Learning Curves

Fiona Golfar | Vogue UK - July 2016

It’s been 15 years since Renée Zellweger first brought the hapless and heroic Bridget Jones to life. Now, with Bridget Jones’s Baby due imminently in cinemas, the actress tells Fiona Golfar how taking time out from Hollywood changed her for the better.

Photographs by Patrick Demarchelier | Styling by Verity Parker.

Cotton pyjamas, £240, Olivia von Halle. Hair: Esther Langham. Make-up: Lauren Parsons. Nails: Christina Aviles.
Production: Connect The Dots. Digital artwork: D Touch

Let's get it out of the way. Renée Zellweger looks perfectly normal to me, and I'm standing an inch away from her nose. Her characterful, quirky face first appeared on our screens 20 years ago when, aged 27, she played Dorothy Boyd, Tom Cruise's love interest in Jerry Maguire. And now, guess what? Aged 47, she looks… older. Shock, horror! The round face, bee-stung lips and eyes that crinkle so endearingly have been joined by some lines, and if she has done something to her face (and does it really matter?), then hats off to her, she looks terrific.

Now the elephant is out of the room, there are things to be discussed, including Zellweger's forthcoming return to our screens as the nation's favourite singleton in Bridget Jones's Baby - her first role since 2010. We meet one morning at the Taschen Gallery in Los Angeles for a private view of Mick Rock's Seventies photographs of David Bowie. 

She's always been a big music fan, she says, remembering how she loved to listen to records as a teenager. "I'd spend hours learning songs from the lyrics written on the back of albums, playing records constantly until they scratched and jumped," she says. "I had older cousins in Norway who would bring records for me and my brother Drew to listen to when they visited… The Beatles, Abba, the Stones…" She laughs. "Quite a mix!" 

We head to the Beverly Hills Hotel pool restaurant in search of a cosy booth where we can hunker down and talk about the much-anticipated third instalment of the Bridget Jones franchise. Renée offers me a lift in her big old Ford four-wheel drive. "I've had it forever," she tells me, in that familiar husky voice with its Texan twang. As we drive, a small compartment above the windscreen repeatedly falls open. "I'm always trying to fix that," she laughs.

  
Cashmere sweater, £1,250, Dior. Opposite: black silk-chiffon dress with leaf print, £805, Philosophy by Lorenzo Serafini. 
Black suede flats with crystal studs, £750, Jimmy Choo

Riding through the perfectly manicured streets of Beverly Hills, I look around her car for clues to her life. "What's on the backseat?" I ask. "Oh, just my workout clothes," she replies. "I'm going spinning later." (Renée is a regular at Soul Cycle.) Now I don't spin, so I'm not sure what three sanitary pads are doing perched on top of her kit, so I ask. "Obvious reasons!" she blurts out, hooting with laughter and nearly swerving the car off the road. Not obvious enough to me, and as my mind begins to race, I nervously overshare how only that morning I was caught short on a walk through Beverly Hills and had to climb into a gap between immaculate hedges… "No, no, no!" she hurriedly assures me. "They're not for that! They're for comfort!" Well, I think, that's as good a way to break the ice as any. 

Just like Bowie, Zellweger can make herself invisible in public. Dressed in a pair of Levi's, trainers and a grey sweatshirt, she carries a small backpack and wears her hair scrunched into a messy ponytail with strands falling around her rosy cheeks. She's slim, not super-skinny, her face is free of make-up and she wears no jewellery. At first glance she could be a student. After stopping for a chat with the valet-parking guy at the Beverly Hills Hotel ("We have mutual friends," she chirps), we make our way to the restaurant, where the hostess asks us how many we are. "Two," I say. "What name?" asks her associate. I'm silent. "Zellweger," says Zellweger. "How do you spell that?" asks the hostess. "Seriously?" I think. "Z, E, L, L…" begins Renée - no reaction - "… W, E, G…" The hostess glances up and her face begins to flush as Renée continues "… E, R." By now the hostess is visibly squirming with embarrassment, but Zellweger plays it cool, complimenting her on her manicure on our way to the booth in an attempt to put her at ease.

So that's Renée Zellweger: open, funny, unspoilt and - oddly, maybe, because they are clearly not the same person - a woman who shares many qualities with the only-too-human Bridget Jones.

It's been 15 years since 32-year-old Bridget landed in our cinemas wearing a very short skirt and see-through shirt, in all her fleshy, sexy, hapless, heroic and hilariously funny fag-smoking glory. Written by Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis, and directed by Sharon Maguire (the inspiration for the original character Shazza in Fielding's columns), the film's portrayal of a plummy-mouthed county poshie who'd moved to the metropolis reassured a generation of women that it was OK to be sitting in alone on a Saturday night, watching TV, eating cereal out of the packet and washing it down with vodka while the phone didn't ring. Indeed, in Bridget - with all her dramas - Renée mirrored the everyday insecurities that so many of her peers were struggling with: weight, work, men, loneliness, life (in any order you like). 

The sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (directed by Beeban Kidron), followed in 2004 and was another box-office smash, so there seems no reason why the third instalment - written by Helen Fielding, Emma Thompson and Dan Mazer, and which has taken eight years to come to fruition - won't appeal to its original huge audiences. "If you find a role that had such success as Bridget, why wouldn't you want to reprise that?" explains the film's producer Eric Fellner. "We wanted to create a franchise following one person's life. I don't think that's been done before."

"Now Bridget has grown up a bit," says Renée carefully. When she thinks hard about something, her voice seems to drop to a whisper. "She's become a successful TV producer, she's making money, her clothes are smarter, she's in good shape - but she's still Bridget. She still finds herself in situations that she has to deal with the consequences of." In this case, a pregnancy, and the question of who is the father. Colin Firth is back as Darcy, and we meet a new love interest, played with humorous charm by Patrick Dempsey (an American who has invented an online dating app), who replaces Hugh Grant as a rival for Bridget's affections.

Renée is a fusion of Goldie Hawn and Lucille Ball - with the femininity of a Forties movie star - and the Bridget that she has created is zany and physically comedic. Her face is an expressive canvas: creasing, twisting, squinting and unsquinting, frowning… with a smile that makes everything fall into place. 

As an actor, Zellweger has certainly had her highs - a clutch of nominations and awards (Oscars and Baftas) for her performances in Bridget Jones's Diary, Chicago, Cold Mountain - and lows. After 2006, the projects she attached herself to, both as producer and as actress, failed to launch. Her love life also seemed to attract as many column inches as her waistline (a perennial preoccupation of the tabloids), with an engagement to Jim Carrey, a short-lived marriage to country music star Kenny Chesney, and relationships with musician Jack White and actor Bradley Cooper, the latter of which ended in 2011. One gets the sense that, like Bridget, Renée may have had her fair share of Saturday nights in front of the television. And it makes her all the more loveable.

So in 2010, when her last project - My Own Love Song, directed by Olivier Dahan (La Vie en Rose) - failed to gain box-office recognition, Renée did what any smart girl in her industry might do. She took some time out. "I found anonymity," she explains, "so I could have exchanges with people on a human level and be seen and heard, not be defined by this image that precedes me when I walk into a room. You cannot be a good storyteller if you don't have life experiences, and you can't relate to people."

Journalist and presenter Mariella Frostrup met Renée during the filming of the first Bridget Jones film, and the pair stayed in touch. In late 2011, she texted Renée to see if she would accompany her to Liberia to support the Great Initiative, a tiny foundation that helps women in the developing world, and was amazed at the actress's response. "I remember saying: 'I don't suppose you want to come to a recently war-torn African nation and raise some awareness?' She immediately replied with two words: 'I will.'"

Cashmere coat, £3,700, Dior. Sunglasses, £300, Retrosuperfuture

Silk robe dress, £2,150, Dolce & Gabbana

Cloqué dress, £1,980, Prada

Broderie anglaise tunic, £3,450, Dolce & Gabbana. Sunglasses, to order, Retrosuperfuture. 

Silk dress, £1,670, Erdem. Suede shoes, £395, Tabitha Simmons. With thanks to Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles.

Frostrup thought it sounded too good to be true and that there might be a last-minute cancellation. Three weeks later, however, "Renée was standing in the lobby of a London hotel with a small backpack as luggage, in a pair of jeans and a North Face jacket. No entourage.

"We spent the next five days in very reduced circumstances," Frostrup continues. "Her knowledge of Africa was huge, she loves to travel and interact with everyone. She was unbelievable - diligent and intelligent. When you spend time with her and really get to know her, it's as if Renée lives in an alien world, and by that I mean Hollywood."

"The past few years have been fun," Renée says, as she grazes on one of the hotel's famed McCarthy chopped salads - "No eggs, no bacon" - washed down with an Arnold Palmer (iced tea and lemonade). "I travelled in Asia with a friend, taking a train through Vietnam and walking across the border to Cambodia. There's a responsibility that comes with constantly working. It requires huge personal investment. Making films is an insular experience, then you pop out and talk about it because that's part of your responsibility, fly somewhere for 12 hours, put on your dress to teeter down a red carpet, before getting back on a plane a couple of hours later to learn your lines and get up and start shooting again at 4am. When you do a few projects a year, that spills over on itself; it becomes a cycle. 

"As a creative person, saying no to that wonderful once-in-a-lifetime project is hard. But I was fatigued and wasn't taking the time I needed to recover between projects, and it caught up with me. I got sick of the sound of my own voice: it was time to go away and grow up a bit."

As well as travelling, Zellweger put down some roots. "I made a home," she says of her new house in LA. "I unpacked some boxes, saw my friends, went through my stuff and found scraps of cocktail napkins with ideas on them from when I was waitressing in college, so I started writing those up… I also saw more of my parents."

Zellweger has a very close relationship with her family. Born in 1969 in Katy, Texas, she was - by her own admission - a conservative child, and didn't really discover acting until she attended university in Austin in the early Nineties. Indeed, it may well be because of her parents that she feels so at home in London. "My dad is originally Swiss and was an engineer. He lived in England a little bit, in Ealing, which is crazy as we filmed Bridget there."

She goes on: "My mum was from Norway but was living in Surrey, working as a governess and cook. Although both my parents were living in the UK, they met on a ship from Denmark to Norway - she was with friends and he saw her going into dinner and asked her to have dinner with him. It was a shipboard romance! They've been married 52 years," she says incredulously. "Even if I'd have got married 10 years ago, it couldn't happen."

Renée is clearly charmed by the romantic notion of her parents' marriage. And, in taking a break from her work, she also seems to have found time to devote to her own relationship with musician boyfriend Doyle Bramhall II, whom she has been with for four years. "I've known him since I was young and living in Austin. We were friends," she reveals. "I think that gives us a sense of shared history and trust. We kept in touch over the years. There is a familiarity between us, that sense you have when you're with someone and you know you are home."

Returning to the familiar is a subject close to Zellweger's heart when it comes to talking about Bridget Jones. "I love her. I'm not her - I think I'm far more conservative - but I think there is some Bridget in all of us. That's why she strikes such a chord with people."

Although, like Bridget, Renée is a girl's girl and not above a bit of gossip. "Have you ever interviewed anyone you hate?" she suddenly asks, with a chuckle. I tell her. Her face scrunches up in mischievous laughter.

On set, too, Zellweger strikes a chord with people. "She is incredibly welcoming and inclusive," remembers actress Debra Gillett, who plays Daisy, Bridget's antenatal teacher. "We were filming in the Aquatics Centre in London's Olympic Village, which meant the green room was the crèche. There were no grand trailers or alternative arrangements made for 'the leading lady'. She sat around on boxes eating her lunch out of a disposable carton like the rest of us, chatting away merrily to all the background artists, heavily pregnant ladies and their partners about their impending births, and how her fake pregnancy suit tended to get all sweaty under the lights!"

I wonder why, when she had been away from the world of film for six years, Bridget Jones was Renée's first choice to come back to? It's a role that - although it still holds such a strong place in the public's affection - is bound to draw questions about her weight and looks, maybe more than any other. Why expose herself to that again? Zellweger simply shrugs. She's not interested in discussing the weight thing. "I put on a few pounds. I also put on some breasts and a baby bump," she laughs. "Bridget is a perfectly normal weight and I've never understood why it matters so much. No male actor would get such scrutiny if he did the same thing for a role."

But, according to Sharon Maguire, the number on the scales has always preoccupied Bridget. "It's ironic, just as Bridget loses the weight, she gains the bump," she says, before continuing, "I think she's part of a generation that feels feminism should have increased their choices, but at her core there's something that very much fears the perceived loneliness of a single life."

Bridget and her contemporaries have undoubtedly followed different paths from their parents, and among other things the new film asks whether having more choice is really a benefit? And if the modern world of technology and apps can help Bridget find love?

So has Renée finally bid farewell to Bridget, I ask. Or could there be Bridget Jones: The Menopause? "That's a brilliant idea," she chortles. "Let's phone Helen immediately!" You heard it here first.