BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — “We will start this interview at some point,” I insisted to Renée Zellweger.

“No, no,” she said.

It was mid-August, and I had gone to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to ask Zellweger about “Judy,” the new drama that casts her as Judy Garland in the last year of her life, when the singer-actress was at her most down and out. It’s a transformative role played with so much gusto that the 50-year-old Zellweger will be hard to beat for this year’s best-actress Oscar, a major coup considering her recent six-year break from the screen.

But it took us a while to get to all that. First, there was the matter of coaxing Zellweger to the interview in the first place: As a publicist kept emailing me to push her arrival back, our lunch date crept closer to happy hour. I wondered whether Zellweger, who’s sometimes had a rough go of it in the media, might be stalling for time.

For nearly two hours in the hotel lobby, I watched a series of well-dressed women and underdressed men emerge from the elevator, and then Zellweger appeared, small and inconspicuous in workout clothes, her blond hair tucked beneath a weathered Texas Longhorns ball cap. “Thank you for sticking around,” she said shyly. “Everything kept spilling over.”