The sound of running water comes across the telephone line while Renée Zellweger is talking about her new Netflix series “What/If,” out Friday. Is she filling her pool? Or having a cleanse at some elite spa? A secondary, clinking sound accompanying the running water reveals what she’s really up to.
“I’m doing the dishes,” says Zellweger from her Los Angeles home. “I have to go to work later.”
One can easily imagine her cinema counterpart Bridget Jones facing a sink full of dirty dishes, but an Oscar-winning actress and star of such films as “Chicago” and “Cold Mountain”? The celebrities-are-just-like-us moment makes Zellweger, 50, seem more accessible than many of her contemporaries, and proves that despite 25 years in the business, she’s just a Texas girl at heart.
When she recently celebrated that milestone birthday, Zellweger rented a house down the hill from where she lives in LA, hired a band and threw a dance party. “You can’t really drive up this hill safely,” she says. One of her dance partners was her father’s 87-year-old World War II buddy. “I imported friends and family and shared time together in a house full of people I love,” she says. “I did it on Passover and Easter weekend. If they could, they came.”
Getting older in a business that famously eats its (female) young doesn’t seem to faze Zellweger, who has chosen as her first series role the kind of diabolical spider woman that “What/If” creator Mike Kelley made his specialty on ABC’s “Revenge.” With a nod to “Indecent Proposal” and “Faust,” Kelley gives us Anne Montgomery, a venture capitalist who offers to become an equity partner in a molecular sequencing company called Emigen, for a price. Anne’s smarmy agenda includes turning the handsome husband (Blake Jenner) of Emigen’s founder (Jane Levy) into her personal sex slave.
If Anne feels like the Norma Desmond of the crypto-currency age, Zellweger reveals that the inspiration for her character was Mrs. Robinson of “The Graduate.”
“Mike said, ‘Think Anne Bancroft, but subvert the circumstances so that it doesn’t spiral into alcoholism and she channels that sexual energy and self-loathing into something pro-active, where she can manipulate instead of the other way around. Let’s do that.’ ”
She prefers to think of Anne as “audacious” and “outrageous,” instead of “diabolical,” but the role is a sharp contrast to the lighter fare that has shaped most of her career. “On a personal level, I was in the mood for this,” she says. “I like the creative choices you can make for a character in a heightened reality. It allows for more liberty to experiment.”
Zellweger’s next leap, a biopic of Judy Garland due out in the fall, will invite closer scrutiny. “Judy,” directed by Rupert Goold and based on Peter Quilter’s play “End of the Rainbow,” covers the legendary singer’s final years, when she performed in London in 1968. (She died a year later, at age 47.) The actress, who does her own singing in the movie, immersed herself in Garland’s discography as she drove to visit her dogs in a rehab clinic.
“I would spend hours on the 405 and 101 [freeways] listening to her. I did this every day in the car,” she says. “Because I wanted to understand the evolution and I wanted to understand how it started, where it went and what that looked like. For Judy, it was always about being able to connect with the songs and the feeling.”
Zellweger has had no problem connecting with audiences, who embraced her from her breakthrough role in “Jerry Maguire” (1996). Her response to Tom Cruise’s declaration of love — “You had me at ‘hello’ ” — immediately entered the romantic lexicon of the times and landed her a place on Hollywood’s A-list of hot young actresses. Yet, success was sometimes a tough pill to swallow.
“Making ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ was very challenging personally,” she says. “It was bittersweet. It was a lonely experience being away [from America] that long.”
Zellweger, who was married briefly to singer Kenny Chesney in 2005, has been dating musician Doyle Bramhall II. “I feel happier than I have in decades,” she says. “I feel like have clarity about things that I might have questioned in the past and the freedom to do what I want.”
The actress grew up in Katy, Texas, a place she describes as “out in the country.” Her family was the last in town to get cable TV and she was only allowed to watch “Donny & Marie” and “Cher.”
Her parents met in the early 1960s when her Norwegian-born mother, a former midwife named Kjellfrid Andreassen, was on vacation in Denmark with her girlfriends, and her Swiss father, Emil, was traveling around Europe with his buddies.
“They met on a ship when my mother and her friends were on line to go to dinner,” she says. “He asked her to dinner.” Eventually, Zellweger’s mother took a governess job with a Norwegian family in Houston. “She wanted to be someplace where it was warm. Dad said he’d follow her. Mom said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Being Swiss and being my father, he showed up the minute he said he would.”
Having parents who grew up during the World War II helps Zellweger keep things in perspective in an age when “we think we’ve had a bad day because we can’t get Internet service. What they know we could not deal with,” she says.
Not that they didn’t see the lighter side of life. While touring New Orleans’ World War II Museum with her parents, the actress remembers her mother pointing to the various weapons on display. “She said, ‘We used to play with those guns,’ ” says Zellweger. Her mother had also played with the hand grenades that were lying around. “She said, ‘Don’t pull the pin, Don’t pull the pin.’ That’s funny.”