After Renée Zellweger faced horrid criticism for gossiped-about changes to her appearance in 2014 and film critic Owen Gleiberman’s bizarre essay asking “If She No Longer Looks Like Herself, Has She Become a Different Actress?” the Bridget Jones star has taken her critics to task in a personal essay penned for Huffington Post, calling out the media’s obsession with her life and, especially, her appearance.
“Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” the actress 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.”
And to the tabloids who prioritize the wrong news, the actress wrote: “It increasingly takes air time away from the countless significant unprecedented current events affecting our world. It saturates our culture, perpetuates unkind and unwise double standards, lowers the level of social and political discourse, standardizes cruelty as a cultural norm, and inundates people with information that does not matter.”
Read the full essay over here.