Renée Zellweger is known for her intense commitment, be it to a part in a movie or to not being in any movies for six years.
Tackling the role of herself after a whirlwind decade of peak Hollywood stardom that included an Oscar win, she removed herself from the spotlight for the first half of the 2010s and used the time that at one point was monopolized by learning lines and press tours to focus on just about everything else—family, friends, her dogs, writing, traveling, taking college courses.
But after easing back into the game with 2016's Bridget Jones's Diary, boy did she build momentum. Barely a month before the world got a lot less happy, she was rewarded for her chameleonic turn as screen and song legend Judy Garland in Judy with a triumphant 2020 awards season, punctuated by a Best Actress Oscar.
While Judy was Zellweger's first movie where you could accurately venture that she had been rendered "unrecognizable," those hours in hair and makeup didn't prepare you for what the performer committed to for the title role on NBC's The Thing About Pam.
Adapted from a Dateline podcast of the same name that told the almost too-twisted-to-be-true story of Pam Hupp, who's in prison for one murder and accused of another, the limited series co-stars Josh Duhamel, Judy Greer and Katy Mixon.
"Renée is a method [actor]," Duhamel told E! News' Daily Pop. "So sometimes you couldn't tell if it was actually Renee or if it was Pam, until you hear her laugh or something."
The star is indeed known for slipping seamlessly into all of her characters—always by doing her research and showing up prepared, naturally. But sometimes that goes hand in hand with changes to her appearance that've ranged from subtle to drastic.
"I don't feel safe playing the girl who looks like me," Zellweger told Britain's Independent in 2008. "There's not enough to hide behind. The further removed the character's reality is from my own, the more fun and easier it is."
You don't get much more further removed than Pam. Here are the secrets behind the actress' most dramatic transformations:
This story was first published on Tue, Mar 8, 2022, 9 a.m. ET.
(E! and NBC are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)