Renée Zellweger would rather have a headache. ”I wish I was hungover from last night, honey, I wish.” She flops into an armchair and crosses her legs for emphasis. ”I didn’t really have the chance to get a drink. I went over to the bar at one point and carried the glass around for the rest of the night.”
She fits her fists to her hips and bellows hysterically, a pocket Calamity Jane. It is the morning after the night before. The British premiere of Bridget Jones’s Diary was a noisy, glossy affair.
Zellweger is in rude good health. Her apple cheeks are scrubbed and rosy, her deep-set eyes shine like damp diamonds. And yes, she is thin — tiny-waisted, pre-teen-chested. Her arms are covered by a long-sleeved top but I’ll warrant her triceps are well-defined. Riffing on her assistant’s new hairstyle, she throws out: ”This is much more interesting than some dumb actress prattling on about her experiences with pizza!” She’s laughing, but she spits the word like it’s swearing.
Of course, Zellweger’s experiences with pizza have taken on mythic proportions. In order to play the eponymous heroine in the film of Helen Fielding’s bestseller, the actress gained about 8kg, consulting a dietician and endocrinologist who devised a regime of three full meals a day, multiple snacks and no exercise.
According to the film’s costume designer, Rachael Fleming, Zellweger would wail ”I’m so fat! I’m so fat!” each day, comparing her stomach with that of Fleming, who was eight months pregnant. Rumour has it that Harper’s Bazaar magazine refused to use her on its cover because she was too heavy, though Zellweger herself politely deflects this with the explanation that she was tired at the time of the shoot and ”probably looked like road kill”.
But recent press reports that she has declined to sign up for a sequel have inevitably been interpreted in the light of the perils of a full fridge.
Yet onscreen, the results of her Robert de Niro-esque efforts are little short of astounding. It is as shocking as it is joyous to watch Bridget’s thighs dimple as she hoicks herself into a gargantuan pair of tummy control pants and realise that you have never — not once — seen cellulite on the big screen before. She looks real — fleshy, female, sexy as hell. It’s a triumphant transformation to observe, if not to undergo.
As a whole, 32-year-old Zellweger’s performance is rather magnificent. It’s a tough call to translate a character as phenomenal and ubiquitous as Bridget Jones, and she meets the challenge amply. Though her vowels are a little more Pony Club than you would have imagined, she crystallises the character’s combination of good-hearted vulnerability, knowing hopelessness and game humour impressively. Not bad for the Texan who ignited Little Englander angst when she was chosen for the role over the likes of Kate Winslet, inciting London’s Evening Standard to liken the casting to ”remaking The Elephant Man with Jude Law”.
While she doesn’t dismiss the weight of expectation, she frames it in terms of responsibility: ”The pressure was more of an internal thing, it was a respect for Helen Fielding and what she’d created and an understanding that I was not alone in loving this character.”
She often betrays a fretful concern that others won’t be let down by her. When talking seriously she sets her knees together and gazes with intensity, all homespun polite and girl-friendly confidences. Her voice is deliciously twangy, with the breath control of Marilyn Monroe. She’s an intelligent, if rambling conversationalist, layering clauses and images.
”Obviously I related to the female aspect [of the character], her day-to-day regimen and fight against Mother Nature. On a more significant level, I’m about to enter the stage of life that Bridget is experiencing and I, like so many people, understood her quest. I understood her search for self-acceptance and her daily attempt to define what is going to bring her happiness in life, her struggle to differentiate between what it is that she wants for her life and what it is that society expects from her.”
What does society expect from women of Zellweger’s age?
”It’s changing, and it’s really an interesting time right now. Bridget is of the last generation that is trying to slip through that antiquated social definition of success regarding women, in terms of being the cornerstone of a nurturing family unit; in other words if you don’t get married and you’re not celebrated in that regard by a man, then you’ve failed in some way.”
It is also significant that her generation doesn’t regard women’s increasing visibility in positions of power as being unusual. ”They don’t see that as, ‘Oh, isn’t it great that there’s a female secretary of state, a female governor in Texas.’ So the ceiling has been presented: here’s what you can achieve now as a woman in terms of family and home, and here’s what you can achieve in terms of contributing professionally in society. So you want to do both, right? And if you don’t reach the ceiling in one or the other or both, have you failed in some way?”
One charge regularly levelled against the character Zellweger plays is that she is reductive, regressive, portraying women as neurotic, self-obsessed and man-mad. How does she answer critics who say Bridget is an anti-feminist construct?
”She faces those dilemmas with humour. She’s aware that she’s self-aware, which makes her not pathetic, and she’s self-deprecating but in a humorous way that makes her not loathsome and not superficial. It’s wonderful that Helen Fielding is so honest about our insecurities as human beings.”
Nor are those insecurities gender-specific, she argues. ”If you look at it on a superficial level, yes it is about a woman and her daily challenges and her laughing about these things that ultimately shouldn’t matter. But if you look deeper, it goes way beyond that, and it’s not age-specific or culturally specific either. It’s the search for who you are, trying to define yourself and really figure out what makes you happy in life.”
”I don’t think [Bridget Jones is] a setback for women. If you look through the course of the book, and the film as well, she really comes into her own on her own. She decides to be happy now and not in some projected myth of what the future might hold and the happiness that might bring. She blossoms, and if that’s not a positive feminist message, I don’t know what is.”
Born and raised in Katy, a country town in Texas, Zellweger studied English at university before moving to Los Angeles to pursue her acting career. She was championed by Tom Cruise, who chose her to play his love interest in the film Jerry Maguire and credited her with ”revealing the core humanity of the movie”.
Lately Zellweger has branched off into comedy, making Me, Myself and Irene with Jim Carrey, whom she dated for a year before they split up last December, and winning a Golden Globe for her role as a soap-opera obsessive in Nurse Betty. She is curious, she says, rather than ambitious.
”Yeah, I want to be able to take care of myself, so I will really work hard in order to achieve that. But I’m not ambitious for that myth of what success is. I’m not trying to get anywhere.”
And is she really so bored of talking about her pizza intake? ”I understand why it’s interesting,” she drawls with heavy irony, ”and believe me, for the first week it was very interesting, going to DiMario’s every day.”
She switches to an itty-bitty baby voice: ”’Yes, I would like the pizza, and the garlic bread too, because it’s my responsibility, and I’ll have the cream sauce linguine, for the good of the film, and a chocolate shake, and a Guinness.’ I understand the intrigue. It sounds like it would be such a liberating experience, but I hope that that won’t be what becomes most important.”
So was Bridget — and consequently herself playing Bridget — fat? ”No,” she says wearily. ”She has a different body type to me, but it reflects the different lifestyles that we lead, and that’s what she chooses. It makes her happy to have Chardonnay and some extra Milk Tray, so why shouldn’t she?”
Then would she say that Bridget was a normal size? ”What’s normal? Kate Moss is normal — her genetic make-up has dictated that this is how she’ll look.”
For Bridget, who is voluptuous and doesn’t go to the gym on a daily basis — that’s definitely normal. Not less attractive, not less beautiful, than someone who weighs 9kg less.
”It’s not as though the character had an obesity problem,” she says. It was never about fat.
”It was about trying to meet a particular media-projected paradigm of what beauty is right now, and unfortunately it’s air-brushed and it’s 2m tall, because that happens to be what makes clothes look really good according to some.”
But as a woman working in an industry where that aesthetic is a given, how does she deal with that pressure personally? ”I try not to make it part of my day,” she says with steely dismissal. ”I try to take care of myself because I get tired if I don’t, from the schedule that I keep. I like to play outside. I like to run up the hill with my dog because it makes me happy. I like to go to the gym because it leaves me psychologically more balanced than if I didn’t.”
It suddenly feels extremely rude to be sitting in a room with a stranger, suggesting that she might be underweight, or freakish, or letting women down by losing the weight again.
It is ever vexed, this question of the ideal female form. We’re as keen on the unhappy thin as we are on the cheerful fat. We are so desperate for signs of flesh that we’re prepared to hang decades of debate off the ankles, slender or otherwise, of one woman.
The truth is, Zellweger’s weight gain won’t alter the aesthetic one bit. But perhaps Bridget has helped challenge it.