Had peanut butter sarnies.  And pizza.  Now can be Bridget.

by Rebecca Carnforth
 

Renée Zellweger is counting calories. Like Bridget Jones, the fictional thirtysomething who is on a permanent quest for self-improvement, Rene conscientiously notes her calorific intake. The difference is, the unfeasibly small actress is trying to gain weight—wolfing down large quantities of peanut butter sandwiches and pizza, heresy for an actress who has spent the past seven years in diet-obsessed California.

"I'm really trying. Mark [her burly driver-minder] brings me sandwiches, McDonald's breakfasts and multi-vit, multi-fat, protein bodybuilder shakes. I've put on more than 15lb and I'm very proud. I'm down to three pairs of sweatpants and four T-shirts that still fit. Everything else is in boxes ready to be shipped home."

Besides bingeing, Bridget's quirky English ways have proved rather alien to the 31-year-old Texan actress (her casting didn't go without protestation, with the likes of Helena Bonham Carter and Kate Winslet overlooked for the role). "I've learned so much about a culture that I hadn't been exposed to and it's helped me learn about who I am," says Rene, who won fame as Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Jerry Maguire.

To ease herself into the role, Rene has been renting a flat in Kensington, shopping at Harvey Nichols and humming Spice Girls tunes. "I needed to get away from the Los Angeles subculture to understand Bridget," she says.

Co-stars Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent have been helping her research—as did working undercover as a temp in a publishing company. "British women are less hard on each other and less judgmental than Americans," observes Rene. "I suppose it's because they're not judged as harshly themselves. When it was somebody's birthday, everybody had a piece of cake. In Los Angeles, nobody would have eaten it."

Despite the cultural chasm, Rene could identify with some of Bridget's emotions. "What woman over 30 isn't concerned about men, body image, work and relationships? I understand what it means to love and fail at it and what it means to contemplate being alone. I've spent evenings alone eating a bag of chips in front of the TV."

But not any more. Rene's evenings are spent with her boyfriend Jim Carrey, whom she met on the set of the forthcoming comedy Me, Myself And Irene. She insists, though, that nothing happened between them while filming was still in progress.

"In a lot of respects I'm an old-fashioned girl and I'm not interested in having flings on movie sets when I'm supposed to be working," she says. "Jim and I became friends and we laughed a lot together. After filming was over we spoke a couple of times on the telephone and I realised I missed him. It was a very innocent, old-fashioned way of getting to know a person."

Carrey has been a frequent visitor to the Bridget Jones set at Shepperton Studios and Rene has run up huge bills calling him in America. It's not just Carrey, though, who is racking up the charges.

She also regularly rings her dog, Dylan, at home in California. "I have a speaker phone and I'm told she wags her tail and goes looking around the house for me," says Rene It's nearly lunchtime and Rene faces the prospect of another round of pizza and peanut butter sandwiches. One wonders if it is necessary, given there is no mention in the book that Bridget is overweight. "It's a character choice," says Rene. "She is self-deprecating, probably with no reason, but it would be silly if she was talking about her chubby thighs if they weren't. "But filming here has been a welcome break from the Californian fixation with image. "The scrutiny can be hurtful and unjustifiable, so it's been good for me to come to London and find out that a doughnut doesn't do a thing and 20 doughnuts don't do a thing. You have to eat 20 doughnuts a day for five weeks before you get results."