Renée Zellweger is reflecting on her six-year hiatus from Hollywood, which opened up the opportunity to “get healthy.”
Zellweger, who found fame starring in movies like “Jerry Maguire” and “Cold Mountain,” was featured on the cover of British Vogue’s February 2025 issue and explained that there was one specific reason she decided to leave the spotlight in 2010.
“Because I needed to. I was sick of the sound of my own voice.”
“When I was working, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, listen to you. Are you sad again, Renée? Oh, is this your mad voice?’ It was a regurgitation of the same emotional experiences,” she told the outlet.
RENÉE ZELLWEGER FORGOT SHE WAS MARRIED TO KENNY CHESNEY
Prior to her return to Hollywood in 2016, Zellweger “wrote music and studied international law.”
She also “built a house, rescued a pair of older doggies, created a partnership that led to a production company, advocated for and fundraised with a sick friend and spent alot of time with family and godchildren and driving across the country with the dogs.”
“I got healthy,” Zellweger explained.
The “Bridget Jones’s Diary” star was asked if she got a do-over if she would ever get into acting in the first place. Zellweger said, “I’m not sure that the way that it works now, celebrity and all of that stuff, I don’t know that that suits me.”
She believes “there used to be a line between celebrity and art” in Hollywood. Now, 25 years later, Zellweger says it “has become increasingly ambiguous.”
“And ‘notorious’ and ‘famous’ and ‘known’ are now all the same thing. It used to be that you were known because you had done something that was worth knowing about,” she continued.
In 2019, Zellweger told Fox News Digital what brought her back to the acting world.
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“I want to play. I wanted to play. I love that this woman is so audacious and free and that she taps into her entitlement and her power and her sexuality to manipulate everybody and everything around her to get what she wants,” Zellweger said about her performance as Anne Montgomery in “What/If.” “That’s not something I do every day. So it was fun.”
Since returning to acting, Zellweger won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for her role in the biopic “Judy,” which debuted in 2019 and focused on Judy Garland’s life.
When asked how she managed to completely channel the late Garland in the Rupert Gold-directed adaptation of the Oliver-and-Tony Award-nominated stage show “End of the Rainbow,” the Academy Award-winning actress paused to think about Garland’s life and talent before explaining her goal in presenting what hasn’t been shown about the iconic performer.
“I approached it really humbly with curiosity and lifelong admiration – awe, really,” Zellweger told Fox News Digital at the time. “And I just wanted to learn as much as I could and read between the lines because I think that a lot of what we sort of address in the film has gone unaddressed or not.”
The “Jerry McGuire” actress continued. “It’s just what isn’t in the article that was written about her. What’d they leave out? What are the extenuating circumstances that nobody wants to talk about? What’s happening in the private moments? And so I just – I sat with all of the facts and all of the sort of linear history of this period in her life, and I tried to understand from my own personal experiences and everything else that I read and what was missing in the telling of this part of the story of this part of her life.”
“But again, just I wanted to be careful because I, like generations of people, I have loved her a lifetime. And so it’s just a special experience it was thought to be able to live in that exploration for a couple of years.”
Back in 2016, when the actress decided to return to Hollywood, she told Vogue that she was able to have “life experiences” while being out of the limelight.
“I found anonymity, 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,” she told the outlet at the time. “You cannot be a good storyteller if you don’t have life experiences, and you can’t relate to people.”
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Turning down job opportunities was a bit difficult for Zellweger – at first.
“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,” she explained.
The star’s latest project is “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.” The film is set to debut on Valentine’s Day.
The fourth installment of the Bridget Jones series also stars “White Lotus” actor, Leo Woodall. On Jan. 22, Woodall spoke about working with Zellweger on “The Morning Show.”
“She’s just a wonder. She’s truly one of the nicest people in the world and I think fans of Bridget are going to be very, very pleased. It’s got all the lovely Bridget-tisms that we love and it’s an incredible movie.”
