Celebrity News March 01, 2022
Renée Zellweger on Unrecognizable ‘The Thing About Pam’ Transformation
NBCUniversal
Renée Zellweger has a killer new role in “The Thing About Pam”!
“Extra’s” Jenn Lahmers spoke with Renée, who detailed her crazy physical transformation for the series, which is based on the true story of convicted murderer Pam Hupp.
Giving credit to the makeup team, Zellweger said, “A really talented team of folks in charge of that… I just show up and let them do their thing.”
She added, “It was exciting. I’d never done that before, so learning something new is always fun.”
Zellweger revealed that it initially took four hours of hair and makeup for her to transform for the role, but they eventually “whittled it down to about two [hours]. You get your shortcuts down and you don’t have to experiment so much.”
When asked which was “tougher,” the physical or mental part of her role, Zellweger commented, “There’s some hard jobs out there, but going to work with, you know, Josh Duhamel and Judy Greer and Katie Mixon is not one of them.”
“It feels like the same part,” Renée elaborated about getting into character. “It’s just sort of gathering information and research and trying to understand things and playing that story over and over in your mind and all the other pieces come together to make it safe. You create a nice safe place to hide and play to tell the story.”
Along with acting in the series, Zellweger is also an EP on the show. What drew her to the project? She answered, “I was fascinated by and curious about how it was possible. I kept having these conversations with my friends and we were talking about, you know, social bias and personal bias and confirmation bias, how that comes to play in the criminal justice system.”
Zellweger felt like it was an “important” topic to explore, saying, “There’s a lot in this story, you know, to look into, to explore — so we did.”
For her role, Zellweger had a Big Gulp in her hand in many scenes. She joked, “It’s really good on a hot day in New Orleans to have to carry a Big Gulp.”
Renée and the cast got very close while working on the series. She noted, “Happens a lot in this industry, which is nice… This particular group of people… it was a real treat to get to go play with everybody every day.”
Thanks in part to the physical comedy, she had “a lot of fun” with the cast and crew.
