About seven years ago, sometime after winning an Oscar for her third consecutive Academy Award nomination, Renée Zellweger took a voluntary break from Hollywood. The Texas-born actress had worked steadily since 1994, appearing in films such as Jerry Maguire, One True Thing, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Chicago, and Cinderella Man;sometimes, she made up to four movies a year. But after a decade and a half, the actress suddenly bowed out of the rat race for reasons unknown.
Now, in a new Vogue U.K. cover story commemorating her on-screen comeback in this fall's Bridget Jones’s Baby, the actress has finally explained the reasons behind her mysterious moviemaking break.
“I was fatigued and wasn’t taking the time I needed to recover between projects, and it caught up with me,” Zellweger confesses to the British magazine. “I got sick of the sound of my own voice: it was time to go away and grow up a bit.”
Not that she wasn’t tempted to return to Hollywood before her six-year-long, self-imposed ban from movie sets ended. “As a creative person, saying no to that wonderful once-in-a-lifetime project is hard,” she admitted, speaking about unknown opportunities she let pass. Zellweger maintains her vacation was worth it, though, saying that it allowed her to recharge and experience life in a way she couldn’t have been able to if she had continued living in the public eye.
“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 explained. “You cannot be a good storyteller if you don’t have life experiences, and you can’t relate to people.”
In 2014, after a rare public appearance spurred plastic-surgery speculation—the Internet’s awful welcome-back gift, apparently—Zellweger wrote a brave essay hinting at the reasons behind her Hollywood vacation and explaining why she doesn’t care about criticism.
“My friends say that I look peaceful. I am healthy,” Zellweger said of her appearance. “For a long time I wasn’t doing such a good job with that. I took on a schedule that is not realistically sustainable and didn’t allow for taking care of myself. Rather than stopping to recalibrate, I kept running until I was depleted and made bad choices about how to conceal the exhaustion. I was aware of the chaos and finally chose different things.”
“People don’t know me in my 40s,” Zellweger added. “People don’t know me [as] healthy for a while. Perhaps I look different. Who doesn’t as they get older?! Ha. But I am different. I’m happy.”
We, as a moviegoing audience, look forward to re-acquainting ourselves with the rested, rejuvenated actress in this new phase of her life. After reprising her beloved role as Bridget Jones in the film’s follow-up this fall, Zellweger returns to dramatic territory with The Whole Truth, a thriller co-starring Keanu Reeves, and Same Kind of Different as Me, a drama based on the New York Times best-selling memoir of the same name.
