Renée Zellweger
Goes off Script
Frances Dodds
| DUJOUR.com
– August 9, 2016
Caught in the cross hairs of media scrutiny, in a moment of unfiltered emotion, the Bridget Jones star raises her voice.
© Mary McCartney
A tall,
wiry man with round glasses is standing in the palatial lobby of the Getty
Center in Los Angeles, the sprawling museum and gardens complex snuggled
into the hills of Brentwood. He’s holding an iPad, which he’s
suspending feebly toward distracted passersby. He asks if we’d like to
take a survey. With brusqueness of New York habit, I say, “No thanks”
and breeze past. But Renée Zellweger pauses kindly. “Oh—maybe,” she
says, in her whisper-soft Lone Star accent. “Do we get one of those
pretty postcards?” Don, as his name card reads, is radiant. Indeed we
do! Alas, further investigation unearths that the survey is meant to be
taken upon leaving the museum. So we promise to return.
I turn to Zellweger, the well-bred Texas girl who’s just disgraced this
one-time Texas girl down to her bluebonnet roots. “So where,” she
wants to know, “did your family live in Dallas?”
Zellweger’s hair is pulled up under a baseball cap, with wisps of blonde
hair falling in front of her ears. She’s dressed in sneakers with black
yoga pants and a black SoulCycle workout jacket, zipped up to the neck.
Her skin is a silky buttermilk white: If she spent those idle high school
hours slicked up in baby oil and broiling under the suburban sun like the
rest of us, you’d be none the wiser now. In fact, it’s doubtful that
the teenage Zellweger, a reputed extracurricular queen whose overachieving
streak lasted well into her career (as, you know, a movie star), had too
many languid afternoons to kill back then. So perhaps in 2010, when she
decided to vacate the limelight for a while, she had plans to reclaim a
few of those afternoons in the sun.
Regardless, now she’s back. And this September, 15 years after Bridget
Jones’s Diary and 11 years after Bridget
Jones: The Edge of Reason, we will get the much-anticipated third
chapter, Bridget
Jones’s Baby. Zellweger, at 47, has returned to play the character
for which she received an Academy Award nomination, and for which she is
arguably most loved—the aspirational single girl who can be counted on,
with cigarette in hand, to slosh wine on the most important person at a
party before inadvertently insulting everyone else, all while squeezed
into Spanx under a dress that’s just a bit too snug.
Most of the original cast is back, including Bridget’s longtime love
interest Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth, as well as director Sharon
Maguire (who sat out the second movie). The notable exception among
returnees is Hugh Grant, who played publishing playboy Daniel Cleaver.
Those shoes have been filled by Patrick Dempsey, who is very in character
as a very American founder of a dating site. Emma Thompson, also a
co-writer on the screenplay, is another charming addition, in the role of
Bridget’s forthright doctor. The story, based on a series of columns
written by Helen Fielding, author of the original Bridget
Jones books, centers
on a mystery of paternity, after Bridget—now 42 and a successful morning
show producer, but single still—has a promiscuous week that results in
an unanticipated pregnancy and an unusually high-stakes love triangle.
“Bridget is so true,” Zellweger says of her character while digging
through her bag in search of gum, extracting a travel sewing kit and
earplugs in the process. “She’s so honest. Whatever it was that Helen
experienced and suffered for the rest of us, I’m grateful.”
Another person to whom Zellweger feels indebted is Maguire, who took the
chance all those years ago of casting a “Texan comic,” as the British
tabloids snidely dubbed her, as Bridget, a character beloved as a national
treasure. But Maguire says that she’d seen her in Jerry
Maguire and Nurse
Betty (two of her biggest roles at that point) and was impressed
with her ability to “combine truth and comedy.” So the pair arranged
to have dinner. “She had a lovely, self-deprecating quality,” Maguire
says, “which isn’t natural to everyone, and was what Bridget needed.
She really made me laugh. So I thought, Phew,
that’s half my job done.”
In the years following Bridget
Jones’s Diary, Zellweger established herself as one of the leading
actresses in Hollywood and starred in a procession of big-budget roles,
among them her Academy Award-winning performance in Cold
Mountain and her Golden Globe-winning performance in Chicago.
So much is different now; surely Zellweger herself is different.
“She has changed,” Maguire says. “We were both groping our way, to
tell you the truth, with the first one. We didn’t know if it was going
to work. But she’s so much more confident now. This
one, she just came on and nailed it on the first take, and by the second
take, she was trying something different. She is probably one of the most
skilled physical-comedy actors I’ve ever come across.” It’s true
that it’s hard to think of a character whose body language—that perky,
vaguely duck-footed gait, the furrowed brow and mouth slightly agape with
concentration—is more endearing. “Bridget herself is made up of a sort
of healthy self-loathing combined with a misguided self-certainty,”
Maguire says. “Which is, of course, in Renée, and in all of us.”
Zellweger admits to being a bit jet-lagged, just in from a couple weeks of
final touches on Bridget
Jones’s Baby in
London. I tell her I’m curious where she feels most at home, being from
Texas, having settled in L.A. and perhaps belonging just a little bit to
England, the country having embraced her so warmly as its pop-culture
progeny. “I’ve never thought about that,” she says. “I guess I
kind of feel at home wherever I go, most places. But I really know I’m
home when I go to Texas. My boyfriend is also from Texas and his family is
still there, so we go back quite a bit now, which is nice.”
The boyfriend in question is Doyle Bramhall II, the musician, songwriter
and producer who’s known for his work with a number of major artists,
including Eric Clapton, Elton John and Roger Waters. They’ve been
together for about four years, but met when Zellweger was still in college
at the University of Texas at Austin. Has it been interesting, I ask,
dating an artist from another medium? She smiles. “We’re very
compatible.”
Zellweger is famously private, having managed to keep her numerous
high-profile relationships over the years—with Jim Carrey, the musician
Jack White, an annulled marriage to Kenny Chesney, a two-year stint with
Bradley Cooper among them—largely out of the spotlight. And as we’re
talking, it strikes me that perhaps her dexterity in obscuring her
personal life is a product of her most beguiling quality, which is an
apparent curiosity about the minutiae of others’ lives. I
mean, we’re talking about an Oscar-winning actress here, but if she’s
not genuinely interested it hardly matters because you feel like
she totally is. She
asks so many questions that—somewhere between learning the hobbies of
your four siblings and your favorite cheese and your closeted professional
aspirations—it’s easy to forget who’s interviewing whom. Given her
plentiful profiles over the past two decades, I know I’m not the first
person to feel this way. But I’m curious: What has it been like meeting
so many writers over the years, spending time with them and then seeing
yourself assembled in their observations?
She laughs. “Someone had me talking to penguins in my own special
language at the zoo. But we sat on a bench, we never went to the zoo!”
She’s referring to a Vogue cover
story from 1998. I gesture shock. I’d read that story; the part where
they “went to the zoo” was a substantial part of the narrative.
“My reaction exactly!” she exclaims. “I don’t know. I guess I have
bigger things to worry about. But that’s one of the things I’ve had to
learn to make peace with. The truth is…”
“Wobbly?” I suggest.
“It’s wobbly,” she says.
Paradoxically, perhaps now more than ever. “I get excited about the
internet because it seems like it should make our culture less naïve
about the effects of misinformation,” she continues. “But I still get
phone calls from people I’m close to like, ‘Oh
my gosh, congratulations!’ The big question is why there is such an
appetite for [vicious tabloid coverage]. Snark has somehow replaced
intelligent wit, and it’s pervasive… it’s in the political spectrum,
it’s everywhere. There’s no shame anymore. It’s an interesting time,
and I wonder where the cycle goes from here.”
There is a scene in Bridget
Jones’s Baby that seems prescient to our conversation.
Bridget finds herself being fired from her job as a morning talk show
producer after she has, in a classic Bridget gaffe, mistakenly put a
befuddled chauffeur on air to be cross-examined instead of a murderous war
general. This comes as the climax to a building conflict with her
millennial boss, whose solution to a weighty segment is to air photos of
cats that look like Hitler. Bridget launches into an impassioned speech
about the integrity of substantive journalism and marches out of the room.
It’s an “Ah-ha!” moment of self-emancipation for her, but it leaves
the audience feeling a bit despondent—as most soapboxes on this subject
can. Bridget is storming out in righteous protest, but the show will go on
without her.
By this point, we’ve wandered our way into the Robert Mapplethorpe
retrospective, and as our eyes adjust from the California sunshine to the
indoor dimness, Mapplethorpe’s shadowy images seem especially lurid.
We’re standing in front of a black and white nude of a woman reclining,
the expanse of her chalky white torso rushing to meet a tangle of dark
pubic hair. Zellweger speaks with unhurried deliberation, foregoing filler
words for gaps of silence as she considers her thoughts.
“I guess I just think a lot about this new idea we’re presenting,”
she says, “about what you need to do in order to be considered a person
of substance in our society. I know I feel overwhelmed by whatever that
standard is. Could that be what fuels this need to read negative things
about people you don’t know? Or to take out aggression by humiliating
people who are in some way recognized for something that they’ve
done?”
But in our era of whiplash reactivity, at the exact moment any one person
is getting ripped to shreds on Twitter, you can almost hear the tapping of
keyboard across America as op-eds are drafted in that person’s
defense—the ultimate progression being toward a kind of enforced
awareness. Perhaps
few have personified this more in recent years than Zellweger herself,
although certainly not by her own wishes. It may be ironic that it was at
the ElleWomen
in Hollywood Awards—one of the foremost annual events celebrating and
supporting women in her industry—that she made an appearance in 2014
after six years off the grid and generated a hurricane of unusually cruel
speculation over her seemingly altered visage. At the time, Zellweger, in
model Southern belle form, politely showed the subject to the door.
“I’m glad folks think I look different!” she told People magazine.
“I’m living a different, happy, more fulfilling life, and I’m
thrilled that perhaps it shows.”
Of course, this response—potentially a statement of denial, but most
certainly a pointed dismissal of the discussion—was not enough to
satiate the carnivores of celebrity gossip. Some came to Zellweger’s
defense, mostly with arguments along the lines of “We’ve created a
culture that expects women to look younger and then shame them for getting
plastic surgery to look younger.” But the fact of the matter is that
within the conversation about “aging gracefully,” with its outsized
focus on Hollywood actresses, no one really knows how to talk about
plastic surgery. Cosmetic plastic surgery is synonymous with vanity, which
is synonymous with shallowness, and while we’re all comfortable decrying
the pressures to get plastic
surgery, once it’s done, to any conspicuous degree, it seems to be
viewed as a sort of pitiable surrender. We perceive vanity as operating on
a sliding scale, with obsessive exercise, fanatic eating habits and hours
spent on makeup contouring and perfecting social media posts on one
end—and going under the knife on the other. Being healthy is great,
obviously, but if vanity is equivalent to hours spent on the cause of
appearance, then surely the equation of “plastic surgery = pitiable
vanity” is off. Because really, in this particular feminist cocktail,
pity is the poison. It’s the feeling we get when we see a woman who has
“overdone it” with plastic surgery—pity that she couldn’t
reconcile the changes in her body with our culture’s standard of beauty,
and that she cared
so much. Because we think women of substance shouldn’t care
so much about the way they look.
But none of this is to say that Renée Zellweger got plastic surgery.
So here is where we come to an uncomfortable moment. Having ventured
outside again, we are sitting under a shaded enclave with bags of potato
chips, and I ask Zellweger her thoughts on Rose McGowan’s recent op-ed
for the Hollywood
Reporter. The actress had penned a savage defense of Zellweger in
response to a column by Variety critic
Owen Gleiberman, who, after watching the trailer for Bridget
Jones’s Baby, was disappointed that Zellweger, to his mind, no
longer looked like the character of Bridget Jones, implicating plastic
surgery as the culprit. He then laments our culture for reinforcing an
unrealistic beauty standard, and mourns Zellweger—once a “poster girl
for the notion that each and every one of us is beautiful in just the way
God made us”—as the latest victim of this “cosmetic-zation of
reality,” counting Bridget Jones as a related casualty. (Never mind the
possibility that Bridget, a middle-aged television producer living on the
same planet we do, might herself consider plastic surgery, but I digress.)
The internet was flung into a fresh bout of outrage along all the lines
one might imagine.
Zellweger, however, has until this moment been unaware of the entire
drama. Which puts me in the very unpleasant position of explaining it, and
Zellweger in the presumably beyond unpleasant position of hearing about
it.
So I fumble through a summary of the main points, a cold sweat pricking at
my forehead. Here is a woman who is famous, but who became famous in a
time when being famous really did mean something different than it does
today. She became famous at a time when the most libelous press she had to
worry about was a made-up story about her and some penguins. She’s
clearly a deeply intelligent, reflective person who is invested in the
state of the world, and as a public figure, she has a greater capacity for
impact than the average individual. But it becomes clear, from her
reaction in this moment, that for purposes of self-preservation, she is
compelled to distance herself from fully engaging with the world as it
pertains to her public image. And yet the world knocks; here I am. So
Zellweger listens, and pauses for a long moment before responding.
“Well, um, thanks, Rose,” she says, and tells me that she and McGowan
“came up together, and that she’s always been very lovely and bright,
and involved in important causes.” Then she says very quietly, “But
that’s really too bad. He wrote this because he read a tabloid story and
it played into his imagination when he watched the trailer? I can’t
comment on it because I don’t know specifically what he was talking
about, but he’s misinformed. He should have called me.”
But then she does comment, and her voice rises a decibel for the first
time in our conversation, the sweet twang of her accent taking on a
harder edge. “But I disagree with
him, if what he’s talking about is that there can’t be a character who
represents every woman at different stages in her life—a character who
is flawed,
and who represents the truths about our humanity. I don’t know why he
thinks there’s no value in that. I see it differently. And I won’t apologize
to him for disappointing him that I’ve grown older because that’s the goal.”
She stops and stares into her bag of chips
for a moment. She goes on.
“My mom turned 80 in June, and it was a room full of her closest
friends. The things they’ve seen—their collective experiences—are
invaluable. They’re the winners. Not someone at 26 who was beginning her
life as a movie actress and landed a really fun role. He’s an
entertainment critic? What does he think of Lucille Ball? Should she have
stopped when they went from black and white to color because it wasn’t
an ideal representation of that character in his mind? Is that what he’s
suggesting?”
[Since this story went to press, Zellweger has published an essay in
theHuffington Post, in which she addresses Gleiberman's article and the
rumors of plastic surgery, saying that in the internet era, “choosing
the dignity of silence… leaves one vulnerable not only to the usual
ridicule, but to having the narrative of one’s life hijacked by those
who profiteer from invented scandal… I’m writing because to be fair to
myself, I must make some claim on the truths of my life.”]
In the final line of Glieberman’s article, after he insists that he’s
always been the biggest Bridget Jones fan, he writes, “I hope it turns
out to be a movie about a gloriously ordinary person, rather than someone
who looks like she no longer wants to be who she is.”
But seriously, what gloriously ordinary person, at certain moments in
their life, hasn’t wished
they were someone else? That they looked like or thought like or had the
life of someone else? Because where, really, is the glory in being
ordinary? Bridget Jones, in all of her “wanton sex goddess” fantasies,
wanted precisely not to
be ordinary. And each of us, in a society consumed with presenting the
least ordinary fantasies of ourselves—living off the feast-or-famine
endorphin rush of likes on our best angles and cleverest captions—is
petrified of ordinary.
But perhaps the one person who actually does want to live an ordinary life
is Renée Zellweger. And she, having concluded her heartfelt monologue, is
now jumping around in a very dignified sort of jig (no squealing), with a
bee in hot pursuit. I think it’s probably more of a hungry bee than a
paparazzi bee, so I pick up her empty chip bag and take it to the
trashcan.
“NO, Frances, you can’t be
cleaning up my trash!” she cries with surprising force from her bee
refuge. We bid adieu to the bee and find Don to take our exit survey,
since we did promise. Two girls come up and shyly ask Zellweger for a
picture. She agrees genially, even though she tells me afterwards she’s
not feeling very photogenic.
“A lot of things feel broken right now,” Zellweger says, as we pass
the place we met, the sun lower and gentler now in the late afternoon sky.
“But there are also incredible things happening. Women in America are
experiencing a cultural renaissance. We’re questioning the pressures
that society places on us in terms of expectations for traditional female
roles. We’re questioning ideas about body image, ageism. We’re
asserting ourselves and recognizing our value. Is that the pendulum
swinging? Is that the result of us getting tired of the negativity? Maybe.
Maybe we need one to serve as a catalyst for the other.”
It’s true, and in this way, Bridget is still a guiding light—in all of
her sloppy, self-respecting, “frankly I’d rather have a job wiping
Saddam Hussein’s arse” glory.
Zellweger thinks so. “As much as Bridget fixates on the details, her
failures and her successes, I see her as a person who looks outward at the
world and not back toward herself. Despite her fixations on certain
things, and being embarrassed by her imperfections at times, I like the
idea that she’s still free.”
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