Renee Zellweger insists she was never a "victim" of the #MeToo movement.
Actress Melissa Sagemiller claimed in a 2017 lawsuit that disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein had told her he’d received "sexual favours" from both Charlize Theron and the ‘Cold Mountain’ actress.
And Renee – who previously claimed the producer was "full of s**t" if he’d said that – has insisted she never felt "insulted or demeaned" and was always happy to be part of a "playful dynamic" between men and women.
She said: "It’s a hard thing to talk about in this context. It’s such a big topic.
"And it’s personal and it’s not. And it’s something that’s always been there and the shift is overdue and you could feel it coming for a while and it was inevitable. And thank God.
"But, in some ways, I feel: Oh gosh, I allowed for the tiny cuts that just seemed like, ‘Oh, this is just how it’s always been.’ But I was never a victim of it.
"I always felt that I knew what to do in those circumstances. I didn’t feel … accostable. I never felt that I was being insulted, demeaned. I didn’t recognise it as that. It was jocular — it’s a joke. And then there’s that other side of it: that I love male-female banter, that playful dynamic. So, it’s a big conversation."
While the 50-year-old star is "sure" she was probably on the "receiving end of something" she didn’t know about, she was also "very surprised" by some of the accusations made when women began to speak out about their experiences in Hollywood.
She told New York magazine: "I’m sure that I was on the receiving end of something that I don’t even know about, in conversations that I wasn’t privy to.
"But it wasn’t something that I felt, it wasn’t something that I was aware of.
"I was very surprised by some of the things that were unearthed. I didn’t know."
The ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ actress insisted it was easy for her to be ignorant of the accusations around the likes of Weinstein because she never "hung out" in Hollywood circles.
She said: "I wasn’t around it. I don’t hang out like that. I don’t go to the party. It’s part of my work: There’s a premiere, there’s an event, there’s a red carpet, there’s the hotel-lobby dinner. That’s my relationship to Hollywood. I don’t live in that. That’s my job. I visit it…
"It was a very hard thing to hear about. And it was hard to accept the surprise of that. And I’m sorry that it’s hard to talk about, because this is a person that I did not know well, but I thought I knew him as I knew him.
"It was red carpets and a hotel lobby in passing or ‘I’ll see you at this after-party’ and ‘I’ll be there to make sure you go to promote our movie’ and ‘I’ll see you at Cannes’ or ‘I’ll see you at the French premiere’ or ‘I’ll see you in the editing room so we can pick these things apart.’ And that’s a lot, when you talk about how we worked during that decade and a half …"
Renee Zellweger wasn’t a victim
