Renée Zellweger, Out of Character For a Moment

Renée Zellweger has been on set since 2006.

Her things reside in New York. "But I live on location most of the time," she says.

It has been that way for two years, as the 39-year-old actress skipped from one soundstage to the next. The music, however, is about to stop.

And it's her finger hitting the pause button.

"I said 'No, thank you,' to a couple things, 'cause I think I need to sit still for a minute," she explains on the phone from Los Angeles.

She will sit still, but not quite yet: It's the day before the Golden Globes, at which she will appear as a presenter, and Zellweger is in the midst of a press junket for the first of three movies she'll release this year.

"New in Town," is a fish-out-of-water romantic comedy: A big-city girl finds herself in a small town and disdains its provincial ways before reluctantly falling in love with the bighearted community -- and it's most ruggedly handsome, single constituent. (Yep, Harry Connick Jr.! Replace the "Hope Floats" cowboy hat with an ear-flapped hunting cap, and you've got your man.)

Zellweger picked the flick because, she says, "I read it and thought, 'God, you know, I don't know that I've ever done that before.' " Which might come as a surprise to fans of Zellweger from her string of previous rom-com's: "Bridget Jones's Diary" (I and II), "Down With Love," "Jerry Maguire" and "Leatherheads," among them.

But it was the process that seemed different, not the product. "I don't know that I'd ever done a film where I got to work every day where I laugh -- and play," she says. "The comedies I've done before require a different kind of focus -- and I didn't want to go and sequester myself away from everybody who's having fun and cutting up. . . . I wanted to be able to play, too."

Playtime ended up feeling like a continual game of double dare, Zellweger says, because they shot in such extreme weather. The movie's fictional small town is in Minnesota, "but we decided that the Minnesota winter wasn't gonna cut it, and we had to up the ante on the cold." So the film was shot in Winnipeg, Manitoba. (Which, by the way, is the coldest city in the world with a population of more than 500,000.)

"It was a different kind of challenge," she says of the project. "To see if you could survive the shot -- literally. Because anything exposed for more than a minute starts to die. We'd laugh about how ridiculous it was."

Just before the holidays, Zellweger finished shooting a road-trip comedy, "My Own Love Song," in which she stars as a wheelchair-bound singer opposite Forest Whitaker. Before that, she wrapped "My One and Only," a '50s-era drama based on the childhood memories of George Hamilton, whose glamorous mother (played by Zellweger) sets off in search of a wealthy husband and a new life for her family.

She is not, she insists, a workaholic. But there is a compulsion to produce, to move her "little circus family" of assistants from film to film to film.

"I like work. I like being challenged," she says. "I like having something to think about. I like to have a project. I like to have something to focus on that makes me have to go out and learn something, make something happen, be active."

So this moment is an unusual one, where she doesn't yet know what she'll do next. "I don't think you can properly embody a character if you don't have some real-life experiences to draw on," Zellweger explains. "I think I need to live a little bit, so I'm going to do that for a minute."

She expects to be bored after five of those minutes and will find herself wanting to travel or learn something new. And before long, something will come along to draw Zellweger back on set. She won't, however, allow herself the luxury of dreaming about what that might be.

"I feel spoiled rotten for the experiences I've had and the characters I've gotten to play, never mind the people I've had occasion to work with," she says. "I'm spoiled rotten. And I'd be a glutton to say, 'What else?' "

There's no equation, no strategy to her choices, though there's one question she always asks: "Who's involved?"

"And are they nice? 'Cause it's a big investment of a large part of your life," she says. "I think life's too short to be tethered to a set that's unpleasant."

True, probably, of any workplace, which is what Zellweger considers each set to be. "I like to say I have the best blue-collar job in America," she explains. She hangs out with carpenters, designers and electricians all day long, then goes to the gym before heading home to e-mail her family and go to bed.

"It's just like anybody else, really," she insists. "It's not what it seems from the outside at all."

If that's true, it's because she has crafted it that way, largely avoiding Hollywood hot spots and paparazzi thoroughfares. "I don't have a place for that in my life. It doesn't feed me in any way. It's depleting to me. . . . So when it became too much to bear in Los Angeles, I just moved," she says.

"I couldn't be a person who had no harmony and complains about it. I just, you know, had to find it somewhere else."