The beloved Cameron Crowe movie celebrates its 20th anniversary.
As Renée Zellweger remembers it, Jerry Maguire was just as much a fairy tale to make as it is to watch.
“It was a pivotal moment, not just professionally, but for me personally,” Zellweger told VF.com about the beloved Cameron Crowe film last month. The sports drama was a critical and box-office hit, as well as Zellweger’s breakout vehicle—pitting the sweet twentysomething Texan opposite the world’s biggest movie star, Tom Cruise, and proving that she had the dramatic ability and charisma to match his. It was a stratospheric jump for Zellweger, who, at the time, had only only recently moved to Los Angeles and appeared in a handful of films including Reality Bites and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation.
“When I got the job, I was living in a garage apartment in West Hollywood and I was very happy,” Zellweger recalled. “I remember that life felt like it was starting to gain momentum, in terms of maturing and growing up and different professional opportunities. My dog Dillon and I had finally found our way around Los Angeles, and we were pretty happy being here.”
While Zellweger was getting her bearings, Crowe was conducting a casting search for his Dorothy, the single mother who makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to leave her full-time job and join Cruise’s title character as he quits his job at a Hollywood agency and jumps into the vast unknown. Crowe read many actresses for the part, including established leading ladies like Mira Sorvino and Gwyneth Paltrow. But in an interview with Deadline, Crowe admitted that something was not clicking with them: “We kept kind of saying to each other, ‘Who’s our blue-collar Fran Kubelik?’”—a reference to Shirley Maclaine’s character in The Apartment. Crowe and his casting cohort thought, “She doesn’t even have to be a star, and maybe it’s better if she isn’t. She has to dive in with Jerry Maguire, knowing she’s messing with her health insurance. Who is that girl?”
It was casting director Gail Levin who suggested Zellweger, and convinced the director to eventually call her in to meet with Cruise.
“I remember I had this instant kinship with Cameron,” Zellweger recalled, “he just felt like an old friend to me, and we share a lot of the same interests—he’s a writer who loves music. I loved spending time with him, the project sounded so interesting and fun, and I was very flattered that he wanted to meet . . . meeting with Tom, though, it was hilarious to me, actually driving to that meeting. I remember thinking how funny it was that I was in my car, driving to Sony Pictures, where they were actually going to let me on the lot . . . because Tom Cruise was waiting for me.”
As Crowe explained of the test that followed—a clip that is included on the 20th-anniversary Blu-ray, available now—“We have video of that because I was filming, and you just see something happen when Tom sees her. He lights up. The two of them together have a very particular chemistry. It brought out more of the story of the movie. . . . As Jerry discovers Dorothy, we discover Renée. That was a very personal thing for me and the way I feel about movies.”
Added Zellweger, “It was amazing to meet someone that I’d admired for so long, who I found to be so genuine and warm and kind. And there we were, going to go and do one of my favorite things, create a scene. It was a pretty special day.”
Crowe has remarked upon the parallels between Dorothy and Renée, an up-and-coming actress at the time.
“I really wanted to get across this idea that when you were really down, you are surprised at who’s there and who isn’t,” Crowe said. “Often, the people you really believed would always be there if you were down, down, down, are not there. But somebody else shows up that you didn’t expect, with loyalty toward you, and that becomes your life and the way you look at the world. Renée fit that piece of the puzzle perfectly.”
Zellweger said she did think about whether the film was going to be a hit, because she was barely able to process the fact that she was in it to begin with. “I was straddling this place in my mind between disbelief and this overwhelming sense of responsibility not to screw the whole thing up,” she laughed.
“There were many nights making the movie,” remembered Crowe, “when they were breaking down the equipment, and Renée would just say, ‘I can’t believe I’m making this movie. I haven’t done that much, you know? Look at that truck. That truck alone is bigger than the whole set of the movie I just did.’ She was very Dorothy, all along.”
Her co-star was every bit as chivalrous offscreen as he was on, Zellweger said, remembering how he surprised the crew one day on set during lunch.
“Tom hosted everybody for a party that he threw,” Zellweger explained. “He had an Elvis impersonator come and sing at lunch. I’m not sure what the occasion was, but I don’t even think it was a holiday. He was just spoiling everybody as he tended to do.”
One of the best scenes in the film, the one in which Maguire tries to rally fellow employees to walk out with him but only manages to attract Dorothy, is another vivid memory.
“I remember we were filming really late into the night,” Zellweger said. “The scene where I’m standing up and talking to him across the room, saying, ‘I will go with you.’ . . . It was quite a large set, so he was quite far away, and Tom stayed until late into the night. He’d been filming in that little office all day, and had his crazy scenes on the telephone, you know, requiring all that energy.”
“I told him, ‘You really can go home . . . you don’t have to stay.’ But he said, ‘No, I’m going to be here.’ He was there all night, even though he was completely off camera, and I just needed to look in his direction, and kind of walk toward the elevators. He was insisting that it be him standing [off camera, as opposed to a stand in]. . . . And I made this joke that I pretended a lot in life that Tom Cruise was standing across the room waiting for me.”
Cruise, she continued, is “so thoughtful and committed. He doesn’t take any of it for granted. He’s very professional and gets a lot of joy out of the process. I respect that so much, and that is what I took away from it. He loves making movies—he loves it.”
And 20 years later, Cruise has not forgotten his Jerry Maguire love interest—he sends her at least one gift a year.
“He never forgets my birthday,” Zellweger revealed. Though she declined to share what Cruise has sent her, she “will say that he’s always so thoughtful and generous, and it’s sweet that he always remembers, because I’m sure he has quite a bit on his plate.”
As for what Jerry and Dorothy are up to these days? Zellweger has a guess: they’re “laughing about something, I’m sure.”
