Renée Zellweger has an explanation for her six-year break from Hollywood.
The actress, 55, revealed why she took an acting hiatus from 2010 to 2016 during a British Vogue Q&A with her “Bridget Jones Diary” co-star Hugh Grant.
“Because I needed to,” she said in the piece, which published Wednesday. “I was sick of the sound of my own voice. When I was working, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, listen to you. Are you sad again, Renée? Oh, is this your mad voice?’”
“It was a regurgitation of the same emotional experiences,” she added.
Zellweger took an acting hiatus around 2010 and didn’t return until 2016 for “Bridget Jones’s Baby.”
“What did you do with the time off? Nothing?” Grant, 64, asked Zellweger, who clarified that she kept busy when she wasn’t making movies.
“No, no, no. I wrote music and studied international law,” she said. “I built a house, rescued a pair of older doggies, created a partnership that led to a production company, advocated for and fundraised with a sick friend, and spent a lot of time with family and godchildren and driving across the country with the dogs. I got healthy.”
In 2019, Zellweger told Vulture that the pressures of stardom prompted her to take her acting break.
“I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was the last thing on my list of priorities,” she said, noting how her therapist helped her during that time.
“He recognized that I spent 99 percent of my life as the public persona and just a microscopic crumb of a fraction in my real life,” Zellweger explained. “I needed to not have something to do all the time, to not know what I’m going to be doing for the next two years in advance. I wanted to allow for some accidents. There had to be some quiet for the ideas to slip in.”
Zellweger and Grant also talked about reuniting for “Bridget Jones: Mad About You,” the fourth movie in the rom-com film series that will be released in theaters next month.
“I love her. And her story is not finished,” Zellweger said about returning to the role. “As long as Helen [Fielding] puts pen to paper, she’s alive.”
Zellweger further teased, “I guess we catch up with everyone later in life. Life has changed, they’ve changed. Bridget’s a mom.”
The pair went on to discuss if some of the tropes from “Bridget Jones,” such as Bridget’s obsession with needing to get married, would be considered “inappropriate” today.
“You were not valuable as a woman if you were not partnered up and beginning your own family by a certain age,” Zellweger said. “But I don’t think that women my age are imposing that on their daughters.”
Grant asked his co-star if the original 2001 movie and Bridget’s relationship with her boss (Grant’s Daniel Cleaver) “looks dated now,” to which the “Judy” actress replied, “Well, I’m sure HR would have some stern rules down at the publishing house these days, don’t you think?”
Later on, Grant confessed that has “an addiction” to checking online reactions to his movies.
“I read every review on Rotten Tomatoes, skipping through looking for the green splats,” the “Heretic” star said. “Sometimes there’s hardly any, but they’re the ones I make a beeline for.”
Grant told Zellweger that he skips the positive reviews about his movies. “It’s sick, I know.”
During another point in the interview, Zellweger briefly mentioned boyfriend Ant Anstead when Grant asked her why she lives near San Diego.
“Because that’s where my fellow lives, and his little boy,” she said.
Zellweger and Anstead, 45, have been dating since 2021 after meeting on his Discovery+ series “Celebrity IOU Joyride.”
Anstead shares son Hudson, 5, with ex-wife Christina Hall. He has two older children, daughter Amelie, 19, and son Archie, 16, from his marriage to his first wife, Louise Storey.
