Renée Zellweger, star of the criminally underrated 2016 film Bridget Jones’s Baby, has a face that I guess looks slightly different from the face she had when she starred in the aptly-rated 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary. Faces change all the time for all sorts of reasons. But people lost their fucking minds over this a few years ago, conveniently forgetting that attached to the face was a person with human feelings.
Zellweger sat down with Jess Cagle from SiriusXM for a Town Hall this week to promote her Judy Garland biopic Judy, and addressed some of the outrageous face-related reactions she got back in 2014, when a photo of her circulated that kicked off all the madness. One of the most egregious examples: Zellweger was once on the London Underground when she overhead a bunch of people calling her “stupid” for getting plastic surgery (she says she didn’t, for the record, not that it should even matter!)
She told Cagle:
I was on the subway in London, and I was sitting next to an older woman and a gentleman who’s about my age, and a woman who I would assume was his girlfriend, or maybe his sister or something, and they were talking about Hollywood. And they were talking about how Hollywood ladies are so silly, “especially that Renée Zellweger. How could she do that? Why would she go and have surgery on her face, like we wouldn’t know? How could she do that? She doesn’t look like herself. You can’t just do that, where you go and you just don’t look like yourself. Because we expect you to look like yourself.”
And I thought, wow, that’s interesting. Anyway, here’s my stop. So I get up and stand next to the door, waiting for it to open, and the man is still talking about how stupid I am. And he looked up, and he said, ‘You’re, oh god, you’re not, you are, you’re, oh my god, but you look just like yourself!” And I thought, yeah, it’s funny how that works, isn’t it. And he said, “Wow, uh, you know, Hugh Grant!” And I said, “Yeah, I do know Hugh Grant. He’s a great guy. I’ll tell him you said hello.”
Zellweger seems to have handled the whole situation with grace. “It’s only momentarily where you go, ‘Geez, wow, that’s pretty painful,’” she said. “But then, I don’t live in that. It just visits my life a little bit here and there…I have other things to do.”
All this is to say, leave Zellweger and her perfectly nice face alone. She’s too busy for you, anyway.