Bridget Jones fans were delighted to see the film franchise’s star, Renee Zellweger, back in the role that defined her career when filming began this week.
The Oscar-winning actress, 55, looked svelte in a green dress paired with a black jacket as she walked radiantly through the streets of London, as it emerged that the fourth installment of the film series, which will be released next year, “will downplay” The character’s obsession with weight.
Bridget Jones’ character lives in a constant struggle with her weight and fears “dying fat and alone,” but as modern audiences see the focus on her body as outdated, the producers have decided that Bridget’s obsession with weight will not appear in the new movie.
Over the years, Zellweger’s weight has gone up and down as she’s been asked to reprise her role, but when she starred in Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016, she revealed that she wasn’t asked to gain weight.
Speaking to the Telegraph, he explained that he wanted to go back to the diet he used to gain weight, but the directors wanted to show that Bridget had “reached her ideal weight” after following a yo-yo diet for years.
Renee Zellweger has been spotted filming the new Bridget Jones movie in London and it has been announced that the new installment will “downplay” the character’s weight.
“Sharon hoped we could show that Bridget had reached her ideal weight, but at the same time that didn’t mean her life was perfect,” he said.
“I wasn’t sure about that because we all have something that we think is wrong, that needs to be fixed, that in our minds represents the ideal that we should obtain.” And I like the idea of that staying with us throughout our lives.”
During an interview with British Vogue, Renee explained that her character in the third film was a “perfectly normal weight.”
The 55-year-old actress (pictured in the first film filmed in 2000) is known to undergo extreme diets to adapt to the character.
Just a few months after filming wrapped on Bridget Jones’s Diary, Zellweger returned to her size 6.
Throughout the films and the Helen Fielding books on which the films were based, there is a strong focus on Bridget’s weight.
After hearing love interest Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth, insult her to her mother in the first film, she says of herself: “And that was it.” Just there. Right there was the moment.
“I suddenly realized that, unless something changed soon, I was going to live a life in which my main relationship was with a bottle of wine and eventually I would die fat and alone and three weeks later I would be found eaten by Alsatian dogs or “I was about to die.” Become Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
Bridget was routinely embarrassed in both Helen Fielding’s original books and the first film, despite weighing just over 61kg, the same size as the average British woman at the time.
In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the actress gained weight again, reaching a size 14, to reprise her role
Zellweger gained weight twice to play the size 12 heroine, once in 2001 for Bridget Jones’s Diary and again in 2004 for the sequel Edge of Reason, before her character reached her “ideal weight” in the third. movie, albeit briefly before getting pregnant.
The actress admitted to having difficulty gaining weight for the role and was reported to be on a 4,000-calorie-per-day diet to reach the goal quickly.
He told the New York Times: “I would have an omelette with cheese and sauce for breakfast with a fatty yogurt and then a fruit salad with dressing, juice, coffee and cream, a bagel with butter and a few hours later a chocolate.” shake it with powder to gain weight.
However, in 2001, shortly after filming wrapped, she returned to her size 6.
When the third film was released in 2016, Zellweger said the directors didn’t want her to gain weight because Bridget had reached her “ideal weight.”
Zellweger photographed in 2021 at a BAFTA event in Los Angeles
Meanwhile, in the second installment, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, we saw even more of Bridget’s concern about her weight, which was explicitly linked to her search for a partner.
Renee Zellweger repeated the weight gain process to play Bridget in the second film, after losing the two kilos she had gained after the first film.
Speaking to Closer magazine at the time, he said: “It would be silly if Bridget was talking about her chubby thighs and they weren’t.”
As the new film is said to remove the focus on Bridget’s weight from the equation, it reflects attitudes of new audiences who have previously criticized the portrayal of the character as “fat” despite being only a size 12.
When the first three films were shown on terrestrial television in the UK over Christmas last year, Gen Z viewers were left furious at the portrayal of her as an overweight “spinster”.
After it was announced that Bridget Jones would return for a fourth installment, younger film fans took to X/Twitter to criticize the fat-shaming lines, as well as the “racist” jokes and sexual harassment issues that arise Of the plot.
Specifically, Generation Z has pointed out a moment in the film in which Bridget’s mother, whose bigoted character was played by Gemma Jones, describes a Japanese woman (Mark Darcy’s ex-wife) as being of a “very cruel breed.” .
Elsewhere, Bridget’s mother looked at what her daughter was wearing and told her: “You’ll never have a boyfriend if you look like you just left Auschwitz.”
Meanwhile, Bridget’s exchange of flirtatious messages with her boss Daniel Cleaver has been dubbed “sexual harassment”.
“It’s the double whammy of fatphobia and racism that helps me. I count this movie as one of my mortal enemies,” wrote one viewer.
Another said: ‘5 minutes into re-watching Bridget Jones’s diary and there’s already racism?!? Adding: “the early 2000s were horrible, oh my god.”
Someone else wrote: “Watching Bridget Jones’s Diary for the first time… and the racism after two minutes made me cry, the 2000 movies were so bold.”