In a very lengthy profile for Vulture, Oscar winner Renee Zellweger opens up about those plastic surgery rumors that made headlines five years ago and why she needed to step away from the spotlight for much of this past decade.
As she prepares to once again handle Oscar talk with her upcoming film "Judy," the acclaimed actress looked back to her absence from acting almost a decade ago.
She took time off from 2010 to 2016, before returning in "Bridget Jones's Baby."
(MORE: Renee Zellweger stars as Judy Garland in new 'Judy' trailer)"I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t taking care of myself," she says of life before her break. "I was the last thing on my list of priorities ... I spent 99% 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."
Zellweger, now 50, also saw a therapist years back and realized she was depressed.
Though she didn't explicitly say it was the plastic surgery rumors in 2014, she talked about an "international humiliation" that set her priorities right.
“Nothing like international humiliation to set your perspective right! ... It clarifies what’s important to you. And it shakes off any sort of clingy superficiality," she added. "One of the fears that maybe, as artists, we all share — because we have this public experience of being criticized not just for our work but as human beings — is when it gets to be too much, when you learn that your skin is not quite as thick as you need it to be, what is that gonna feel like? Well, now I know. I got the hardest kick. And it ain’t the end."
(MORE: 2019 fall movie preview: Hottest films hitting theaters this season)But when the "plastic-surgery kerfuffle," as the reporter calls it, is brought up, the actress doesn't hold back.
"It probably gives you a stomachache, asking me about that, doesn’t it?" she says. "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. And the implication that I somehow needed to change what was going on because it wasn’t working."
She added, "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."