Renée Zell­weger: ​‘There was a moment where I didn’t recog­nise myself’

Film crit­ics have a habit, and not an espe­cial­ly good one, of describ­ing bio­graph­i­cal per­for­mances as a kind of mag­ic trick, a van­ish­ing act. We mar­vel at the ​“trans­for­ma­tive” process that turns one famous per­son, for two hours or so, into anoth­er. We describe their crafty, make­up-aid­ed mim­ic­ry as ​“uncan­ny”, a kind of super­nat­ur­al chan­nel­ing. And we speak of actors ​“dis­ap­pear­ing” into these roles, as if the true mark of a great per­for­mance is our fail­ure to see the artist behind it.

It’s a per­cep­tion that per­vades the indus­try itself, win­ning glit­ter­ing prizes on a near-annu­al basis for high­ly recog­nis­able actors doing their best to make them­selves less so: Gary Oldman’s latex-swad­dled Win­ston Churchill, Meryl Streep’s starched-and-pressed Mag­gie Thatch­er, Rami Malek’s buck­toothed, lip-synch­ing Fred­die Mercury.

Yet some of the most vivid biopic turns aren’t dis­ap­pear­ing acts at all. Think of Faye Dunaway’s once-den­i­grat­ed high-camp Joan Craw­ford in Mom­mie Dear­est: an extra­or­di­nary, emul­si­fied fusion of both leg­ends’ chal­leng­ing hau­teur and hard-ass glam­our, no more recog­nis­able as one than the oth­er. Or Diana Ross play­ing Bil­lie Hol­i­day in Lady Sings the Blues, the Motown diva’s baby-doll look and Can­der­el voice intact, and both miles away from those of the tor­tured jazz god­dess – and yet, some­how, they feel emo­tion­al­ly true to her pain. Not every actor needs to lose them­selves in the per­son they’re play­ing; some­times find­ing your­self in them can work just fine.

This thought repeat­ed­ly came to mind while watch­ing a resur­gent Renée Zell­weger take on the daunt­ing task of inhab­it­ing Judy Gar­land in Judy, Rupert Goold’s bit­ter­sweet late-life biopic. The per­for­mance is gut­sy, fun­ny, stir­ring: an against-odds coup from an actor who wouldn’t have been first on many people’s lists to play Hollywood’s great­est (and most tor­tured) show-woman. It is absolute­ly not a slav­ish act of imper­son­ation, despite daz­zling con­tri­bu­tions from the cos­tume, hair and make­up teams: Zell­weger may art­ful­ly approx­i­mate Garland’s brassy, mar­malade-thick tim­bre and glitchy-elec­tric stage pres­ence, but so many details of this por­trait – that blink­ing, quizzi­cal gaze, that short, pur­pose­ful gait – are unique­ly her own.

If they’re so easy to iden­ti­fy as hers, it’s because we missed them for some time. Zell­weger has been offi­cial­ly ​“back” for three years, hav­ing end­ed a six-year hia­tus in 2016 with a spright­ly return in her sig­na­ture role as hap­less Lon­don diarist Brid­get Jones, as if no time had passed at all. But it had. Her absence was a dis­rup­tive one in a career that, since the mid-’90s, had ploughed on more or less non-stop through Oscar-gild­ed pres­tige films, mall-friend­ly come­dies and the odd off-piste indie, all play­ing in dif­fer­ent ways on Zellweger’s ground­ed, Tex­an-sweet­heart charm, even when she was air­lift­ed far from the Lone Star state.

Zell­weger seemed too com­fort­ing, too con­sis­tent, too reli­able a movie star to just go AWOL on us for more than half a decade. Fans and jour­nal­ists were dis­con­cert­ed enough by the break that, when she did return, she was scru­ti­nised cru­el­ly for dif­fer­ences – hair, body, face – as if she may have been some kind of imposter. And yet she was breezi­ly back on the beat in Brid­get Jones’s Baby: old­er, of course, but game and gawky as ever. It was a cau­tious, can­ny, reas­sur­ing choice of return vehi­cle, but Judy feels like the real, hard-graft come­back. It is the per­for­mance that has tru­ly been born of her absence, and what­ev­er she learned of her­self in that time.

I catch Zell­weger quite lit­er­al­ly off-bal­ance when I arrive to meet her. She’s hop­ping around a satiny Knights­bridge hotel suite, wear­ing one bright, sky-high stilet­to san­dal and try­ing to wres­tle her way into the oth­er one – but its fierce­ly orange straps won’t quite com­ply, and she makes a sheep­ish just-a-sec­ond ges­ture as she gives up the jig, sit­ting down to adjust the recal­ci­trant shoe.

It’s the kind of entrance – a spot of every­day prat­falling to under­cut an oth­er­wise immac­u­late, cham­pagne-hued out­fit – that you might script for Brid­get Jones, or even a glam­orous movie star play­ful­ly want­i­ng to appear a bit more real. But Zell­weger, pleas­ant­ly seri­ous and soft-spo­ken in per­son, isn’t the mug­ging type. ​“I’m afraid I don’t real­ly wake up for anoth­er four hours,” she says dead­pan, hav­ing only touched down in Lon­don from Los Ange­les the night before. ​“I hope I know what to say.” She laughs dri­ly, look­ing around the vast, plush hotel room as if search­ing for inspiration.

Such lux­u­ry cham­bers can be dis­tress­ing­ly blank spaces in which to con­duct inter­views, but here it feels apt: so much of Judy takes place in Garland’s sim­i­lar­ly cush­ioned Lon­don suite, a decep­tive­ly opu­lent sanc­tu­ary for a broke diva loath to admit she doesn’t have a home of her own. Zell­weger can’t relate. She is a pro­fessed home­body who has a nest in Los Ange­les that kept her occu­pied in the six years she took off from act­ing. (She enjoys a lit­tle car­pen­try, she tells me.) Not hav­ing to live peren­ni­al­ly on sets and out of suit­cas­es dur­ing that time was a life-chang­er; the projects she makes now have to earn that dis­rup­tion. ​“I’m just a lit­tle more strin­gent about that now,” she says. ​“Ear­li­er in my career, I’d think how my life could fit around the movies, and now it’s the oth­er way round.”

Which brings us back to Gar­land, who nev­er got to make that call for her­self. With repeat­ed flash­backs to the starlet’s teenage years under the oppres­sive­ly con­trol­ling, con­tract-bound wing of stu­dio boss Louis B May­er, Goold’s film shows a girl being put on a drain­ing show­biz tread­mill from which she hasn’t escaped by the final months of her life in 1969. This is where Zellweger’s gnarled, still-defi­ant per­for­mance finds her.

“The sys­tem was very dif­fer­ent then, obvi­ous­ly,” Zell­weger says, ​“and so she didn’t have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to par­tic­i­pate in deter­min­ing her pro­fes­sion­al fate. Or even to be made aware of her finances, and how she was being com­mod­i­fied and exploit­ed. Cer­tain­ly, she assumed that because every­thing else was sort­ed and decid­ed for her, that meant she was being man­aged prop­er­ly in terms of her wealth and her well-being. And what a shame that it was just not so.”

It’s a sit­u­a­tion, she says, akin to the tragedy of Amy Wine­house, and as I nod in agree­ment, some­thing she said a minute before bounces back to us at the same time. How dif­fer­ent is the sys­tem today? Aren’t vul­ner­a­ble per­form­ers – women, in par­tic­u­lar – still being exploit­ed to the point of ruin by the pow­ers that be? ​“Yes, absolute­ly.” She sighs. ​“For any­one com­ing into this indus­try, the cir­cum­stances are so for­eign. And you find your­self need­ing help with things that you nev­er antic­i­pat­ed. Things where life was com­plete­ly man­age­able before, it becomes impos­si­ble to find bal­ance and safe­ty, and espe­cial­ly self-care. It’s just this train that’s run­ning at a dead­ly speed, and you don’t know that every­one around you has your best inter­ests at heart. And mean­while, you prob­a­bly don’t always make great choic­es either.”

The way Judy frames Garland’s sto­ry feels thought­ful­ly attuned to the #MeToo age of reflec­tion and reform: it shows how deep-root­ed the iniq­ui­ties and inequal­i­ties behind the move­ment are. The teenage Gar­land (played by Dar­ci Shaw) is por­trayed as a cold­ly micro­man­aged stu­dio prop­er­ty, cease­less­ly crit­i­cised by her min­ders for being pret­ty or skin­ny enough, and placed on an esca­lat­ing diet of pills to man­age her moods and waist­line alike.

It’s a sto­ry of abuse slight­ly dif­fer­ent from the tes­ti­monies emerg­ing in this post-Wein­stein era, but it’s not hard to draw a line from one to the oth­er. It’s with this unhap­py lega­cy in mind that Zell­weger sees Hollywood’s cur­rent inquiry not as a star­tling light­bulb moment, but as a long-brew­ing cathar­sis. ​“Of course some of it shocked me,” she says. ​“Because some of the folks that sur­faced and had been accused – you know, I was very sur­prised. But no, this has long been a part of this indus­try, and every other.”

With an increased under­stand­ing of the oppres­sion Gar­land faced, then, comes a shift in the direc­tion of blame for her down­fall. Judy sounds a rejoin­der to the con­ve­nient tabloid myth that casts ruined female stars – from Gar­land then to Wine­house now – as ​“self-destruc­tive”, instead unpick­ing the lay­ers of indi­vid­ual and sys­temic mis­treat­ment that con­tributed to her demise, and the ways in which she attempt­ed to fight it. It’s a recla­ma­tion of her nar­ra­tive, I sug­gest, if not an entire­ly hap­py one. ​“There’s so much more to the sto­ry than just her mis­steps,” Zell­weger agrees. ​“It’s not prop­er­ly con­tex­tu­alised in most rec­ol­lec­tions about what had hap­pened. It seems like it’s so much more fun to talk about the neg­a­tiv­i­ty, or the dis­as­ter, rather than say, ​‘Wait a sec­ond,’ to look at her human­i­ty, and recog­nise the cir­cum­stances that led there are not only by her own hand.”

Which isn’t to say she’s pre­sent­ed with­out agency either: Zell­weger had lit­tle inter­est in play­ing Gar­land as pure vic­tim. ​“I didn’t know, before tak­ing this part, how extra­or­di­nar­i­ly sharp she was – just such a wit­ty per­son,” she says. ​“I guess it’s impos­si­ble to deflect in the way that she did with­out hav­ing such keen intel­li­gence. I real­ly enjoyed watch­ing the old footage of her, because she could hit the ball back like nobody. So I don’t know if vul­ner­a­ble is the right word, but she want­ed to con­nect, it seemed to me. And of course, there’s always some­one who might take advan­tage of that want. In Judy’s case, that hap­pened quite a lot.”

It’s not the first time she speaks of Garland’s expe­ri­ence with sad, know­ing sym­pa­thy. As much research as Zell­weger did into her life and work, it’s hard not to sus­pect that 25-odd years in Hol­ly­wood have pre­pared her for this role in ways that can’t be looked up, or found in grainy archive footage. ​“I’m sure there are expe­ri­ences I’ve had that sad­ly made her cir­cum­stances a lit­tle eas­i­er to under­stand,” she says qui­et­ly. ​“There’s a lot in between the lines, and it’s not ref­er­enced very often by her crit­ics: those inti­mate moments where you oscil­late between being the famous per­son and being the pri­vate per­son. That’s some­thing I’ve known.”

Zell­weger was 26, with a few promis­ing indies under her belt and some grunt work in Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre: The Next Gen­er­a­tion (along­side an equal­ly unformed Matthew McConaugh­ey) behind her, when Cameron Crowe cast her in her star-mak­ing role as sin­gle moth­er Dorothy Boyd – the irre­sistibly earnest, earth­bound foil to Tom Cruise’s cocky epony­mous sports agent – in the 1996 smash Jer­ry Maguire. She was young, then, but had been chas­ing the dream long enough that star­dom didn’t seem a fait accom­pli to her. (By the time Gar­land was 26, the glare of the Hol­ly­wood lights had already pushed her to a ner­vous break­down and a sui­cide attempt.)

Suc­cess snow­balled. Before the decade was out, she was shar­ing top billing with the likes of Meryl Streep and Jim Car­rey, attract­ing paparazzi atten­tion with her engage­ment to the lat­ter. The 2000s were busier still. Brid­get Jones’s Diary brought her solo star clout, the first of three con­sec­u­tive Oscar nom­i­na­tions – she won on the third, for her rootin’ tootin’ farm­hand Ruby Thewes in Antho­ny Minghella’s Cold Moun­tain – and less desir­ably, the endur­ing fix­a­tion of tabloid media on her waist­line. These weren’t devel­op­ments she’d bar­gained for. Who could? Zell­weger gri­maces. ​“It was a dif­fi­cult thing for me ini­tial­ly, because the things that I val­ued the most dis­ap­peared overnight. And so I had to learn to be com­fort­able with the new real­i­ty of hav­ing a pub­lic ​‘per­sona’.”

She puts the last two words in such audi­ble quo­ta­tion marks that I won­der if she ever did get com­fort­able with it. Is this the ​“pub­lic per­sona” I’m see­ing now? Is the mask on? She laughs. ​“It’s not so much a front as a set of skills you’re not born with, that enable you to nav­i­gate the pecu­liar­i­ty of the cir­cum­stances that you find your­self in,” she says. ​“And the pecu­liar­i­ty of the job, which actu­al­ly seems very nor­mal from the inside, but the pro­jec­tions are fan­tas­tic. But it’s con­stant­ly evolv­ing, it’s always a surprise.”

By the end of the 2000s, how­ev­er, the job wasn’t evolv­ing to Zellweger’s lik­ing: her work sched­ule was as busy as ever, but the work itself wasn’t bring­ing her much pride or joy. Ele­gant main­stream enter­tain­ments like 2002’s Chica­go and 2003’s Down with Love – the delight­ful, Doris Day-ref­er­enc­ing rom-com she affec­tion­ate­ly cites as the film of hers she’d most like audi­ences to revis­it – had giv­en way to out­right junk like 2009’s New in Town and the inad­ver­tent­ly riotous hor­ror Case 39, from the same year. (Its inaus­pi­cious tagline: ​‘Some cas­es should nev­er be opened.’) Mean­while, inde­pen­dent projects in which she was more invest­ed – like 2010’s My Own Love Song, an odd­ball Deep South Europ­ud­ding in which Zell­weger crooned Bob Dylan as a wheel­chair-bound folk singer – bare­ly got released at all.

Cue the hia­tus, which she chose to take even as scripts con­tin­ued to come in. ​“It was absolute­ly nec­es­sary. It was just time. I mean, I was exhaust­ed when I went to make Chica­go. I need­ed to stop then, and I just didn’t for years. Because you think, ​‘Eat your ice cream while it’s on your plate.’ And it was real­ly nice ice cream. Once in a life­time, dream-come-true expe­ri­ences, and I didn’t stop to…” She inter­rupts her­self, think­ing a sec­ond. ​“Well, that was all more impor­tant at the time.”

She leans in, odd­ly ani­mat­ed on the sub­ject of her sta­sis. ​“There was a moment where I start­ed to recog­nise that I didn’t recog­nise myself. Phys­i­cal­ly, I saw the chaos on the out­side that was on the inside. I didn’t rest. I didn’t live any­where. I didn’t have a rela­tion­ship. Most of my clos­est friends – or peo­ple whom I shared my clos­est expe­ri­ences with, any­way – were peo­ple who worked with me. That was not a healthy road to be on. And I need­ed to stop.”

Her craft, she felt, was suf­fer­ing as much as her per­son­al life. ​“I was bored of myself,” she shrugs. ​“I had been liv­ing in oth­er char­ac­ters’ lives, in oth­er people’s spaces and cos­tumes, look­ing like oth­er peo­ple for a decade and a half, I guess, with­out stop­ping. And there’s not much to draw from in life expe­ri­ence, to tell human sto­ries, when you haven’t been liv­ing as your­self. And not only does that frankly make for bor­ing per­for­mances – all regur­gi­tat­ed emo­tion that you’ve lived a mil­lion times as anoth­er char­ac­ter – but I was bored with myself as a per­son too.”

I bring up a term she men­tioned ear­li­er with regard to Gar­land: self-care. Is that how she saw her break? ​“Oh, absolute­ly. Phys­i­cal­ly, emo­tion­al­ly, all of that.” She found a house and began fix­ing it. She took road trips to see fam­i­ly scat­tered across the coun­try from her Texas home­town to the cool north­east. She wrote and devel­oped a TV series, Cin­na­mon Girl, about young girls com­ing of age in 1960s Hol­ly­wood: it wasn’t picked up, but she cheer­ful­ly main­tains that it had some­thing. She took on per­son­al study projects and res­cue dogs. (“200 pounds of them,” she grins, when I ask how many.) She was, she grad­u­al­ly realised, happy.

Zell­weger is mind­ful of the priv­i­lege that per­mit­ted her this break, and with that aware­ness, she always intend­ed to go back to work even­tu­al­ly. ​“It’s not as if I don’t recog­nise the rar­i­ty of the cir­cum­stances, and the priv­i­lege of the oppor­tu­ni­ties I’m giv­en: I’m not going to be cav­a­lier about them. They came at great cost. But now I recog­nise that there are bound­aries that are per­mis­si­ble. Or that I’ve made per­mis­si­ble.” She has learned, she says, the pow­er of say­ing no, and feels more pow­er­ful for it.

What makes her say yes, then? ​“Oh, it’s always the same thing.” A good part is a good part, still. But has she emerged a dif­fer­ent actor from the wilder­ness? ​“I’m sure I am,” she says. ​“But that’s just age, too. As for every­one, with the pas­sage of time, you grow and learn and tol­er­ate, or nav­i­gate things that you wouldn’t choose to. But I think I did return with a slight­ly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. Because there are peo­ple in this busi­ness who come to depend on you, and you don’t want to let them down. And now I appre­ci­ate that there’s a way that I can be respon­si­ble to them, and still include myself in the equa­tion. And not let my health be last.”

For all the work yet to be done, she sees Hol­ly­wood as grad­u­al­ly grow­ing into a bet­ter place for women than it was when she tem­porar­i­ly left it. ​“Well, it’s inevitable,” she says. ​“You know, younger gen­er­a­tions of women are start­ing to just do. And the inter­net has enabled so many not to wait around to be invit­ed. And so they’re just going to con­tin­ue to pro­duce won­der­ful mate­r­i­al. And folks are going to find val­ue in it.” She, mean­while, has pro­duc­ing plans of her own. ​“I’m active in it all,” she says, clam­ming up on the details. ​“It’s just qui­et, you know, because you don’t talk about it until it’s time.”

Relax­ation has made Zell­weger more open to risk in oth­er ways: 2019 has brought her first lead role in a TV series, Netflix’s high-trash, hoot-and- a‑half soap opera What/​If, in which she plays venal, manip­u­la­tive San Fran­cis­co ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Anne Mont­gomery, ici­ly ruin­ing lives while wear­ing the hell out of crisply cut busi­ness-bitch cou­ture. ​“Isn’t it the most fun?” she cack­les when I bring it up, light­ly stamp­ing her feet in glee. It is, though you sus­pect she’s hav­ing even more – it’s the most against-type she’s ever played.

More so, even, than as Judy Gar­land, who has a com­mon thread with many of Zellweger’s best-loved screen per­for­mances: the unas­sum­ing Dorothy in Jer­ry Maguire, who feels out of place in her lover’s high-fly­ing world; striv­ing star­let Rox­ie Hart in Chica­go, who deter­mines to win the spot­light through noto­ri­ety when her tal­ent isn’t enough; or eter­nal sham­bles Brid­get Jones, who must go through a parade of klutzy humil­i­a­tions to be loved (or at least liked very much) just the way she is. Zell­weger excels at play­ing women either not quite com­fort­able in their skin, or the skin that oth­ers impose on them, and who find ways to tri­umph any­way – even if, in Garland’s case, the suf­fer­ing and glo­ry were inseparable.

I ask Zell­weger if she grav­i­tates toward under­dogs, and am met with a sur­prised blink. ​“I don’t know, I nev­er saw it that way,” she says after a moment’s con­sid­er­a­tion. The ques­tion, admit­ted­ly, feels sil­ly in Zellweger’s cur­rent pres­ence: she seems as con­tent­ed and com­fort­able in her skin as can be. She’s so per­sua­sive­ly, riv­et­ing­ly ago­nised in Judy that it’s hon­est­ly a relief to see her like this, though she claps her hands when I say I see plen­ty of Renée Zell­weger in her Judy Gar­land: ​“That’s what we want­ed,” says, explain­ing that she and Goold were both resis­tant to the idea of imper­son­ation. ​“We feared that the more you veer away from what is authen­ti­cal­ly you, the less like­ly you are to con­nect with the per­son you’re representing.”

Judy Gar­land had a more gru­elling under­stand­ing than most of the way the spot­light – ador­ing and exco­ri­at­ing in equal mea­sure – could wear a star down, though she was nev­er per­mit­ted any time out of it; bat­tle-worn but restored, Zell­weger plays her with the pal­pa­ble under­stand­ing of one who knows how hard it is to be looked at for so long. Much intri­cate cos­met­ic work has gone into mak­ing her cred­i­ble as Judy Gar­land for two hours, yet the per­for­mance isn’t ​“trans­for­ma­tive” in the hoary Spit­ting Image sense: the most strik­ing change here is to the actress’s own gut­sy, defi­ant resolve on cam­era. Renée Zell­weger dis­ap­peared on us for six years. She can’t van­ish before our eyes again.