Actress Rose McGowan has come to the defense of Renee Zellweger, who was the subject of a sour Variety column about plastic surgery in Hollywood and how the “right to look however [she] wants” has adversely affected her reprisal of Bridget Jones.
McGowan, best known for her work in Scream and Charmed, accused the trade publication and critic Owen Gleiberman, formerly of EW, of bullying the actress whose only “crime … is growing older in a way you don’t approve of.” Zellweger will return to the big screen this October in Bridget Jones’s Baby.
“Who are you to approve of anything?” McGowan wrote in a column for THR. “What you are doing is vile, damaging, stupid and cruel. It also reeks of status quo white-male privilege. So assured are you in your place in the firmament that is Hollywood, you felt it was OK to do this. And your editors at Variety felt this was more than OK to run.”
A self-described victim of Hollywood sexual harassment, McGowan goes on to write how she was “bullied for years by a vicious pack of lower beings” and how “any studio that Renee Zellweger has made money for … should be calling this harassment out.” To help drive her point home about the double-standard placed on actresses, McGowan replaced Zellweger’s name in Gleiberman’s column with A-list male stars:
The movie’s star, LEONARDO DICAPRIO, already had his “Did he or didn’t he?” moment back in 2014, and I had followed the round-the-world scrutinizing of his image that went along with it, but this was different. Watching the trailer, I didn’t stare at the actor and think: He doesn’t look like LEONARDO DICAPRIO. I thought: He doesn’t look like JAY GATSBY!
He worked with costars who reinforced his supernova status, through their fame or their beauty or both. ROB LOWE, with pillowy cheeks and quizzically pursed lips and that singular squint, was beautiful, but not in the way that a BRAD PITT or GEORGE CLOONEY was.
McGowan wasn’t the only actor to take notice of the Variety column. Last week, Clark Gregg (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) tweeted this missive about the column that attracted more than 2,000 likes:
Read McGowan’s full column here.
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