This week there was encouraging news for fans of the Bridget Jones movies; another delivery is on the way.
Nearly a quarter of a century after moviegoers first fell in love with Helen Fielding’s spinster diarist Bridget Jones and laughed out loud, she’s ready for a fourth box office outing.
Bridget Jones 4 will begin filming in London in May and pre-production is already underway.
The first film, adapted from Fielding’s 1996 novel of the same name, landed in 2001 with Renee Zellweger playing thirtysomething Bridget, Hugh Grant as ladies’ man Daniel Cleaver and Colin Firth as attorney Mark Darcy.
Romantic comedy heroine Bridget Jones will return to screens next year, with the fourth film currently in pre-production; Scrutiny over Renée Zellweger’s weight, which affected the first two films in 2001 and 2004, is expected to no longer be an issue.
Co-written with Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral screenwriter Richard Curtis, the first film grossed a whopping £250 million at the global box office and spawned two more films, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in 2004, and Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2004. 2016.
However, there was a murkier side to the franchise that has largely been overlooked: Bridget’s weight.
Zellweger promoting the first film Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001; The star gained weight for the role and she told The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2016 that her physical appearance was what she was asked about most while she was promoting the first and second films.
Renee Zellweger gained weight to play the character, and in the first two films in particular, Bridget routinely looks embarrassed. for appearing like an average-sized woman.
At the beginning of the first film, Bridget Jones’s Diary, viewers are told that she weighs 136 pounds, just over 61 kg, and wears a size 12 dress.
The average weight of a British woman in 2021 was 71.8kg and the average dress size in the UK is 16.
In one scene, the new girlfriend of Bridget’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Daniel Cleaver, is heard saying, “I thought you said I was thin” during a scene in her bathroom.
In the first film, released in 2001, Renée Zellweger played Bridget, a thirty-something single woman, with Hugh Grant, on the right, as the womanizer Daniel Cleaver, and Colin Firth, on the left, as the lawyer Mark Darcy.
Bridget Jones’s Diary begins with the main character telling viewers that she weighs 136 pounds, just over 61 kg, and that she needs to lose 20 pounds (9 kg). The average weight of a British woman in 2021 was 71.8 kg
The final film in the Bridget series will be released in 2025 and filming will begin later this year. Pictured: Zellweger in Bridget Jones’ diary in 2001.
In another scene from the first film, her friend asks her: ‘Just like you are? Not thinner? Isn’t it smarter? when she tells him that her boyfriend, her lawyer Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth, said he likes her just the way she is.
While Bridget was constantly told by others that she was fat, she was also self-critical about her size.
After hearing Mark Darcy insult her to her mother in the second 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.
In another scene from the first film, from 2001, her friend asks her: ‘Just like you are? Not thinner? Isn’t it smarter? when she tells him that her boyfriend, lawyer Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth (pictured playing Mark), said she likes him just the way he is.
Bridget’s weight was also constantly mentioned in her diary entries in the original Fielding books, something that carried over decidedly into the films, with the exception of the third film, in which Bridget’s character is pregnant.
But there are even references there; A friend of Pamela’s, Bridget’s mother, congratulates her on her surprise pregnancy and says, “Wonderful, we thought you had put on weight again.”
In the years after the first two films, Zellweger spoke about the scrutiny of her body in the role.
Although Bridget, created by writer Helen Fielding in the late ’90s, was constantly told by others that she was fat, she is also self-critical about her size. She also kept track of her weight in her famous diary.
Pictured is Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones in the 2011 film.
She told The Today Show in 2016: ‘I never thought she (Bridget) had a weight problem. I thought it was something all of us thought, “Oh, I’d love to change this about myself” when in reality no one notices it except you.
Appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show a year later, Zellweger said, in a clip that resurfaced last year, that the question she was asked most about her appearances in the first two Bridget Jones films was about her weight.
The star said: “It makes me very sad because it seems to imply that one way of being is acceptable and the other is not valuable, and that is simply not true.”
According to sources, ahead of filming in May, Renee Zellweger is already looking for a house to live in while she is in Britain.
The new film comes eight years after the last installment, Bridget Jones’s Baby, and will be based on Fielding’s 2013 novel, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, in which she raised young children as a single mother while scrolling through social media. and dating apps. .