After taking an extended break from the spotlight, actor Renée Zellweger rejoined the award
show circuit at the 77th Golden Globe Awards on January 5th, 2020.
The Bridget Jones's Diary star didn't disappoint, strutting down the red carpet looking better
than ever in a baby blue Giorgio Armani gown and sporting a flawless up-do.
The cherry on top?
The actor won her fourth Golden Globe, her first one in 16 years, for best actress in
a drama, as an award for her work lighting up the screen as Judy Garland in Judy.
As she put it in her acceptance speech,
"Well, hi everybody, it's nice to see you.
Y'all look pretty good 17 years later."
But it wasn't just Zellweger's reentrance into the spotlight that captivated Golden
Globes viewers.
Instead, her curious Southern twang ended up stealing the show.
One viewer tweeted about her noticeable drawl,
"Has Renee Zellweger always had a southern accent or is she just drunk?"
Another viewer quipped,
"Is Renee Zellweger like Christian Bale in that we always forget what she sounds like
or is she doing an accent??"
"What?"
As it turns out, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Zellweger had a strange
accent at the Golden Globes.
She does indeed just sound like that, and apparently, some people forgot.
Even those who are familiar with Renée Zellweger's work might not know that she hails from the
city of Katy, Texas, and attended the University of Texas at Austin.
Sometimes you can even see her sporting hats championing the UT Longhorns.
As she told InStyle in 2017,
"You can take the girl out of Texas, but you can't take Texas out of the girl."
Needless to say, Zellweger's Southern upbringing perfectly explains her thick twang in her
Golden Globes acceptance speech.
In response to buzz about her accent after her awards speech, the Hollywood vet's rep
reiterated to Page Six,
"She's always had a Southern accent.
Perhaps viewers who haven't heard it before haven't heard her speak before."
It really is as simple as that.
Zellweger is a Texas gal through and through.
So the next time you see her hanging out with friend and fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey,
you'll know it's not totally random.
One of the reasons why so many people seem to have forgotten Renee's roots might have
to do with her most well-known character, the British Bridget Jones.
"Oh!
I forgot about you."
Zellweger, who played the clumsy Brit struggling to find love in three separate installments,
initially sparked controversy for landing the role due to her American background.
The backlash made sense, considering the series was penned by British author Helen Fielding
and was a big hit in the U.K.
One writer for the Evening Standard referred to the choice as, quote, "clunking, Hollywood
idiocy."
Even the film's director, Sharon Maguire, reportedly reacted to the news of her lead
actress' origins by saying,
"Oh f---k, she's a Texan."
Zellweger soldiered through the criticism and ended up nailing the character - British
accent included.
Plenty of credit goes to voice coach Barbara Berkery, who helped transform the actress
from a Southern girl to a full-blown Londoner.
Berkery explained to The Telegraph,
"She learned very well.
We would go and have tea in various places, and she would use the accent."
Funnily enough, Renée Zellweger's country accent has been the focus of speculation and
debate for quite some time.
In fact, it even spurred an investigative article published in the Texas Standard, featuring
analysis from Lars Hinrichs, director of the Texas English Project and associate professor
of English linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin.
As Hinrichs noted in the interview, Zellweger's upbringing with a Norwegian mother and a Swiss
father, coupled with her time spent growing up in Texan public school, is probably what
gives her accent a certain degree of flexibility.
As the professor put it,
"It's like going into your walk in closet and picking out what you're going to wear...The
more you're exposed to different influences, the less homogeneous your linguistic environment
is, the more you're likely to project different identities."
Another factor to consider here is nerves, as being jittery has the potential to alter
someone's accent.
This might have been the case for Zellweger, who admitted after the Golden Globes ceremony
that her, quote, "brain was scrambled" during the speech.
But not as scrambled as the people in the audience learning for the first time that
she doesn't really talk like Bridget Jones.
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