Renee Zellweger is… a complicated person. I understand that she isn’t the kind of celebrity to spill her guts to every magazine in town. She was never like that, not even at the peak of her fame. Around 2010, Renee disappeared. She disappeared from films, from TV, from work. We would see paparazzi photos of her occasionally and many of us just assumed the work had dried up for her, plus the fact that she’s always kept her privacy pretty well-guarded.

In 2016, she started working again, here and there (Bridget Jones’ Baby) and at some point, we had a discussion about whether Renee had gotten plastic surgery, because her face looked noticeably different. Currently, she’s promoting Judy, the bio-pic about the last few years of Judy Garland’s life. The trailer looked terrible and absurd to me, but I keep reading good things about it. Anyway, all of that to say… I think this New York Magazine cover story is really the first in-depth interview she’s done in years. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

On why retreating from acting was crucial for her health: “I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was the last thing on my list of priorities.” She has seen a therapist during only one period of her life, she tells me, and it was back then, as she retreated from acting. “He recognized that I spent 99 percent of my life as the public persona and just a microscopic crumb of a fraction in my real life. I needed to not have something to do all the time, to not know what I’m going to be doing for the next two years in advance. I wanted to allow for some accidents. There had to be some quiet for the ideas to slip in.”

On the advice her friend Salma Hayek gave her: “She shared this beautiful … metaphor? Analogy? ‘The rose doesn’t bloom all year … unless it’s plastic.’ I got it. Because what does that mean? It means that you have to fake that you’re okay to go and do this next thing. And you probably need to stop right now, but this creative opportunity is so exciting and it’s once-in-a lifetime and you will regret not doing it. But actually, no, you should collect yourself and, you know … rest.”

On the “whole plastic surgery kerfuffle:” “It probably gives you a stomach ache, asking me about that, doesn’t it? Well, because there’s a value judgment that’s placed on us. As if it somehow is a reflection of your character— whether you’re a good person or a weak person or an authentic person,” she says. I suggest to her that there was a kind of panic people felt that she somehow did not look like herself. “And the implication that I somehow needed to change what was going on because it wasn’t working. That makes me sad. I don’t look at beauty in that way. And I don’t think of myself in that way. I like my weird quirkiness, my off-kilter mix of things. It enables me to do what I do. I don’t want to be something else. I got hired in my blue jeans and cowboy boots with my messy hair. I started working like that. I didn’t have to change to work. So why was I suddenly trying to fit into some mold that didn’t belong to me?”

On Harvey Weinstein and #metoo: “It’s a hard thing to talk about in this context. It’s such a big topic. And it’s personal and it’s not. And it’s something that’s always been there and the shift is overdue and you could feel it coming for a while and it was inevitable. And thank God. But, in some ways, I feel: Oh gosh, I allowed for the tiny cuts that just seemed like, ‘Oh, this is just how it’s always been.’ But I was never a victim of it. I always felt that I knew what to do in those circumstances. I didn’t feel … accostable. I never felt that I was being insulted, demeaned. I didn’t recognize it as that. It was jocular—it’s a joke. And then there’s that other side of it: that I love male-female banter, that playful dynamic. So, it’s a big conversation. I’m sure that I was on the receiving end of something that I don’t even know about, in conversations that I wasn’t privy to. But it wasn’t something that I felt, it wasn’t something that I was aware of. I was very surprised by some of the things that were unearthed. I didn’t know.”

On how hard it was hearing about the Weinstein revelations: “It was a very hard thing to hear about. And it was hard to accept the surprise of that. And I’m sorry that it’s hard to talk about, because this is a person that I did not know well, but I thought I knew him as I knew him. It was red carpets and a hotel lobby in passing or ‘I’ll see you at this after-party’ and ‘I’ll be there to make sure you go to promote our movie’ and ‘I’ll see you at Cannes’ or ‘I’ll see you at the French premiere’ or ‘I’ll see you in the editing room so we can pick these things apart.’ And that’s a lot, when you talk about how we worked during that decade and a half …”

[From Vulture]

Re: her plastic surgery… I took her answer to mean that she had some work done but it wasn’t so that she would look younger or get more scripts or whatever. Which… fair enough. The thing about it was that instead of just dealing with sh-t with some humor or even an outright denial/lie, Renee and her people issued a series of cryptic statements and half-denials and “how dare you notice that her face look different, SHAME” faux-feminist treatises. I mean, she got noticeable plastic surgery. It would have been a story for a few weeks no matter what, but her reaction to it was what made it an even bigger story. And that’s why she’s still being asked about it today, years later.

Re: Harvey Weinstein… he significantly helped her career. She thanked him profusely, in speech after speech, for all of his help with her career. None of that sh-t is ON HER. Weinstein preyed on some women and he didn’t prey on other women. If Renee is saying that he never behaved inappropriately towards her, I’ll believe her. But is that what she’s saying? Or is she saying that she still doesn’t really know if Weinstein was inappropriate with her? “I was never a victim of it. I always felt that I knew what to do in those circumstances. I didn’t feel … accostable. I never felt that I was being insulted, demeaned. I didn’t recognize it as that. It was jocular—it’s a joke.” That’s a terrible way to explain it, Renee. I’m sure many of Weinstein’s victims didn’t feel like they were “accostable” either.

Cover courtesy of Amanda Demme/New York Magazine, additional photos courtesy of WENN and Avalon Red.