After
having taken more than half a decade away from Hollywood, Oscar winner
Renee Zellweger is back with the third installment of the Bridget Jones
franchise,
Bridget Jones’s Baby. The actress sat with The Advocate’s Brandon Voss to discuss her Hollywood hiatus, her gay chums, and the gay
rumors that swirled around her ex-husband, Kenny Chesney, after their
2005 annulment.
On
media outlets alleging that ex-husband Kenny Chesney was gay after she
cited “fraud” as the reason for annulling their marriage in 2005:
“I
forgot about that. It’s a pretty big thing to forget, isn’t it? That
made me sad. It made me sad that somehow people were using that as a way
to be cruel and calling someone gay as
a pejorative, which has fateful consequences. Of course, there’s the
bigger-picture problem of why anyone had to make up a story at all.”
On her gay male confidants:
“I’m
lucky to have handfuls. The majority of my closest friends are gay, and
I have my pearl. I went to Miami for New Year’s Eve some years back
with him and his boyfriend, and we got
paparazzied on the beach. … Some tabloid ran the photos and wrote, ‘Has
Renée finally found her pearl?’ I was like, ‘Aww, he’s my pearl!’ He’s
family to me. We dated for a minute, actually. … No, I knew he was gay —
or had been gay. But he wasn’t gay that
day!”
On whether a female admirer had ever expressed love for her:
"Yes,
thank goodness. But I loved her differently. We talked about it, we
laughed, and I was happy she trusted me and that we have a relationship
where. we could have that conversation.”
On whether the gents may wind up together in
Bridget Jones’s Baby:
“That
was actually an ongoing joke on set because Colin [Firth] and Patrick
[Dempsey] immediately had such an affinity for each other, which was
wonderful. Maybe in the next movie? There’s
still time!”
