Over the past month or so, I’ve started to wonder and worry about Renee Zellweger. I genuinely feel sympathy for her, because I think she’s done a good job of maintaining her privacy and being a low-key person, and she doesn’t deserve to be the butt of so many jokes and the subject of so many invasive conversations. But on the other hand, I wonder if Renee might actually have some no-joke issues? She just seems particularly fragile during the promotion for Bridget Jones’s Baby, and the way she brazenly lied in her HuffPo essay has been eating away at me for a week now. Like, she thinks she ended the conversation about her face work when she wrote: “I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes.” And in this DuJour interview, it seems like she’s lying about several other things. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Where she’s most at home: “I guess I kind of feel at home wherever I go, most places. But I really know I’m home when I go to Texas. My boyfriend is also from Texas and his family is still there, so we go back quite a bit now, which is nice.”

She claims a famous Vogue incident never took place: “Someone had me talking to penguins in my own special language at the zoo. But we sat on a bench, we never went to the zoo!” She’s referring to a Vogue cover story from 1998. I gesture shock. I’d read that story; the part where they “went to the zoo” was a substantial part of the narrative. “My reaction exactly!” she exclaims. “I don’t know. I guess I have bigger things to worry about. But that’s one of the things I’ve had to learn to make peace with. The truth is…It’s wobbly.”

Internet gossip: “I get excited about the internet because it seems like it should make our culture less naïve about the effects of misinformation. But I still get phone calls from people I’m close to like, ‘Oh my gosh, congratulations!’ The big question is why there is such an appetite for [vicious tabloid coverage]. Snark has somehow replaced intelligent wit, and it’s pervasive… it’s in the political spectrum, it’s everywhere. There’s no shame anymore. It’s an interesting time, and I wonder where the cycle goes from here. I guess I just think a lot about this new idea we’re presenting, about what you need to do in order to be considered a person of substance in our society. I know I feel overwhelmed by whatever that standard is. Could that be what fuels this need to read negative things about people you don’t know? Or to take out aggression by humiliating people who are in some way recognized for something that they’ve done?”

Upon being told the Variety critic complained about her new face: “But that’s really too bad. He wrote this because he read a tabloid story and it played into his imagination when he watched the trailer? I can’t comment on it because I don’t know specifically what he was talking about, but he’s misinformed. He should have called me… But I disagree with him, if what he’s talking about is that there can’t be a character who represents every woman at different stages in her life—a character who is flawed, and who represents the truths about our humanity. I don’t know why he thinks there’s no value in that. I see it differently. And I won’t apologize to him for disappointing him that I’ve grown older because that’s the goal.”

[From DuJour]

The last half of the DuJour article is an interesting read because you can tell that the writer feels bad about having to bring up the plastic surgery story and the assorted sub-stories involved (the Variety critic, Rose McGowen’s defense of Renee and more), but Renee feigns ignorance throughout, like she’s a freshly hatched chick who has never seen one negative story about herself, except that she was just making all of those pointed references to internet negativity just minutes beforehand. Renee is exhausting. Also: the Vogue story, where Renee claims that she and Vogue journalist Bob Ickes never went to the zoo… Ickes told Page Six, “We certainly went to the zoo. The article never says she was speaking in her own special language to the penguins. That would be insane.”

Photos courtesy of DuJour.