Christa D'Souza

If you want to get Renée Zellweger going, try asking the 53-year-old about the pain of being an older woman in Hollywood. “What?” she shrieks. “But I couldn’t wait to turn 50! I loved it! It made me realise I have no interest in being 23. Turning 50 felt like a whole new beginning without the nonsense, the point where you can stop listening to all those voices in your head and all those expectations and projections people have of you and become more authentically yourself. Like, good luck all you suckers out there because you’ve got to survive a lot to get to my age, and I’ve earned my power and voice.”

The two-time Oscar winner, whose films have made an estimated £2.3 billion at the box office, is speaking to me via Zoom, from what looks like her agent’s office in LA. Wearing an old tank top (“I’ve had it for, like, 20 years”) and a Texas Longhorns baseball cap pulled low, with a blank TV screen and a nearly empty bottle of green juice as her backdrop, she apologises for not making more of an effort. “How many years have we had now to up our Zoom game? I’ve never been able to figure that out with the whole background thing and all.” 

I have met Zellweger twice before, once in 2000, still flush from her magnificent appearance in Jerry Maguire and in the middle of filming Bridget Jones’s Diary, and again in 2015 on the set of Bridget Jones’s Baby, the third instalment of the £630 million franchise. By the second time, she had won her first Oscar (for her supporting role in Cold Mountain) and established herself as one of Hollywood’s top earners thanks to blockbusters such as Chicago. I remember her as being adorable and humble, a “properly good egg” as her co-star Hugh Grant recently described her, and smart as a button too. (She graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in English literature and seriously considered a career in journalism before moving to LA and becoming an actress.) So I was curious to see what she would be like now.

Gratifyingly she remembers that first meeting in 2000, probably because I dragged the family retriever along with me. As any of Zellweger’s friends will tell you, she’s a fanatical dog lover. Today we’re here to talk about her latest project, The Thing About Pam, a new series on Paramount+ in which she plays the real-life killer Pam Hupp. It explores the brutal 2011 murder of the Missouri mother-of-two Betsy Faria, how her husband, Russ, was framed for it by her great friend and co-worker Hupp, and how Hupp not only emerges as the real culprit but also goes on to murder again. Zellweger first became aware of the story after listening to a podcast about the case and becoming hooked. “I binged it all the way in the car from LA to San Francisco. We failed to buy the rights because they’d already been sold, but then a couple of months later we met the buyers [the producers of Get Out] and agreed to collaborate.”

What’s extraordinary is her transformation for the role. But then look at how she morphed into Judy Garland for her performance in Judy — for which she won a best actress Oscar in 2020 — or how convincing she was as a Brit in the Bridget Jones films. (The rumours, by the way, that she’s doing a fourth Bridget Jones? Don’t get too excited, they are just that. “Nothing has been confirmed or denied. Nothing to report,” is all her people will say.) For The Thing About Pam she wore a padded suit, which she seems wary of discussing today, probably because of the criticism her appearance as Hupp has already drawn. As one commentator put it: “For Zellweger to masquerade as a plus-size person is damaging, fatphobic.” Meanwhile, other actresses such as Sarah Paulson have said that they regretted wearing a fat suit (Paulson wore one for her role in Impeachment).

When I ask Zellweger about it, all she will carefully say to me is, “Look, you want to be respectful and responsible,” adding later, “There’s always a limit to how much you can establish an authentic approximation without being distracting.”

The other reason for Zellweger’s wariness may be because of the scrutiny around her own looks. Soon after that second time we met on the set of Bridget Jones’s Baby, rumours were going around that she’d had cosmetic surgery. At first she tried to maintain a dignified silence, but in August 2016 she decided she could take the rumours no more and ended up writing a definitive statement in The Huffington Post to address them. “Not that it’s anyone’s business,” it read, “but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes.”

“All those ads telling us we don’t need to look our real age if we just buy all their creams and their fixes and all that garbage they want to sell us?” she says now. “I’m like, what, you’re saying I’m not valuable any more because I’m 53? Is that what you’re saying? There is a big difference between being your absolute best, most vibrant self and wanting to be what you’re not. To be vibrant and beautiful you must embrace your age, otherwise you are living apologetically and to me that’s not beautiful at all.”

In 2010, citing mental and physical exhaustion, much to the dismay of her management, she stopped working and embarked on a six-year journey of self-discovery, doing all those things she hadn’t been able to do. “I guess I reached a point where I had to play a different game. I don’t know if it was because it was a heightened experience for me being a woman of that age or because back then cinema was so culturally important, the centre, in a way, of everyone’s consciousness. But it felt pretty chaotic.”

She travelled to Liberia and Cambodia; she took courses at UCLA in public policy and international law. She went home to Texas to visit her parents (Emil, an engineer, was born in Switzerland; Kjellfrid, a former midwife and governess, is Norwegian) and bought a rural farmhouse in Connecticut to spend time near her older brother, Drew. And, of course, she saw a therapist.

A virtual grande dame in the industry, Zellweger has her own thriving production company, Big Picture Co, which she runs with Carmella Casinelli, her business partner, and through which all her projects can be channelled. Aside from The Thing About Pam, she will executive produce and star in the TV series Avenger Field, a Hidden Figures-style period drama about an all-female US air force team during the Second World War. Then there is The Back Nine, a film directed by Sex and the City’s Michael Patrick King about a woman who rekindles her golf career after 25 years of marriage.

In terms of keeping her public persona from seeping into her private one, she seems to have got it pitched just right, dazzling audiences on the talk show couch, rocking the red carpet in Armani Privé and Dolce & Gabbana and simultaneously being able to mooch around in her workout gear and trainers without garnering too much attention. “Yeah,” she confirms, “there’s no energy shift when I walk into my local coffee shop. Of course with social media [the landscape of fame] is so much more diverse now, right? There are these TikTok stars I’ve never even heard of but that people just go crazy over. So yeah [droll giggle], underneath them, that’s where I sit right now.”

There’s not too much National Enquirer stuff, either, about her current paramour, Ant Anstead, the hunky, silver-haired Brit whom she met in June 2021 via a friend, the late publicist Nanci Ryder. Last year she sold her sprawling £5.5 million villa in Topanga Canyon and moved into a rented house in his neighbourhood, Laguna Beach. They manage to keep themselves to themselves. Although, I cannot help pointing out, it must surely irk her the way the expat TV presenter will keep posting pictures of himself and “Ren” on his Insta feed.

“Yeah, well,” says Zellweger, the brim of that helpful baseball cap dipping downwards, “I don’t pay much attention to any of that.” She herself, as any fan of hers would know, does no social media whatsoever.

“I don’t think it would be a good thing for me, you know? I have a list of things I like to get done every day. One of them is to text or call my mom. Another is to study language online [during lockdown she taught herself Norwegian, her mother’s native tongue; these days she is teaching herself Arabic]. If I had this compulsion to check my phone every day, well, that feels scary. I’d rather be out hiking with my dogs, Chester and Ellie [two rescue alsatians].”

But back to navigating middle age as a Hollywood superstar and this “unapologetic” life she is determined to live. I wish she was on social media to speak more to that. “Look, as long as we buy into the whole idea that society is obsessed with youth, then we perpetuate it. OK, so you want to look good? So go get your hair done or your skin fixed or have that day at the spa or whatever it is that makes you feel great. But let who you are and what you contribute and how you represent yourself at that age lead.

“I have this conversation with my girlfriends all the time,” she goes on, warming to her theme. “Like, who’s doin’ it? Who’s redefining 50 or 60 without having to say, ‘Hey, look at me with my clothes off and I still look almost as good as I did back then?’ I don’t want to be ‘almost what I was’. I want to be a thousand times better! We have to shift the paradigm. You really can’t do anything meaningful when you are worrying about whether you still look like you’re in your twenties. You just can’t.”