Renée Zellweger hadn’t been onscreen since 2010 before her return in Bridget Jones’s Baby this year, and she said she loved her break.
“When you go away and you’re out of people’s consciousness, they stop noticing you,” she told British TV host Jonathan Ross, BBC reports. “It’s fantastic: you order your coffee and you get a coffee and leave.”
Along with ordering coffee unmolested, she said she also enjoyed getting the chance to “meet people authentically.” “You’d have authentic conversations on the street and I enjoyed that,” she said. “That’s something that I had missed.”
Zellweger said she decided to take time off from acting because “I just wanted to shift my focus a little bit and keep some promises that I had made to myself a long time ago”.
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Write to Tessa Berenson at tessa.Rogers@time.com