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After three movies and almost $1.2 billion at the global box office, Renee Zellweger and Bridget Jones are inextricably linked.
It’s easy to forget that wasn’t always the case.
Back in 2000, a year before the release of the first film in the series, Bridget Jones’s Diary, controversy erupted at the news a Texan had been cast in the titular role.
At that point, Zellweger already had the smash hit Jerry Maguire under her belt and was well on the way to Hollywood superstardom.
However, the thought of an American playing the quintessentially English heroine from Helen Fielding’s very British and very popular novel set more than a few stiff upper lips quivering in Old Blighty.
Fielding had originally created the character for a regular newspaper column to lampoon British society and cultural conventions.
She then used Austen’s Pride And Prejudice as a loose framework to turn those columns into a novel that was as English as Buckingham Palace or kippers for breakfast.
So, when it was revealed Kate Winslet, Helena Bonham Carter and Rachel Weisz had reportedly been considered for the role before Zellweger won over director Sharon Maguire, the British press had a decidedly hard time keeping calm and carrying on.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly at the time, Hugh Grant leapt to Zellweger’s defence, having himself just been cast as Daniel Cleaver, Bridget’s boss and one-third of an enduring love triangle that also included Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy.
“She’s very funny, and she’s been living in England a long time now, mastering the accent. It’ll be a triumph. I know it will,” Grant said in the interview.
He was right.
The film made more than $430 million, more than 10 times its budget and out-grossing The Fast And the Furious, as well as earning Zellweger her first Academy Award nomination.
Two sequels, The Edge Of Reason (2004) and Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016), also adapted from Fielding novels, confirmed the character as Zellweger’s signature role, even as she won Oscars elsewhere for Judy and Cold Mountain.
With a fourth and allegedly final instalment, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, hitting Australian cinemas this week in time for Valentine’s Day, the 55-year-old considers what the character has meant to her.
“It’s so hard to say,” the actor says in a sit-down interview with PLAY, clearly struggling to condense the decades spent as Bridget Jones.
“She feels a little bit like an alter ego, you know. She’s very familiar to me … I recognise myself in her foibles most of all, I guess, like a lot of people.”
Those foibles have been front and centre in every movie as we’ve watched the character learn to embrace her imperfections, despite regularly being embarrassed by them.
We’ve watched her lurch through life like a runaway double-decker bus, from one self-inflicted disaster to the next, leaving almost as much destruction in her wake.
With her friends and a glass of white wine constantly by her side, Bridget Jones is relatable to all those who also muddle through the mess as best they can.
And don’t even start on her romantic entanglements, which are often played for laughs but hold very real emotional resonance for fans.
That will certainly be the case with Mad About The Boy, an improvement in every way over the silliness of the previous instalment that had fans worried the franchise had jumped the shark.
The new film finds Bridget alone once again, widowed four years earlier by the tragic death of her true love, Firth’s Darcy, while on a humanitarian mission in the Sudan.
Technically, she’s not entirely alone, raising a six and 10-year-old with the help of Grant’s Cleaver, who is still a bit of a cad, but thankfully not as deceased as it appeared in the previous film.
The grief of losing her Mr Darcy has Bridget literally seeing his ghost, but her friends and gynaecologist (played brilliantly by the great Emma Thompson) finally convince her to come back to the land of the living.
Returning to the world of TV producing is one thing, but getting back into the dating scene is something else altogether, and fans will be happy to know our heroine is still hilariously awkward in front of a hot guy.
Imagine, then, how awkward she is in front of two hot guys — her kids’ straitlaced science teacher, Mr Wallaker (Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor) and local park ranger Roxster (White Lotus star Leo Woodall).
The latter is as dashing as he is youthful, and this age-gap romance is a major plot line in the film.
Fun fact: Woodall was just four years old when the first movie came out, but he says he didn’t have much catching up to do to prepare for the role.
“I didn’t really have to learn about the Bridget Jones universe,” the British actor tells PLAY.
“I’ve sort of grown up with it, you know, it’s something that I was just always familiar with.
“And, the second I read the script, I recognised the humour, the tone of it, and it just filled me with joy.”
Audiences might be filled with joy watching one memorable scene in the film, which sees Roxster dive into a swimming pool to rescue a dog, only to emerge with muscles rippling under a wet, white shirt that clings in all the right places.
Director Michael Morris says it was a deliberate callback to that iconic scene from the BBC’s adaptation of Pride And Prejudice, where Mr Darcy (also played by Firth, as it happens) strode sodden out of a lake.
A scene not unfamiliar to this franchise.
“We tried a million different designs of shirts,” Morris reveals to PLAY. “Because I wanted the shirt to be both a little bit timeless, like it could have been a Pride And Prejudice type of shirt, but it was also very important that it clung the right way.
“There’s a fine tradition in Bridget Jones of men in water, and this was definitely a callback.”
The director says what Zellweger has done with the character is almost unparalleled. And he might be right.
“I don’t know that there are many other characters in film history who are just, on the one hand, regular people, they’re not crime fighters or superheroes, and, on the other hand, have been around in films for 25 years,” he says.
“It’s been remarkable, what Renee’s done. She’s embodied this woman that was already a very kind of confessional character of Helen Fielding in print — it’s very hard to kind of make it completely your own — and she’s done that, and then revisited her over the decades.”
Listen to Ejiofor, and you might come away thinking Bridget Jones has a superpower, after all.
“For me, ultimately, it’s the sense that you can approach the challenges of life with optimism,” the Brit tells PLAY.
“For everybody, life can feel out of control. It can feel like it’s moving at such a pace, and there are so many things to do, to achieve; so many different pressures and so many emotional pressures, and you’re spinning so many different plates all the time, and you’re dropping half of them.
“(Bridget Jones teaches us that) it’s actually OK. You can still meet those things and still persevere with optimism, with kindness, and I think people really … relate to it because it’s inspirational and aspirational.”
Word of warning to Bridget Jones fans heading to see Mad About The Boy — don’t forget the tissues.
Whether it was the emotion of mourning Mark Darcy on camera, or the sense a final curtain was drawing on this huge part of her professional career, Zellweger admits making the film was a bittersweet experience.
“The actors that I’ve had the opportunity to share a set with, I just am so lucky to have forged friendships with those guys over 25 years,” she says.
“I just remember sitting outside of Bridget’s flat (making the first movie), and … there was nothing fancy about it at all. We were there at three o’clock in the morning, in the rain, telling stories and things, it’s just a true friendship.
“I didn’t expect it was going to be so emotional in the last film, when there would be no Daniel Cleaver, and in this film there would be no Mark Darcy.
“I thought, ‘Am I a crazy person, because I’m in love with these fictional characters and they’re going away’, but also to not share the experience anymore with my friend Colin.
“I didn’t expect to be so overwhelmed on the day filming with him, but I was.”
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is in cinemas now.
After three movies and almost $1.2 billion at the global box office, Renee Zellweger and Bridget Jones are inextricably linked.
It’s easy to forget that wasn’t always the case.
Back in 2000, a year before the release of the first film in the series, Bridget Jones’s Diary, controversy erupted at the news a Texan had been cast in the titular role.
At that point, Zellweger already had the smash hit Jerry Maguire under her belt and was well on the way to Hollywood superstardom.
However, the thought of an American playing the quintessentially English heroine from Helen Fielding’s very British and very popular novel set more than a few stiff upper lips quivering in Old Blighty.
Fielding had originally created the character for a regular newspaper column to lampoon British society and cultural conventions.
She then used Austen’s Pride And Prejudice as a loose framework to turn those columns into a novel that was as English as Buckingham Palace or kippers for breakfast.
So, when it was revealed Kate Winslet, Helena Bonham Carter and Rachel Weisz had reportedly been considered for the role before Zellweger won over director Sharon Maguire, the British press had a decidedly hard time keeping calm and carrying on.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly at the time, Hugh Grant leapt to Zellweger’s defence, having himself just been cast as Daniel Cleaver, Bridget’s boss and one-third of an enduring love triangle that also included Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy.
“She’s very funny, and she’s been living in England a long time now, mastering the accent. It’ll be a triumph. I know it will,” Grant said in the interview.
He was right.
The film made more than $430 million, more than 10 times its budget and out-grossing The Fast And the Furious, as well as earning Zellweger her first Academy Award nomination.
Two sequels, The Edge Of Reason (2004) and Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016), also adapted from Fielding novels, confirmed the character as Zellweger’s signature role, even as she won Oscars elsewhere for Judy and Cold Mountain.
With a fourth and allegedly final instalment, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, hitting Australian cinemas this week in time for Valentine’s Day, the 55-year-old considers what the character has meant to her.
“It’s so hard to say,” the actor says in a sit-down interview with PLAY, clearly struggling to condense the decades spent as Bridget Jones.
“She feels a little bit like an alter ego, you know. She’s very familiar to me … I recognise myself in her foibles most of all, I guess, like a lot of people.”
Those foibles have been front and centre in every movie as we’ve watched the character learn to embrace her imperfections, despite regularly being embarrassed by them.
We’ve watched her lurch through life like a runaway double-decker bus, from one self-inflicted disaster to the next, leaving almost as much destruction in her wake.
With her friends and a glass of white wine constantly by her side, Bridget Jones is relatable to all those who also muddle through the mess as best they can.
And don’t even start on her romantic entanglements, which are often played for laughs but hold very real emotional resonance for fans.
That will certainly be the case with Mad About The Boy, an improvement in every way over the silliness of the previous instalment that had fans worried the franchise had jumped the shark.
The new film finds Bridget alone once again, widowed four years earlier by the tragic death of her true love, Firth’s Darcy, while on a humanitarian mission in the Sudan.
Technically, she’s not entirely alone, raising a six and 10-year-old with the help of Grant’s Cleaver, who is still a bit of a cad, but thankfully not as deceased as it appeared in the previous film.
The grief of losing her Mr Darcy has Bridget literally seeing his ghost, but her friends and gynaecologist (played brilliantly by the great Emma Thompson) finally convince her to come back to the land of the living.
Returning to the world of TV producing is one thing, but getting back into the dating scene is something else altogether, and fans will be happy to know our heroine is still hilariously awkward in front of a hot guy.
Imagine, then, how awkward she is in front of two hot guys — her kids’ straitlaced science teacher, Mr Wallaker (Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor) and local park ranger Roxster (White Lotus star Leo Woodall).
The latter is as dashing as he is youthful, and this age-gap romance is a major plot line in the film.
Fun fact: Woodall was just four years old when the first movie came out, but he says he didn’t have much catching up to do to prepare for the role.
“I didn’t really have to learn about the Bridget Jones universe,” the British actor tells PLAY.
“I’ve sort of grown up with it, you know, it’s something that I was just always familiar with.
“And, the second I read the script, I recognised the humour, the tone of it, and it just filled me with joy.”
Audiences might be filled with joy watching one memorable scene in the film, which sees Roxster dive into a swimming pool to rescue a dog, only to emerge with muscles rippling under a wet, white shirt that clings in all the right places.
Director Michael Morris says it was a deliberate callback to that iconic scene from the BBC’s adaptation of Pride And Prejudice, where Mr Darcy (also played by Firth, as it happens) strode sodden out of a lake.
A scene not unfamiliar to this franchise.
“We tried a million different designs of shirts,” Morris reveals to PLAY. “Because I wanted the shirt to be both a little bit timeless, like it could have been a Pride And Prejudice type of shirt, but it was also very important that it clung the right way.
“There’s a fine tradition in Bridget Jones of men in water, and this was definitely a callback.”
The director says what Zellweger has done with the character is almost unparalleled. And he might be right.
“I don’t know that there are many other characters in film history who are just, on the one hand, regular people, they’re not crime fighters or superheroes, and, on the other hand, have been around in films for 25 years,” he says.
“It’s been remarkable, what Renee’s done. She’s embodied this woman that was already a very kind of confessional character of Helen Fielding in print — it’s very hard to kind of make it completely your own — and she’s done that, and then revisited her over the decades.”
Listen to Ejiofor, and you might come away thinking Bridget Jones has a superpower, after all.
“For me, ultimately, it’s the sense that you can approach the challenges of life with optimism,” the Brit tells PLAY.
“For everybody, life can feel out of control. It can feel like it’s moving at such a pace, and there are so many things to do, to achieve; so many different pressures and so many emotional pressures, and you’re spinning so many different plates all the time, and you’re dropping half of them.
“(Bridget Jones teaches us that) it’s actually OK. You can still meet those things and still persevere with optimism, with kindness, and I think people really … relate to it because it’s inspirational and aspirational.”
Word of warning to Bridget Jones fans heading to see Mad About The Boy — don’t forget the tissues.
Whether it was the emotion of mourning Mark Darcy on camera, or the sense a final curtain was drawing on this huge part of her professional career, Zellweger admits making the film was a bittersweet experience.
“The actors that I’ve had the opportunity to share a set with, I just am so lucky to have forged friendships with those guys over 25 years,” she says.
“I just remember sitting outside of Bridget’s flat (making the first movie), and … there was nothing fancy about it at all. We were there at three o’clock in the morning, in the rain, telling stories and things, it’s just a true friendship.
“I didn’t expect it was going to be so emotional in the last film, when there would be no Daniel Cleaver, and in this film there would be no Mark Darcy.
“I thought, ‘Am I a crazy person, because I’m in love with these fictional characters and they’re going away’, but also to not share the experience anymore with my friend Colin.
“I didn’t expect to be so overwhelmed on the day filming with him, but I was.”
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is in cinemas now.
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