Renée Zellweger Revealed What She Was Up to During Her 6-Year Break From Hollywood

Renée Zellweger is opening up about why she took a break from Hollywood.

In a new interview with Vulture, the actress said that she decided to take some time off from the movie industry back in 2010 because she "wasn't healthy."

"I wasn’t taking care of myself," she told the outlet. "I was the last thing on my list of priorities.”

Zellweger said that she saw a therapist during that time (the only period in her life in which she sought therapy), who advised her to take time for herself.

“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," she said. "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."

She also recalled that she got some advice from Salma Hayek at the time, who told her, "The rose doesn’t bloom all year … unless it’s plastic."

“I got it. Because what does that mean? It means that you have to fake that you’re okay to go and do this next thing," she said. "And you probably need to stop right now, but this creative opportunity is so exciting and it’s once-in-a-lifetime and you will regret not doing it. But actually, no, you should collect yourself and, you know … rest."

In 2010, the actress took a break from acting after her film My Own Love Song, returning in 2016 in The Whole Truth and Bridget Jones's Baby.

During the Vulture interview, Zellweger was also asked about the rumors that she had gotten plastic surgery, a topic she and the interviewer both acknowledged was a difficult one.

“Because it probably gives you a stomachache, asking me about that, doesn’t it?” she asked the interviewer. “Well, because there’s a value judgment that’s placed on us. As if it somehow is a reflection of your character — whether you’re a good person or a weak person or an authentic person."

In an essay for The Huffington Post in 2016, she spoke out about the tabloid speculation and scrutiny over her plastic surgery, writing, "Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes."

When the interviewer suggested that some people felt that she did not look like herself, Zellweger said, “And the implication that I somehow needed to change what was going on because it wasn’t working."

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“That makes me sad. I don’t look at beauty in that way," she told Vulture. "And I don’t think of myself in that way. I like my weird quirkiness, my off-kilter mix of things. It enables me to do what I do. I don’t want to be something else. I got hired in my blue jeans and cowboy boots with my messy hair. I started working like that. I didn’t have to change to work. So why was I suddenly trying to fit into some mold that didn’t belong to me?”