Bridget’s Back  

John Hiscock | Jumeirah – November 2016

It has been 12 years in the making – but now Renée Zellweger has reprised the role of one of cinema’s most-loved comic heroines. She tells John Hiscock why she disappeared from the big screen and what finally lured her back.

© Fotex/Rex Shutterstock

It has been six years since Renée Zellweger dropped out of sight to take a break from acting and 12 years since the last Bridget Jones movie.

Now both are back in Bridget Jones’s Baby but, says Zellweger, its hapless heroine Bridget has never left her.

“I am always like Bridget Jones,” she says. “If you could only know my inner dialogue when I am out at Hollywood events and things, there is always some­thing strange that happens that nobody knows about. The dress doesn’t fit or the zipper broke and it has heen sewn up. My shoe breaks and then I have to go on stage and present at the Oscars anyway, even though the shoe is taped up. I mean, there are a million silly things. I am not ready and the train is leav­ing and I have to go anyway. All that. And I am a really private person so lots of the public attention feels unnatural to me and so I feel awkward – I feel very awkward. All the time.”

Zellweger, 47, is giving one of the few interviews she has given for several years and seems to think carefully before she speaks. She does not enjoy being interviewed and was unhappy with the storm of controversy that arose when a photograph of her at a red carpet event recently caused widespread specu­lation that she had undergone a facelift.

The arguments about whether she had undergone plastic surgery or had merely grown older became so loud, she felt compelled to issue a statement saying: “I’m glad folks think I look different. I’m living a different, happy, more fulfilling life and I’m thrilled that perhaps it shows.” Later she wrote: “Not that it’s anyone’s business but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes.”

Talking in London, wearing a scarlet, long-sleeved dress designed by Victoria Beckham and looking very much like the Zellweger of old, she explains for the first time why she might have looked different.

“I was busy at that time,” she says. “My friend had been diagnosed with ALS [the degenerative nerve-affecting disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] the month before. I had been living with her at her house and so I was not really thinking about what I looked like. I went to that event because she wanted me to go and she wanted to be on the red carpet with me so that she could show she was not being defeated by this terrible disease. And that is what I was thinking about that day. I was not thinking about what I looked I like or what people thought.”

For most of the past six years, she says, she has enjoyed a quiet life, living “under the radar” as she calls it. She enrolled in a screenwriting course and co-wrote a TV pilot which was accepted by the Lifetime network. “I wanted to grow” she says. “I did a lot of things. I wanted to take some time so that I could learn some things that you really do not have time to explore when you are in the cycle of making films. I wanted to keep some promises I had made to myself a very long time ago and I did and I learned a lot. I spent a lot of time with my niece and nephew and my family who live on the East Coast and I have been watching them grow up and getting to know them. I have been doing all the things I used to want to do if I had time to do them.”

Like Bridget Jones in the latest movie, Zellweger is getting older, something that youth-obsessed Hollywood does not like to think about. But Zellweger has firm opinions on ageing. “I think a woman only gets more interesting as she gets older,” she says. “Youth and superficial beauty [have their] place and are understandably celebrated to a certain degree. But it is fleeting and only a tiny moment in life. As you mature you are not getting older, you are becoming more of who you are supposed to be and you are becoming the best version of yourself – better and more interesting. And at a certain point that is more beautiful and more interesting than physical beauty. The sto­ries actresses tell as they get older are so much more interesting and speak­ing as an actress, I do not want to stay the same. I have done that and I am curious about what is next.”

Coming back to the movie business was, she says, “a little scary. I was nerv­ous because I love Bridget Jones. I did not want to disappoint anybody and I had been away for a while. So getting past that was interesting and from the moment I read the script, I was so happy to be reunited with Bridget’s family and her friends and to be in her world again. It just reminded me how much I love [her] and it was a very happy experience.”

She was 32 and a rising star after a career-making turn with Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire when she landed the starring role in Bridget Jones’s Diary, a part that every British actress under the age of 40 had been coveting. The 2001 film, based on Helen Fieldings novel by the same name, earned Zellweger her first Oscar nomination for best actress and spawned a sequel, 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

Between the first two films, she was Oscar-nominated for her performance as Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago and won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in 2003’s Cold Mountain. She also became a regular fix­ture in gossip columns because of several high-profile relationships. She was engaged to Jim Carrey in 1999 and dated Jack White of The White Stripes in 2003, was briefly married to country singer Kenny Chesney in 2005 and dated Bradley Cooper for two years until 2011. She is now with guitarist Doyle Bramhall, 47, a friend she met while attending the University of Texas and with whom she reconnected in 2012, although she does not want to talk about it.

She recently sold her farmhouse in Connecticut and her beach house on Long Island and moved back to Los Angeles. “The house is rustic and iso­lated. There is more land than house and it’s comfortable,” she says. “You can eat on anything and put your feet on anything.”

Renée devotes a lot of her spare time to exercise, going to the gym, yoga classes and meditation. “I do all that and I run a lot, although less than I used to because my hips are bossy now and they tell me when it is time to stop,” she says. ‘“And unlike before, now I listen instead of trying to make them listen to me. I get a lot of clarity when I run and I ride bikes a lot these days because it gives my hips a break. All of it is because I like to exert myself. It keeps me fit and sane.”

She has no presence on social media, although she is not against it. “I don’t know – I just never got around to it. I did not see that it would be that inter­esting or that it would serve a purpose of any kind that I would find useful. And it could be tragic. I regret things I have said in interviews so I cannot imagine pressing send on something that is there for eternity for the whole world to see.” Then she laughs. “Or accidentally sitting on your phone and sending something. But a lot of my friends have a lot of fun with it so I might at some point – but not yet.”

It took years for Bridget Jones’s Baby to come before the cameras because of creative differences and script problems. Different directors were mooted with Sharon Maguire, who originally directed Bridget Jones’s Diary, even­tually returning while Fielding, Borat writer Dan Mazer and actress Emma Thompson wrote the script. Hugh Grant declined to return as Bridget’s boss Daniel Cleaver, saying he did not like the screenplay. Patrick Dempsey instead debuted as Jack, Bridgets new American love interest and the possi­ble father of her haby.

Once the movie got the go-ahead, Zellweger threw herself wholeheartedly into preparing for the role. She spent time in the newsroom of the British TV show Good Morning Britain because Bridget, who is 43 years old in the film, has a new job in television. She also spent hours researching all aspects of pregnancy; for which she had plenty of help.

“I have a lot of friends who have been pregnant and I am an aunt and have godchildren and my best friend is expecting her second child any minute,” she says. “I have seen the experience and there was this won­derful show on Channel 4 [in the UK] when we were in pre-produc­tion where they chronicled the lives of pregnant women to the birth. The variances of women’s experiences are incredible. We also worked with a midwife and went through all the possibilities of what happens to the body at each stage – all that. One of our make-up artists was pregnant while we were making the film so that was pretty helpful and I could ask her things on the spur of the moment.”

She admits the prosthetic device she had to wear for Bridget’s preg­nancy was uncomfortable and time-consuming to put on and take off. “I was not drinking a lot of water during the day because every­one would have to wait a good 20 minutes for me to come back,” she says. “It was beautifully built and quite heavy, which was essential for the experience to be realistic. My back hurt so kudos to the ladies who have been through it.”

So would Bridget make a good mother? “Of course she will,” says Zellweger. “I think like every mother, she will improvise and figure it out. She is inherently a good and loving person and I think those are the prerequisites for being a good mother.”