Renée Zellweger slams journalists for 'tabloid speculations' about her appearance
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Renée Zellweger is finally wading into a heated media debate about her.
Zellweger has spent months as the center of conversations and op-ed articles in Hollywood about plastic surgery and the pressures placed on actresses’ appearances. After some believed Zellweger had changed her face, critic Owen Gleiberman wrote an essay that caused outrage called “Renée Zellweger: If She No Longer Looks Like Herself Has She Become a Different Actress?”
Actress Rose McGowan fired back at the critic in an open letter, and Jennifer Aniston wrote about her own experience with what she described as "body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of ‘journalism.’“
Now Zellweger has weighed in with a note on The Huffington Post, ”We Can Do Better.“ Like Aniston, she’s accusing journalists of using their platform to cover superficial Hollywood stories, including ones about her face.
"Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” Zellweger wrote. “This fact is of no true import to anyone at all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists and became a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/entertainment confusion and society’s fixation on physicality.”
The actress, starring in the coming “Bridget Jones’ Baby,” said she felt compelled to speak out when a tabloid story turned into a much larger issue.
“The 'eye surgery’ tabloid story itself did not matter, but it became the catalyst for my inclusion in subsequent legitimate news stories about self-acceptance and women succumbing to social pressure to look and age a certain way,” she wrote. “In my opinion, that tabloid speculations become the subject of mainstream news reporting does matter.”
Zellweger went on to call out the constant objectification of women and how it feeds into the news cycle, causing what she said was a “double standard used to diminish our [women’s] contributions.”
“What if immaterial tabloid stories, judgments, and misconceptions remained confined to the candy jar of low-brow entertainment and were replaced in mainstream media by far more important, necessary conversations?” she wrote.
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