Fans are praising a resurfaced clip of Renée Zellweger where she shared her candid response to questions she received about her weight gain for Bridget Jones’ Diary.
The actress discussed how she’d been constantly asked about her weight loss, after starring in the movie franchise, during a 2017 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Zellweger previously shared that she gained 30 pounds for her role in 2001’s Bridget Jones Diary, in which her character is concerned about her weight. Although she went on to lose the weight, she later regained it for the film’s 2004 sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.
During her resurfaced conversation with Oprah Winfrey, Zellweger revealed that, after starring in the film franchise, she continued to be asked: “How did you lose that weight?” However, according to the Judy star, the question creates assumptions about what a woman’s body should look like.
“It saddens me so much because it seems to imply that one way of being is acceptable and the other isn’t valuable, and that’s just not true,” she said.
She said that when asked the question about her weight loss, she “doesn’t want to answer” because it comes with people applauding her and once again saying: “Oh my god, how did you lose it!”
Winfrey chimed in to note that when Bridget Jones was at her “heavy size” in the movie, this was still “the normal size for Americans”. In response, Zellweger reflected on the praise that her character received, which she believed “nullified” the idea that women should be a “size zero”.
“And did you know, I was told this while we were filming, did you know that Bridget Jones was voted the most sexy personality, on-screen, whatever personality in England?” she told Winfrey. “I thought wow, that right there completely nullifies the notion that you’re supposed to be a size zero in order to be considered attractive, don’t you think?”
On TikTok, where the interview clip has been reshared, many people praised Zellweger’s response to questions about her weight, while others criticised those who asked her about her appearance in the 2000s.
“How did we ever get out of the 00s alive!!” one person wrote, while another said: “This really reflects how things have changed. It’s not perfect, but it’s so much better.”
The conversation about Zellweger also came in response to a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, about the Hollywood pressures placed on women.
In the replies, many people went on to criticise the Bridget Jones movies by claiming that they created a false perception about Zellweger’s character being overweight.
“I mostly remember Bridget Jones Diary and everyone in the movie saying she was fat,” one person wrote. “Renée Zellweger is NOT and has never been fat. She’s what, a size eight in the movie at most?”
One year before her conversation with Winfrey, Zellweger had also discussed her character’s weight during an interview withToday in 2016, while promoting her return to the movie franchise for Bridget Jones’s Baby. Speaking to TV host Savannah Guthrie, the Jerry Maguire star said that she was concerned about how her character’s weight was presented in the films.
“I never thought she had a weight issue,” she said. “I thought that was just something that, like all of us we think: ‘Oh I’d love to change this thing about myself’ when in fact nobody notices it but you.”
She noted that during her “long conversations” about Bridget Jones reaching her ideal weight, she explained that the director, Sharon Maguire, told her why she did this, saying: “In deciding how we show that [Bridget’s] evolved, let’s let her have that one thing, that one thing that she’s always obsessed about, that she’s always presumed is the golden ticket to her happiness. And let it have no bearing on her life at all.”
