Renée Zellweger has said that turning 50 felt like a “whole new beginning” as she reflects on living “unapologetically” and rejecting the beauty standard of chasing her youth.
The Bridget Jones’s Diary actor believes more people should embrace their current age, rather than comparing themselves to how they looked when they were younger.
“I have this conversation with my girlfriends all the time,” Zellweger, 53, said in a new interview with The Sunday Times.
“Who’s redefining 50 or 60 without having to say, ‘Hey, look at me with my clothes off and I still look almost as good as I did back then?’
“I don’t want to be ‘almost what I was’. I want to be a thousand times better! We have to shift the paradigm.
“You really can’t do anything meaningful when you are worrying about whether you still look like you’re in your twenties. You just can’t.”
Zellweger said there is a “big difference between being your absolute best” and “wanting to be what you’re not”.
“To be vibrant and beautiful you must embrace your age, otherwise you are living apologetically and to me that’s not beautiful at all,” she said.
Reflecting on her most recent milestone birthday, Zellweger said she couldn’t “wait to turn 50” because it made her realise she has “no interest in being 23”.
“Turning 50 felt like a whole new beginning without the nonsense, the point where you can stop listening to all those voices in your head and all those expectations and projections people have of you and become more authentically yourself.”
“Like, good luck all you suckers out there because you’ve got to survive a lot to get to my age, and I’ve earned my power and voice.”
Zellweger also opened up about her decision to stay off social media.
In June last year, the actor began dating British TV presenter Ant Anstead. While Anstead regularly shares photographs of himself and Zellweger to his Instagram, where he has around 450,000 followers, Zellweger said she doesn’t plan to join the platform any time soon.
“I don’t think it would be a good thing for me, you know? I have a list of things I like to get done every day,” she explained.
“One of them is to text or call my mom. Another is to study language online. If I had this compulsion to check my phone every day, well, that feels scary. I’d rather be out hiking with my dogs, Chester and Ellie.”
