Monday, August 8, 2016

Renee Zellweger: I Didn"t Get Plastic Surgery, OK?

There’s something about Renee Zellwegger that looks different these days, but we might just be seeing things.


That is, according to Renee.



Renee’s face was the object of tabloid fodder back in March.  Some noticed that she appeared younger, and automatically assumed that she had work done.


“In my home I’m not aware of it,” Renee said during a March appearance on the Today show.


“I don’t do any kind of social media, so I don’t see it. I like to have – I guess you would call them real experiences.”



The Oscar winner stars in the upcoming third installment in the Bridget Jones’s Diary franchise, Bridget Jones’s Baby.  


In an effort to kill two birds with one stone, she’s written a heartfelt essay for Huffington Post about those nasty rumors, while serving as a reminder that the film opens on September 16th.


The essay, titled We Can Do Better, is a complicated read.  In fact, one can’t be blamed for re-reading it a few times, mainly because Renee tries very hard to sound as academic as possible.



Still, she gets her message across.


“I am not writing today because I have been publicly bullied or because the value of my work has been questioned by a critic whose ideal physical representation of a fictional character originated 16 years ago, over which he feels ownership, I no longer meet,” Renee wrote, referring to her character from Bridget Jones’s Diary.



“I am not writing in protest to the repellent suggestion that the value of a person and her professional contributions are somehow diminished if she presumably caves to societal pressures about appearance, and must qualify her personal choices in a public court of opinion.


“I’m not writing because I believe it’s an individual’s right to make decisions about his or her body for whatever reason without judgment.



“I’m writing because to be fair to myself, I must make some claim on the truths of my life, and because witnessing the transmutation of tabloid fodder from speculation to truth is deeply troubling.


“The ‘eye surgery’ tabloid story itself did not matter, but it became the catalyst for my inclusion in subsequent legitimate news stories about self-acceptance and women succumbing to social pressure to look and age a certain way.


“In my opinion, that tabloid speculations become the subject of mainstream news reporting does matter.”


If writing this article gave Renee some sort of closure on the whole plastic surgery rumor mill, then good for her.  Many, however, won’t buy it for the simple fact that she does look different.