“I don’t know what people expect of me,” Renée Zellweger says in an elevator at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. “I really don’t and I hope that came across.”

Zellweger, who costars in Leatherheads with the film’s director George Clooney and The Office’s John Krasinski, has just left a room full of journalists where she was asked how she feels about the expectations of fans and coworkers when they meet her. She said it was the hardest part of her life.

“I have the most difficult time with the days where people don’t see you or hear you or communicate with you but just who they perceive you to be before they meet you. I have a hard time with that and I work every day to negotiate it and to neutralize it and be the person who is standing there. That is all I know. I am older now and things that I really crave are the hardest things to come by.

"As an actress I want to draw on the truth of experiences and I can’t draw on the truth of experiences from 20 years ago which was the last real exchange that I had with a person. I want to have real conversations and I want to be a fly on a wall in a room and I want to be able to people watch and have different sociological experiences and they are becoming rarer and rarer.

"I know it sounds crazy, but I cherish it when someone is mean and they don’t recognize that you know Tom Cruise and so they alter their behaviour in some way. I love it. I love it when the stewardess is just nasty. It is fantastic. I shrink when she comes back and apologizes because she didn’t realize [who you are]. Then it is just yucky. [I think] ‘I liked you before a lot because I can respect that you are having a bad day but now it matters that you are nice where before it didn’t?’ ”

The movie opens April 4 in Vancouver.