Most movie stars come with an expiration date. It's called a birthday.
Before they know it, once-virile leading men find themselves subsisting on a career diet of paternal figures and crusty old-timer roles, while former A-list starlets start turning up as the mothers of the rom-com girl du jour. If they're lucky, they get to sing along in an ABBA movie musical.
It's this brand of Hollywood Darwinism -- maybe ageism, maybe simple pragmatism given our youth-obsessed culture -- Renee Zellweger will have to contend with sooner rather than later. Next year she turns 40.
Serendipitously, though, the winsome blond who completed Jerry Maguire and plumped up to play every-gal Bridget Jones doesn't sound terribly concerned with remaining ageless. She just wants to stay interested. Even now she acknowledges it's more difficult than it used to be to uncover compelling parts.
"I don't want to have the same experiences or be offered the same roles. I have no interest in that," says Zellweger, kicking back in a hotel suite in downtown Toronto. "I'm assuming that as I get older the way I perceive things is going to be so much different ... I've never separated my career from my life because this isn't the kind of job where you can do that. It's one thing. You don't have both things simultaneously. One becomes your life. You can say I live in New York, but no you live where you're sent for these four months. That's the reality of living in this business. I never thought it as something apart from that. It's a journey, right? But not a professional journey so much as it is a life adventure and seeing what the next day brings and please God, I hope it changes."
This explains, as much as any other reason, her latest role in Ed Harris' Appaloosa, an old-school duster that, at least in terms of characterization, blows the tumbleweeds off some of the genre's rough-hewn cliches.
Zellweger plays Allie -- neither a schoolmarm nor a whore, thereby distinguishing herself from 99.9% of traditional female western characters -- an enigmatic stranger who insinuates herself into the lives of two mercenaries (Harris and Viggo Mortensen) hired by a frontier town to bring a vicious land baron (Jeremy Irons) to justice. Based on the novel by Robert B. Parker, it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival this month and, after hitting screens in Toronto on Friday, will roll out across the rest of the country in October.
"I liked how complicated (Allie) was," Zellweger says. "I liked how the mystery of her past has led her to this point where her personal, moral parameters are questionable. I think what I liked too is that you couldn't judge her because her options are so limited ... You've got to survive. She's very clever. She recognized her currency and she's afraid to tap into those facilities. They're not choices I'd be comfortable making, but they're interesting. I don't think about her in terms of good or bad; I think she's complicated. She defines a relationship differently. She knows she has to find her way to the alpha dog."
If this sounds a departure from Zellweger's girl-next-door norm -- or at least what the public perceives it to be -- she points out that she has played plenty of darker, difficult roles. She won an Oscar, after all, for Cold Mountain as a cantankerous, Appalachian rube.
"I don't think I'm sweet in all my movies. (In Chicago) Roxy Hart's not sweet. Ellen in One True Thing is not sweet. I've played some pretty not-so-nice gals, plenty of them."
Says Harris, "She really thought it was a challenging character to play. We got along good. She's a trooper, you know. I was surprised how much of a pure good time I had with her. I really enjoyed being around her. You never quite know."
"I wanted to do a very raw, no-frills filming experience," Zellweger says. "Now more than ever I choose roles for what the life experience that will accompany that potential project will be. That was always a luxury I allowed myself from the beginning because life's too short too spend a year with someone you don't respect or who aren't kind or whose intentions aren't respectable. I've always paid attention to that. But now it's become even more so."
That said, she's hardly slowing down. In the past two years, she has barely stayed in one place for more than a smattering of months, seguing from last spring's Leatherheads to Appaloosa to the thriller Case 39 in Vancouver and most recently to the comedy Chilled in Miami in Winnipeg. The latter two are both due in 2009.
Next she will star in the followup film from La Vie En Rose director Olivier Dahan entitled My Very Own Love Song. Forest Whitaker and Chris Noth also star in the 1950s period piece.
"By the time I get complaining to myself that I'm never home, I'm off on a new adventure that I couldn't have anticipated. I enjoy this life, I just do. I get tired and think I really need to stay home and the next thing is all-encompassing so there's no time to mourn what's not happening. There's so much excitement surrounding each project. I believe I have that foundation that comes with me, and I don't mean people who travel with me, although there is that and it helps quite a bit. The village, we call it -- the travelling nomadic village. But my family and friends, if they're not always in the house, their presence is always felt."
Behind the camera, her production company recently finished work on a movie for Lifetime Television, Living Proof, about Dr. Denny Slamon, a pioneer in breast cancer research.
"My buddy" -- as she calls him -- Harry Connick Jr. stars. While Zellweger's clearly proud of the results, she is less enthused at the prospect of producing more films. Shmoozing, she says, just doesn't suit her.
"(I'll do it) when a project comes along and it's worthwhile or I feel personally responsible for it or I want to be sure it will be taken care of. But there's a lot of making phone calls and asking for things and I'm not good at that. I dislike it intensely. And that's pretty much the job of the producer -- writing letters and asking questions and asking for help and assistance.
"It's like politics. It's a reciprocal kind of profession and I don't know if I'm good at that ... I'm sure it has to do with my independent nature and I like to be self-sufficient and not beholden to anyone for anything."
kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca
