A Part With Meat on Its Bones

“Beans for breakfast. Beans and toast. It’s rainy and cold, and that’s what you feel like: beans and toast.” That’s Renee Zellweger, describing her diet while filming “Bridget Jones’s Diary” in England last year. All that toast, along with croissants and cheesecake and buttered biscuits at tea time, added 17 pounds to Zellweger’s usually slight frame. “You know that food coma you go into at Thanksgiving? Seven months!” exclaims Zellweger, with the slightest wisp of a Texas twang. Zellweger gained the weight on behalf of Bridget Jones, the pudgy, fashion-backward, occasionally self-loathing “singleton” at the center of Helen Fielding’s best-selling 1996 novel, “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

“Bridget Jones’s Diary,” the movie, opens Friday, with Zellweger in the title role opposite Hugh Grant as a dashing scoundrel and Colin Firth as priggish barrister Mark Darcy, modeled directly on the character he played in the BBC’s production of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Curled up in the corner booth of a West Hollywood diner, Zellweger is zaftig no more. She orders scrambled egg whites and spinach, an enormous cup of soy latte and a double order of biscuits. Dressed in a no-frills ensemble-black V-neck top, blue jeans, black boots, no jewelry-Zellweger appears lean as a string bean.

In a town that rarely forgives a single centimeter of cellulite, Zellweger’s willingness to bare some bulges on screen qualifies as a daring career move. One moviegoer at a preview screening gasped with appreciation, “She has thighs!” Hollywood fashionistas may not be so kind. But Zellweger says Bridget lite would be no Bridget at all. “If I hadn’t tried to match the image that was in my head, it would have been not believable. Playing Bridget isn’t about perception or what somebody might think, except that this book was really important to a lot of women for a lot of reasons, myself included. To turn Bridget into something that she’s not would not only be a disservice to the people involved in the film, but it wouldn’t be honest.”

Getting chubby was simply one part of her preparation, Zellweger says. “Bridget lives in England, she speaks differently than me, she works at this place, her hair is cut probably like this, she dresses probably like that, and she probably needs to not look like she goes to the gym every day because she doesn’t. Bridget eats a lot of Cadbury Milk Tray, and she drinks a lot of chardonnay and likes to chill out, and that’s all. It was no different from the accent part or the learning the lines part and the showing up on time part. It’s just another element of the job that’s not usually there; usually it’s stay away from the craft service table,” she says, laughing. Besides, Zellweger adds, “Bridget is not a woman with a weight problem. She’s a woman with a self-image problem.”

In “Diary,” Zellweger may just do for women with a “self-image problem” what she’s previously done for single moms (‘Jerry Maguire’), lonely Texas schoolmarms (‘The Whole Wide World’) or deranged soap opera fans (‘Nurse Betty’). Millions of Americans will doubtless be heartened to see an A-list, Golden Globe-winning actress such as Zellweger squeezing herself into girdle-like garments known in England as Granny Pants, toddling around a tea party packed into a bunny outfit and lurching out of the bathroom with tissue paper stuck to her thighs after a torturous waxing session. It’s a vanity-free performance.

Zellweger’s weight varied slightly during the course of the four-month shoot, but for the sake of continuity, she made sure some features remained consistent. “I kept the chubby cheeks and other things ...” she pauses, “... the va-va-voom!” Zellweger laughs, emphasizing her bust.

Brushing a biscuit crumb from her nose, she says she never dared imagine herself as Bridget. Not when she read the book, which she deemed fantastic. Not when she learned the book would be made into a movie. Not even when her manager called after she’d returned to Los Angeles from filming “Me, Myself & Irene.” ’He says, ‘Did you ever hear of a book called “Bridget Jones’s Diary’?’ I thought he was going to ask if he should read it or something-I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Is that something you’d ever possibly be interested in being part of?’ And I’m thinking, ‘In what capacity?’ Well, yeah, is the answer. ‘They’d like to meet with you.’ And I thought, ‘OK, meet with me.’ It’s still not registering. He says, ‘Yeah, they’d like to talk to you about playing Bridget.’ ” Zellweger pauses. “Next plane to London.”

“It didn’t even occur to me to think, ‘Hey wouldn’t [playing Bridget] be fun?’ I figured, it’s an English project, it’s an English woman’s voice, it’s going to be made in England and some phenomenally talented English actress is going to play the part, and that was fine.”

“Bridget” director Sharon Maguire says that by the time she met with Zellweger last March, Kate Winslet, Helena Bonham Carter and Cate Blanchett had already been involved in discussions about the role. A former BBC producer, Maguire is a longtime friend of Fielding and the real-life model for Bridget’s wine-swilling, salty-tongued feminist gal pal Shazzer. Maguire and Zellweger bonded almost immediately, especially after the actress clued her in on some ribald Texanisms.

“Renee was completely charming but miles apart from the specifics of Bridget Jones. And she said to me, “If we don’t get the accent right, the pair of us-you as the first-time director, me as a Texan-we’re going to be so busted. Renee had none of that typical movie-star vanity, which I thought was kind of crucial, and yet there was this incredible vulnerability, especially when we talked about when you’ve been sort of spotty and a bit overweight, how it reduces your self-esteem and how shallow that is, and how we’re all supposed to be feminists and don’t care about things like this, about male approval, but we do-and she understood all the ironies about all the stuff involved.”

Maguire also was reminded of Shirley MacLaine’s Miss Kubilek character in “The Apartment.” “I saw in Renee a gift few people have, that she was able to straddle comedy and emotion. You think of Miss Kubilek, and Jack Lemmon’s character in “The Apartment’-they’re so lonely, such losers, yet they’re also funny as well. I don’t know if we’ve achieved it, but we sort of had similar aspirations.”

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Zellweger got the green light from Maguire, producer Jonathan Cavendish and Working Title chiefs Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, who had produced “Notting Hill” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” She returned to Los Angeles with Barbara Berkery, Gwyneth Paltrow’s dialect coach for “Shakespeare in Love,” and for two weeks Zellweger practiced her accent-in-progress at all her usual L.A. haunts.

“It was embarrassing,” Zellweger says, motioning around the diner. “All these people who I see all the time, and now I’m sitting here ordering huevos rancheros as if I came from Hampshire.”

Then Zellweger packed her bags and moved to London. For three months she methodically put on the pounds, took a cram course in British culture from Berkery and worked, incognito, at Picador, the publishing company where Fielding had been employed while she wrote “Diary.”

Then came the table read, when the cast met for the first time to go through the script and check out Zellweger’s command of the mother tongue. Firth says, “At an English read-through, the glasses go on, cigarettes come out, pens get chewed on, people are definitely scared, and there’s always something slightly disingenuous where they say, “Don’t worry everybody, this is not a performance, no one’s going to judge anything, it’s just a gentle read-through.” And then afterwards they come up to you and go,” Firth suddenly whispers conspiratorially, “You were great, although I’m bit worried about so and so; I thought they really sucked.

“Yeah, of course they’re judging you, which just makes it terrifying.”

Even more nerve-racking was the fact that Zellweger was a longtime fan of Grant’s, dating to her college days when she lived above an art film theater in Austin and saw his early indie flicks.

At the reading, she came, she read, she passed. Grant remembers, “I was staggeringly impressed, to be absolutely honest, it was so brave of her anyway to take this on, because even if you’re a genius actor, accent-wise, crossing the Atlantic is notoriously difficult. I think there were some early rehearsals where there was a touch of Princess Margaret-she’d gone a little bit posh-and then there was a very brief phase where Renee sounded slightly like she’d had a stroke-a little bit slurred. And then she absolutely nailed it. I mean, I knew she could act it, just a question of whether she was going to nail the voice, and she definitely did. There were some journalists in England who’ve been a bit sniffy about an American being cast, and now that they’ve seen previews, they’re saying, “We were wrong.”’

Zellweger’s performance even pleased Fielding. The author, who adapted “Diary” with “Notting Hill” and “Four Weddings” writer Richard Curtis, says, “What’s great is, I think people are going to relate to her as a normal person and not as a heroine who’s stick-thin, does everything right and doesn’t always look perfect. Renee was very game to allow her bottom to be filmed in all its glory,” Fielding says, laughing. “And you know, lots of guys have said to me that she looks gorgeous in the movie, and that’s a fantastic thing, that it’s OK to be a normal shape, and you are gorgeous as a normal shape.”

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The silly outfits, bad hair and farcical fistfights-Firth likens his scratching, kicking showdown with Grant to a spat between “a couple of 7-year old girls’-provide plenty of laughs, but it’s Bridget’s search for love that gives “Diary” emotional heft. Unlike Bridget, who chronicles her private life in delirious detail, Zellweger, linked romantically for a time to Jim Carrey last year, shies away from discussing personal matters. As for the commitment-phobic men that drive Bridget to distraction, Zellweger says she sees it all the time. “It’s something I’m familiar with, of course; you watch it all around you, and I’m a huge observer. But I can’t say that’s been part of my experience. Does that make me atypical, or crazy if I’m not walking around with my fingers crossed saying, “Maybe this time . . .’? So, yeah, I understand because I see it, ever present in your friends’ lives, everywhere around you. At the point that I read the book, you know, I had been kind of busy, so I haven’t really been looking around hoping to find the guy that’s going to commit and be messed with in the mind games department.”

The third-act finale, a grand ending created for the film, has Bridget in her nightgown chasing after Darcy through the streets of London during a snowstorm. It may fall short of her three-hankie classic “You had me at hello” line from “Jerry Maguire,” but Zellweger’s performance will no doubt prompt some fans to reach for the Kleenex.

Zellweger even cries at her own movies. “It’s the ‘One True Thing’ premiere,” she recounts, “and of course, I’m crying. Who doesn’t cry with Anna Quinlan’s book? I know the story, I’ve made the movie, I was there when they shot the scenes, and I still cried-Meryl Streep, what’re you going to say about her? So I had tissue in my purse at the premiere, dabbing my eyes-you got the makeup, you got the hair, you got the dress, so you’re trying your best not to blow your nose out loud or rub your eyes and get raccoon eyes.”

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Zellweger grew up in a Houston suburb, ran track in high school and began acting when she was 20 after taking a theater course at the University of Texas in Austin. She soon found work doing TV commercials for Long John Silver and other local businesses. Moving to Hollywood in 1993, she waitressed and made 11 low-budget films before getting her break in “Maguire.”

“I was in ‘Johnny Zombie’ for 2.2 seconds,” she says. “I had curlers in my hair for the scene, and I got cut out. I got cut out of a lot of movies. I don’t pretend to think the experience revolves around me. I know better. I was shooed away from the craft service table on “Dazed and Confused” because that was not for the extras. My mistake. You see these different examples of behavior, looking around, you see different lifestyle choices. You learn who you don’t want to be.”

Her choices since “Jerry Maguire” have favored tough-sell relationship films over genre blockbusters, most notably 2000’s “Nurse Betty,” which earned her a Golden Globe for best actress and cemented her reputation as an actress willing to try risky material. Even in a small role, she looks for characters that give her room to move. “If it’s a girl part and if she has nothing to do, and she’s underwritten in the script, then there’s room in between the lines to create what she is, which is interesting to me. But if she’s over-written as [having] nothing to do, then what do you do? She’s there as ... nothing! There’s nowhere to go. There’s no room for interpretation, there’s no contribution to make, nothing to create.”

In Bridget Jones, Zellweger had plenty to create, goofy hairdo, big bottom and all. It might be nice, she muses, if a few more big-screen heroines offered more than perfect cheekbones. “I don’t want to go to the movies and be blown away just by how beautiful someone is,” says Zellweger. “I want to see her beauty and beyond. I want to be moved, and I want to be taught something, I want to think about it when I leave. Sometimes I just want to go and have a laugh, but there’s a lot of laughs and not enough of the other.”