Judy’s Renée Zellweger to everyone eager to write a story on her career: Don’t call it a comeback

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Renée Zellweger isn’t having it. It’s Sunday afternoon, the busiest day of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and Zellweger is making waves with her latest role: playing the legendary singer/actress Judy Garland in Judy. The biopic, based on a Tony-nominated play, zeroes in on Garland’s final comeback, a sold-out, five-week run at the aptly-named Talk of the Town nightclub in London in 1968. (Garland was 46, and as it turned out, six months away from death.)

Here at a swanky Toronto hotel, reporters are lined up like ants outside a sugar bowl, and every one of them (me included) is dying to impose onto Zellweger some sort of Garland-esque comeback narrative. In 2010, she dropped off our screens for a six-year hiatus; in 2016 she popped up in familiar territory, reprising the title character in Bridget Jones’s Baby. This past May, playing Anne, an evil Mrs. Robinson who steams up her penthouse like a cougar in heat in the Netflix series What/If, Zellweger managed to stay on the right side of risible – just. Now in Judy, arriving Sept. 27, her real acting chops are on full, regal display.

Films opening this weekend: Renée Zellweger’s star performance as Judy, the adorable Abominable and haunting Monos

Adding fuel to the comeback fire are those infamous photos from the 2014 Elle Women in Hollywood Awards in which Zellweger looked so altered – her forehead as flat as Saskatchewan, her trademark squinchy eyes unsquinched – that it didn’t seem like she’d had Botox; it seemed like she’d entered the witness-protection program. So enormous was the reaction that Zellweger responded in a Huffington Post essay chiding the media for its superficiality, entitled, “We Can Do Better.”

But though our fascination was part woman-shaming, it was also genuine concern. Zellweger was our delightful Everywoman. Despite her killer body and unshakable commitment to steamed spinach, her imperfect beauty made her feel accessible, possible, one of us. Women don’t get that very often in our superstars. Men have lumpy role models a la Seth Rogen; the standard for women is Jennifer Lopez. So, our panic went, if Zellweger opted for generic blandness over characterful flaws, it meant we were going backwards.

Whatever those 2014 photos showed, it was temporary, because Zellweger, now 50, looks like herself again. Today she’s going for Consciously Relaxed: She wears blue satin pajama pants, a soft blue cashmere sweater that keeps sliding off her shoulder, a stunning square ring with a honking yellow stone. Her hair is pulled back, she’s barefoot (a pair of stack-heeled metallic booties lies nearby), and she tucks one leg under the other thigh as we talk. She speaks softly, in full, formal sentences; she leans in; she smiles. But what doesn’t seem relaxed is the way she never stops tugging at her sweater sleeves or twisting and twisting that ring around her finger.

She’s happy to talk about her year-long “layering” process for creating Judy, the costume fittings and dance lessons; the singing alone in her car, “trying to hit notes for the first time in my life;” the research, “mining for facts to fill in the blanks” (Garland’s insomnia, which Zellweger shares, was key). “There’s a lot of information out there,” she says, “but I knew to look at it judiciously, and to consider the source. I understand that everyone delivers information through the prism of their own biases. What might be the real context of that story? And what are the omissions?”

But asked about those biases in her own story, Zellweger demurs. “My public persona is none of my business,” she says. “It has nothing to do with the truth of my life.”

This isn’t a comeback, she insists – after making 19 movies in 10 years, she took off those six years voluntarily. “Just like any person who’d been doing something for 25 years, I wanted to learn something else,” she says. “I wanted to grow. I wanted to have different experiences. I didn’t stop working. I just worked in a different capacity.” She developed a series for Lifetime, Cinnamon Girl, set in the music world of the late 1960s (it didn’t get picked up). She took international policy classes at a Los Angeles university (she won’t name which, because she’d like to go back). She saw a shrink.

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“I’d had a greedy collection of spoiled-rotten experiences, but I wasn’t taking care of myself,” she says. “I needed to stop and say, ‘You can’t sleep three hours a night for two years. That’s bad.’ It wasn’t brave to stop. It was necessary.”

So what brought her back? “Here we go, let me make my English teacher proud,” she says, grinning. “I never didn’t love it. But how can you be good at something when the well you draw from is dry? You can’t be an authentic storyteller when none of your life experiences are authentic, just regurgitated past emotional experiences. I heard myself talking when the lines were coming out of my mouth. That’s not transcending. There’s no magic in that.”

In Judy, Zellweger finds the magic. She doesn’t just play Garland, she wills herself into her: the quaver in the voice, the rat-a-tat delivery, the hunched posture, the world weariness with a dash of cockeyed optimism. And yes, the singing. Zellweger sang in Chicago (and earned an Oscar nomination). In Judy, she SINGS: She belts, she whispers, she clang-clang-clangs and ding-ding-dings. (On the Judy soundtrack album, also due Sept. 27, she duets with Sam Smith and fellow Garland devotee Rufus Wainwright.)

“Judy Garland’s ability to transcend, to tear open a song and touch your soul – there is no one like her,” Zellweger says. “Her understanding of the lyrics, and having lived them. Every person who saw her felt she was singing just to them.”

Although we’re clear now that this isn’t a comeback, Zellweger will carry some Garland with her going forward. “I admire her so much, what she was able to overcome,” she says. “The criticisms of her at this time of her life, the lampooning, it’s easy to dismiss as, ‘Oh tragic, tragic.’ But she wasn’t! She kept going, ever hopeful and joyful. She kept delivering, despite the challenges she faced.

“It’s impossible to know what she went through,” Zellweger continues, finally caution-free. “A woman in an industry where you have no autonomy and no say in the course of your professional career – because it’s not ladylike to participate in the financial side of things. And you are expected to deliver at the highest level, for sustained periods of time, for your entire life, from the time you’re two years old.

“So this thing that is your joy, your bliss, and your good fortune to be able to participate in, but you’re told all the time how lucky you are, and that you’re replaceable, it becomes your identity, and then your ability to take care of yourself financially, you count on it. And yet, the repeated overuse of the very thing that enables you to take care of yourself, debilitates it? Imagine that. Imagine that!”

We’ll try, Ms. Zellweger. Welcome back.

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