Renee Zellweger slams journalists for 'tabloid speculations' about her appearance
For months now, Zellweger has been the center of conversations and op-eds 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 Anison wrote about her own experince with "body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of 'journalism.'"
Now Zellweger herself has weighed in with a note on Huffington Post, "We Can Do Better." Like Aniston, she's calling out journalists for using their platform to cover superficial Hollywood stories.
"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 upcoming "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.
"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.