, your hair.” But with men, it’s: “How are you doing? How did the thing go? What have you been working on?”
‘I did another interview recently,’ she says, ‘And to start with, it was interesting – we talked about the process of undertaking Judy, and the technical aspects of it. And then the journalist moved on to my private life. She asked me if I was single, and am I still dating so-and-so. And then, again – am I in a relationship right now? And she kept pushing. Is it hard to have a private life? How do you feel about this thing about your appearance? And it was… disappointing. But also interesting that it was a female journalist who brought the conversation to that place. Where it might diminish the importance of what you did.’
Still, she says, at some point she hopes we’ll see change. ‘On one level, it’s sort of inevitable, isn’t it? A younger generation of women are coming of age and, as with most things that shift in the right direction, it takes a minute. But at the same time, I don’t think we should have apathy about it.’
What she’s really saying is that the buck stops with us. Zellweger nods. ‘It’s just a different perspective. Because we shouldn’t accept less than what we deserve. It’s a pattern in my life, for sure. But what I’ve realised is I can be just as responsible in participating in collaborative efforts. I can be included in the equation. And while it’s good to say yes, I can say no. I can push back.
‘It’s not easy to talk about because I know I’m very lucky,’ she adds. ‘I’m aware that it’s a blessing to do what I do for a living. But, at one point, I think I was too grateful.’
Judy is released in cinemas on 2nd October