Renée Zellweger’s Lost Decade
After the BRIDGET JONES years, after the HARVEY-AT-MIRAMAX years, after a long break from acting, now the star is ready to play JUDY GARLAND.
A splashy return to the spotlight, after a long hiatus, as the ill-fated starlet Judy Garland. By Jonathan Van Meter
IT’S A WILDFIRE-HOT AUGUST afternoon in Topanga Canyon, the air so dry and still you can practically hear the sagebrush gathering itself for the conflagration. Everyone’s gulping down great lashings of CBD water, including Renée Zellweger, who can’t hydrate fast enough. We have been hanging out now for nearly two hours on the patio of Topanga Living, a little café that’s one of Zellweger’s regular joints. ¶ As she heads inside for more supplies—bottles of turmeric juice, tea, and more fancy water— a young dude a couple of tables away leans over. “I don’t mean to make this weird,” he says, “but is that Renée Zellweger?” The actress, meanwhile, has stopped to talk to a lesbian couple with a tiny dog sitting near the door. They are earnest in the extreme and seem not the least bit starstruck, which makes me think they have no
idea who she is—just some nice lady in Capri tights and running shoes with a voluminous scarf draped around her neck.
When Zellweger gets back to our table, I express surprise that the couple didn’t get movie-star dopey, and she says, “Nope.” A big smile spreads across her face. “I have very authentic exchanges with people once again.” She stares at me for a second and then screws up one of those great Renée Zellweger faces. “Thankyouverymuch,” she says, sort of doing Elvis if he were from Texas. “Six years. It was important, that time. You’re not in people’s consciousness anymore, so they don’t immediately make the connection. It’s a quieter life, and I love it.”
For a long time, Zellweger had anything but a quiet life. You could blame 1996’s Jerry Maguire, which took her from ingénue to star. Or maybe the Bridget Jones movies of the early aughts, which further solidified her image as a relatable Everywoman but which also turned her into tabloid prey right at the moment when newsstands began to look like Warhol installations, giant checkerboards of the same woman on the cover of every magazine, from Us and InTouch to Vogue and Elle. Who could look away from a star gaining and losing weight for a role in plain sight?
Zellweger dated rock stars and movie stars and was a genuinely fascinating creature of that last great Hollywood moment before it all became one big smelly sweat sock of adolescent-boy entertainment. She was effortlessly soignée on the red carpet, the darling of fashion editors. And she was a star for Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax: Her three Oscar nominations came for films, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Chicago, and Cold Mountain, that he had produced. It was an era that, in some ways, couldn’t have been crueler to actresses, but also one that allowed them to play challenging parts in prestige films. Zellweger, perhaps, experienced the highs and the lows as acutely as anyone.
And then, in 2010, after a series of duds and ill-conceived roles, she stepped off the merry-go-round—stopped making movies, wearing daring dresses to premieres, doing big interviews. She briefly came out of hiding in 2014 to attend the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards, and the press focused almost entirely on what the internet presumed was plastic surgery that had rendered her unfamiliar looking. She handled it with grace and eventually wrote an essay for HuffPost, criticizing the media scrutiny, called “We Can Do Better.” In 2016, she eased back into movies, including Bridget Jones’s Baby, and has been quietly, steadily working ever since. This month, the film Zellweger has chosen for a proper comeback, Judy (as in Garland—a biopic), comes out. It is a brave decision on so many levels— the challenge of singing like Garland, of playing a woman who, at 46, looked much older—not least because the ways Garland struggled with loneliness, insomnia, and the tolls of show business in general resonate with some of Zellweger’s own struggles, even if hers are not remotely as volcanic as Garland’s were.
Stepping back, Zellweger says, was crucial. “I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was the last thing on my list of priorities.” She has seen a therapist during only one period of her life, she tells me, and it was back then, as she retreated from acting. “He recognized that I spent 99 percent of my life as the public persona and just a microscopic crumb of a fraction in my real life. I needed to not have something to do all the time, to not know what I’m going to be doing for the next two years in advance. I wanted to allow for some accidents. There had to be some quiet for the ideas to slip in.”
One day around this time, she ran into her friend Salma Hayek in an airport. “She shared this beautiful … metaphor? Analogy? ‘The rose doesn’t bloom all year … unless it’s plastic.’ ” She levels me with a look. “I got it. Because what does that mean? It means that you have to fake that you’re okay to go and do this next thing. And you probably need to stop right now, but this creative opportunity is so exciting and it’s once-in-alifetime and you will regret not doing it. But actually, no, you should collect yourself and, you know … rest.”
Thanks to the shrink, she realized she was depressed. “Nothing like international humiliation to set your perspective right!” she says with a mordant laugh. “It clarifies what’s important to you. And it shakes off any sort of clingy superficiality … that you didn’t have time for anyway. One of the fears that maybe, as artists, we all share—because we have this public experience of being criticized not just for our work but as human beings—is when it gets to be too much, when you learn that your skin is not quite as thick as you need it to be, what is that gonna feel like? Well, now I know. I got the hardest kick. And it ain’t the end.” But she also wants to be perfectly clear: The rough patch only lasted a year. “I had a good five-year period when I was joyful and in a new chapter that no one was even aware of.”
ZELLWEGER HADN’T PLANNED on any of this. She was an English major at the University of Texas at Austin in the early ’90s. She thought she was going to be a writer, maybe a journalist, but an acting class in her junior year led to a role in a student’s thesis film based on a Flannery O’Connor short story, in which she played a girl full of wanderlust who winds up in a boardinghouse contemplating suicide. “There was this scene on the bathroom floor where she’s in such deep despair,” she told me when I first wrote about her years ago. “And as we filmed it, I was just dumbfounded. It was so much more than I had expected it could be, and I didn’t know where it was coming from or why it was so important to me to return to that bathroom and do it again. From that point, I didn’t care where it was going, I just knew I wanted to do that.”
Before long, she was the “Girl in Blue Truck” in Dazed and Confused, then did Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, both starring Matthew McConaughey, who remains a good friend (she does a pitch-perfect imitation of him). She had memorable turns in Reality Bites and
Empire Records—Gen-X indie classics—but she really blasted off when she co-starred with Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. Right out of the gate, she got saddled with one of the most indelible lines in modern cinema— “You had me at hello.”
It’s hard to overestimate the deleterious effect this sort of thing can have on an actor. It gives strangers permission to invade your boundaries everywhere you go—they shout it at you in airports and hotel lobbies. And then, in quick succession, she made a bunch of interesting comedies: the underrated Nurse Betty (for which she won her first Golden Globe), Me, Myself & Irene, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Jones is officially a classic, pure Zellweger goofball magic. She is so identified with the role that there’s an entire generation of women who assume she is a clumsy, befuddled mess with food on her sweater. After that came the Oscar juggernaut Chicago, which led to her second nomination and the semi-comedic role of Ruby in the Civil War drama Cold Mountain, for which she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. But that was followed by another Bridget Jones, then a string of films you’ve probably never heard of, and her retreat—just as she was entering those years in which Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with actresses whose talent they don’t entirely understand.
“None of it I regret,” Zellweger says. “Though a lot of it? No thank you.” She lets out a honking laugh. “If I could remember more of it, that would be nice, because my 30s are a blur. I think I just didn’t sit still long enough to actually let anything soak in. People are like, ‘Remember that time we …?’ and I have absolutely no recall about the thing at all. What’s my girlfriend say? The file cabinet is bound to get full at some point, and something’s got to fall out the back.”
We talk for a moment about how she gets nervous for young actresses who are obviously going from film set to film set and look slightly unhinged on the red carpet—with barely masked terror in their eyes. “You can see how vulnerable they are,” she says. “When you’re not grounded, how can you have boundaries?” You can’t just grind on forever, I say. “Well, you can,” she replies. “But then you’re really unhealthy and unbalanced and, you know, about to die. And then you look back on it and wonder what happened. And where are the relationships that you didn’t have a chance to nurture?” She continues: “I had lots of different places to live but no home. No home where I actually unpacked pictures and put them on the shelf … I had two suitcases. I knew where my passport was, I knew where my important papers were—the inoculations, all that stuff, were in my carry-on, all the time. Now I put the carry-on up on a shelf!” Here she lets rip with another one of those patented laughs—full-throated, head back—and everyone on the patio looks over and realizes who she is.
I first met Zellweger during this peripatetic period in her life: on a soundstage in Toronto in February 2002—the set of Chicago. I was writing a piece about the making of that film, but Zellweger avoided everyone when she wasn’t in a scene, including me; it was the first film, I would later learn, where she’d figured out that it was just easier if she kept to herself and stayed in character all day. I would see her going in and out of her trailer, in Uggs and a puffy coat, so thin, clutching a cup of tea, hugging herself against the cold, being cheerful and unfailingly polite but never stopping long enough to truly engage. She was a blur. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Zellweger and I would eventually all have dinner in Manhattan a couple months later. Zeta-Jones showed up late in a leather trench coat and a cloud of perfume and ordered a rare steak and Champagne. Zellweger arrived very early—in her running clothes—and ate steamed spinach.
A year and a half later, as I was writing a profile of Zellweger for the release of Cold Mountain, I met her one July afternoon at the Mercer Hotel, and she kept me waiting in the lobby for nearly an hour. She was dating Jack White at the time and admitted to me that she’d been up all night with him and some friends in their suite. I remember thinking: Is she on drugs? It just didn’t make sense, given the clean-machine approach, the constant running, the healthy eating. Was she in love? “Don’t know,” she said. “Don’t ask myself, don’t talk about.” A week later, I was on a plane to London, where Zellweger was preparing to play Bridget Jones once again. She had the flu and was wrapped in a blanket, clinging to a cup of tea as if her life depended on it. Despite the illness, she was hilarious and smart, and we talked for hours in a dark hotel-lobby bar. She was gaining weight to play Jones, and her assistant kept bringing her little bowls of food every half-hour: potato chips mostly, but also doughnuts.
Back then, she couldn’t stop buying up old houses. There was the townhouse on the Upper East Side, the big pile on the East End of Long Island. She was searching, she tells me now. “I did a where-are-yousupposed-to-live tour around 2003. I started in New York City and I had just a toothbrush in my purse and drove all the way out to the Cape.” She stopped along the way in towns in Connecticut and New York and Massachusetts, eventually buying a farm in the very far-northwestern corner of Connecticut, in the same town where her brother Drew, to whom she is exceptionally close, had moved with his wife and two kids.
It must be said: Zellweger looks great; she looks like herself again. Whatever was going on that night on the red carpet a few years ago that made everyone think she had radically altered her trademark—her eyes, which are practically her calling card, so crinkly and comically expressive—was obviously temporary, because she looks, well, like Renée Zellweger at 50. But Hollywood 50, which is to say several years younger. When I tell her I am a little reluctant to bring up the “whole plastic-surgery kerfuffle” she says. “Because it probably gives you a stomachache, asking me about that, doesn’t it?” There is a long pause. It’s a difficult topic, I say. “Well, because there’s a value judgment that’s placed on us. As if it somehow is a reflection of your character— whether you’re a good person or a weak person or an authentic person,” she says. I suggest to her that there was a kind of panic people felt that she somehow did not look like herself. “And the implication that I somehow needed to change what was going on because it wasn’t working,” she says. “That makes me sad. I don’t look at beauty in that way. And I don’t think of myself in that way. I like my weird quirkiness, my offkilter mix of things. It enables me to do what I do. I don’t want to be something else. I got hired in my blue jeans and cowboy boots with my messy hair. I started working like that. I didn’t have to change to work. So why was I suddenly trying to fit into some mold that didn’t belong to me?”
D URING THOSE YEARS she wasn’t making movies, Zellweger created and produced a television series—Cinnamon Girl, about four young women, musicians and artists, coming of age in Los Angeles in the late ’60s—that did not get picked up. She traveled a lot, to places like Thailand and Liberia, which she visited with a friend from London who had started an organization that recognizes leaders who advocate for women’s rights, in this case the country’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. She also went back to school, taking classes at a university in L.A. that she’d rather not name because she’s planning to continue: “I was just interested in learning a little bit more about international policy, getting a little smarter about it all, to see if it was something I had an aptitude for away from the news on the television set. It was fantastic.”
I have been watching her pull on the very long, stretched-out sleeves of her threadbare
shirt, putting her thumbs through holes she has created. What’s up with that? I ask. “I pull my sleeves down,” she says. “It’s a thing I do. I play with my sleeves all day until there’s holes in them.” Suddenly, she puts her hands, which are covered by her sleeves, to her lips and starts massaging them. “Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Sorry. I’m going through a moment here. With, like, fatigue on my face.” Her plump lips seem to have gone slightly crooked at the moment. She gently massages them once more. “What is that now? What now?” And then says—I think—to her lips: “You may not invite any friends over. You’re done,” as if to punish them for their misbehavior.
Judy, an adaptation of the Tonynominated musical drama End of the Rainbow, is set in 1968, as Garland arrives in London for a five-week run of sold-out shows at the Talk of the Town nightclub— where, predictably, she succumbed to booze and pills and some nights couldn’t perform, unless, of course, she was on and blew the roof off the place. The movie, which debuts at the Telluride Film Festival and opens on September 27, is directed by Rupert Goold, best known for staging Shakespeare as artistic director of the Almeida Theatre in London.
The film is good, not great—though it hardly matters because Zellweger is riveting as Garland, her best acting to date. She plays her as a spooked mess, both studied and utterly free, so intense you barely notice some of the more lachrymose Wizard of Oz flashbacks. She nails the way Garland, arms akimbo, hunched herself and chewed on her words: IsFrankSinatrahere? She ties herself into a pretzel, suffering alone in a hotel bathroom in the middle of the night, zonked on pills yet still unable to sleep. Zellweger even manages to conjure Garland’s butch aspect—“I’m fine!”— and that slacks-and-a-blouse march in kitten heels down the long hallway that leads to the stage on opening night.
I ask Zellweger how she approached playing Garland, and she answers with one word: “Denial” (a snappy retort right out of the Garland playbook). “I felt like we never actually did it. We were talking about seeing what we might be able to do. Every day. Just try that. Try and see what this feels like and what does that hair color look like, let’s try this kind of makeup and then let’s try these songs, with this kind of orchestration. Let’s try to emulate this year and this less successful evening in her life,” she says. “A lot of it was, like, dentist rage. You know that dentist rage? Where you don’t have a choice? you. just. have. to. do. it.” She bangs her fist on the table between each word. “And then you’re so glad that you did? That’s what it was like.”
“It’s a big ask to play Judy Garland,” says Goold. “The Scandinavian-looking, blonde, diminutive Bridget Jones wasn’t necessarily slam-dunk obvious.” But when she came to London for a meeting in 2017, he was “just so taken by how bright she is.” They spent three days around the piano at Abbey Road studios, “just feeling each other out, singing together. She’s got a really good voice and a really good ear—great pitch, great phrasing. And I thought, She’s got a long journey to travel, obviously, but this is a colleague I really want to work with. Yes, she needs to be able to sing, but that wit, that spiky intelligence, is No. 2. When you watch that old Garland footage from talk-show interviews—she’s brilliant. Just when you think she’s maybe spiraling away, she snaps back— really crisp and laserlike.”
“Did you ever see that Dick Cavett interview?” says Zellweger, who spent months reading biographies and watching YouTube footage. (“I’m the queeeeen of the comeback,” says Garland. “I’m getting tired of coming back … I can’t go to … the powder room without making a comeback.”) “She’s just off the charts. And she’s gorgeous in that black dress, the way she saunters on, so playful, and hits the ball back and just aces!”
The excellently named Finn Wittrock, who plays Garland’s fifth and last husband, Mickey Deans, says, “There was such a palpable sense of loneliness with Judy, that sense that she gave more to life than it gave back to her, of being drained and worldweary—which is not, in my observation, something Renée has naturally. I don’t know what her secret was, but it was like she was heavier than she is in real life, carrying a kind of grief around with her. And the way Renée played Judy, the grief doesn’t come out as self-defeating; it comes out through comedy—but all her zingers are from a deep sense of sadness.”
Judy costume designer Jany Temime, best known for the Harry Potter films, says, “Renée was extremely emotionally and artistically involved in Judy. It was her film. I think she really got into Judy’s skin.” As close to literally as possible: Says Zellweger, “Jany fit the costumes to Judy’s posture. So the dresses didn’t fit me unless I stood like I was supposed to stand. The zipper wouldn’t go up.” Because of the film’s budget constraints, Garland’s Chanel bags and Dior scarves and jewelry came from Temime’s mother’s wardrobe.
As she had on the set of Chicago, Zellweger stayed in character. “We didn’t call her Judy on set or anything, but she was pretty much transformed from the time we were called till we wrapped, so I rarely saw her step out,” says Wittrock. “But it was, like, all the great sides of Judy and none of the diva because she was kind of a social butterfly. The AD would come get her to take her to set, and she would stop five times because she was asking the grip how his dog was. That kind of person.” It was almost as if he never really met Zellweger until the very end. “She was always in the wig and had a bit of a prosthetic nose and dark contacts. It wasn’t till the wrap party that she came out and she was blonde and wearing a stunning dress, and I was like, Oh, right. That’s the movie star.”
Zellweger, as herself, has that rat-a-tat-tat What’s the news boys? aspect. Some of her stories have a kind of jazz to them; she sometimes launches herself into a riff, and you’re not quite sure where it’s going, but when it finally lands it always makes perfect sense, sometimes even profoundly so. Her texts are threaded through with a similar manic patter. When I told her I’d spoken with her friend of 20 years the producer Neil Meron, she texted, “SENSATIONAL adventures!! And getting Neil to drink a whiff of annnything would be another to top the list! Ha! Though if you succeed you gottttttta call! Comin running! …with phone voice notes ON. Haha. He is a human treasure and I love and admire him so. We must share a table sometime soon! I’ll bring the fire extinguisher.”
Meron, who produced Chicago and also made a miniseries on Garland’s life starring Judy Davis, says he was surprised when Zellweger called with the news that she was going to tackle Garland. But then he remembered having dinner at Zellweger’s house one night ten years ago and bringing a copy of Garland’s last film, I Could Go On Singing, so he could show her “that famous scene where she’s breaking down and it’s kind of autobiographical and she’s talking about what it’s like to perform every night
I think the majority of the
films that I’ve made wouldn’t get made today.