Photography David Roemer Styling Naomi Smith WORDS Alexandra English
the Renée-ssance
small problem arises every time a new Bridget Jones film starts production: no-one seems to know who the real Bridget is. Is it the Oscar-winning actor Renée Zellweger, who has portrayed the adored Brit on screen for four films in 20-something years, or is it the award-winning author Helen Fielding, who created the character for a newspaper column in the early ’90s? “Bridget and Renée have merged into the same person for me,” Fielding tells marie claire, “but when Renée and I meet, it’s quite funny
Renée Zellweger on why we need Bridget Jones more than ever
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and confusing because we both think the other is Bridget. But neither of us is Bridget.”
Everyone is Bridget, and no-one is Bridget – and that’s the genius of Bridget. When the chain-smoking, charming and hopelessly romantic 32-year-old publishing assistant first appeared as the fictional narrator of a column in London’s The Independent newspaper in 1995, she brought with her all the neuroses, insecurities and embarrassments that came with being a woman of the era. She wanted to drink less, smoke less, lose weight, find a man and get ahead at work (would any of that make her happy? Who knew?). Yet when her friends – the real loves of her life – came knocking, she couldn’t help but get swept up in the spirit of their drunken, gossipy evenings, showing up to the office the next day hungover and scruffy. Still, she was lovable for all her foibles and immensely relatable to a generation of women who were emerging from the other side of ’80s power-suit feminism not feeling all that powerful, actually. Sometimes they felt too bloated to wear a pencil skirt, and Bridget showed them that it didn’t make them any less of a woman to admit it.
When Zellweger logs onto our call a few days before our cover shoot, she’s in a spacious hotel room in Brooklyn. For my part, I’ve just come off a long-haul flight during which I binge-rewatched the first three Bridget films. That’s five hours and 28 minutes of listening to Zellweger speak in the character’s iconic upper-middle-class London accent. So when she starts talking with her native Southern twang, it takes a beat to understand what’s happening. She’s also wearing a trucker cap. This combination is a stark reminder that Fielding was right: Renée is not Bridget, no matter how synonymous she’s become with the character. Zellweger is more likely to be found underneath a car checking the suspension or changing the oil than she is to be dressed as a Playboy bunny at her parents’ Christmas party.
Zellweger grew up in Katy, west of Houston, with a younger brother, Drew. Their mother, Kjellfrid, is from northern Norway. Their father, Emil, was born in Switzerland. Zellweger’s parents met on a ship travelling from Denmark to Norway, and later immigrated to the United States “with nothing but each other”.
Zellweger may consider herself a “failed journalist”, but she uses that natural curiosity and love of research to prepare for her roles. Before the first Bridget film, she worked with a dialect coach to master the accent, and also did undercover work experience at the publishing house Picador, which represented Fielding. She went by the name Bridget Cavendish (using the surname of the film’s producer, Jonathan Cavendish) and part of her job was to take newspaper clippings for Fielding’s file, many of which complained about the American actor who was set to play Bridget Jones. For the third movie, when Bridget is a television producer, Zellweger trailed a real morning show producer. She also watched hours of birth videos to prepare for Bridget’s pregnancy. Getting back to Bridget this time was trickier simply because of how much time has passed. Zellweger says she watched some of the films, sparingly and cautiously. “I don’t sit down and watch the whole catalogue because I don’t want to emulate something – Bridget’s not the same person.” Instead, she dipped in to re-familiarise herself with Bridget’s dialect and her specific way of walking. “How she walks and her movement has an openness to it that I think is so beautiful,” says Zellweger.
For a while there, it was thought that the first Bridget Jones film had not aged well, what with its calorie counting and office relationships and worship of coupledom. Even Fielding noted that she did not think the first film could be made now. But in fact, when you consider it a period piece (they’re smoking indoors, for goodness sake), you see that it’s actually an examination of what life was like in the 1990s for late-twenties, early-thirties women, the societal pressures placed upon them and how they responded. It’s a stick in the ground that shows us how much – and how little – has changed.
“Since we started on this journey so many years ago, values have shifted and we’ve evolved culturally in that we’ve become more aware of the way we address certain issues, and how we value women in the workplace and how we look at the way women are treated,” says Zellweger. “I think some of those things that Bridget grappled with [back then], maybe they’re not quite the same, but the difference is that societal pressures – those things that make you question your own value, or the prototypes for beauty that you feel pressure to conform to or measure yourself against – have just moved online now and they’re more ubiquitous than ever before.”
“Sometimes you have to leave the thing to be able to have clarity and perspective,” she says. “When you’re in the middle of the storm, you don’t have perspective. It’s not unusual to reach a place where you start to ask yourself whether you’re the best version of yourself within the structure of your life as you’ve established it, and my answer was, ‘No, I’m not.’ I was last on the things that I take care of, and I said absolutely 100 per cent yes to everything that everyone asks of me, and there was nothing left in my life for myself. I was an interloper in my own life.
“Stepping back doesn’t mean you have to lose all the things that you love,” she continues. “It just means there’s probably a better way to go about it, which probably enables you to do a better job.” She came back with a bang: first up was the third Bridget, followed by 2019’s Judy, which critics considered the finest performance of her career. She scored another Golden Globe, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award, as well as a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack. In 2019, there was the thriller series What/If, about a scientist at a medical tech start-up; and in 2022 came the crime miniseries The Thing About Pam, based on the true story of Pam Hupp, who is serving a life sentence for murder.
While Zellweger says she always has another project on the go, her time away taught her how to set healthy boundaries. “I make room for myself, make room to sleep, make room to have time,” she says. “It doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s a different life entirely. It’s definitely a happier life.” These days, that life is in Southern California, where she moved to be close to her partner, Ant Anstead, and his son. She loves to spend her days gardening and taking care of her old dog (“he’s my current project”).
As for Bridget? Well, Zellweger says that as long as Fielding keeps putting pen to paper, she will keep playing her. But the question of who, exactly, is Bridget, remains. “There was a moment on set when we were both trying to impress one of the male stars, who shall remain nameless,” says Fielding, “and we’d hugged just before. My hair got stuck on Renée’s microphone, so when he appeared, we were weirdly stuck together.”
That sounds about right.
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is in cinemas from February 13.
Talent Renée Zellweger Editor Georgie McCourt
Creative Director Juanita Field
Art Director Rebecca Rhodes
Fashion Director Naomi Smith
Photographer David Roemer
Writer Alexandra english
Hair Jenny Cho
Makeup Kindra Mann
Manicure Diem Truong
Set Designer Danielle Von Braun
Fashion Assistant Jordan Boorman
Creative Producer Camille Peck / Eminente Creative Production
This story appears in the March 2025 Issue of marie claire.
“It’s an interesting thing to revisit a character in different chapters of her life while having grown personally at the same time, it’s like visiting an old friend.” - RenÉE Zellweger
“I had a really blessed childhood,” Zellweger says. “It was a lucky environment to grow up in where what your parents are aspiring to establish for their family is simplicity and love, not the acquisition of things, but experiences.” Some of those experiences were travel, and others were more practical, like mechanics. “My dad is a really practical guy – there’s nothing he couldn’t and wouldn’t do, and there was nothing he would do that he didn’t want us to come and learn how to do,” she recalls. “He’d be out in the garage and I’d hear my name and that was it for the Barbies for that day,” she says, laughing, “because we were going to change the CV boots on the car or we were going up into the attic because there was something wrong with the airconditioner and we were gonna go fix that.” It taught her to clean up messes and solve problems. (Jim Carrey, her future co-star and ex-fiancé, would eventually say of her, “She thinks having a good time is renting a U-Haul and taking furniture to Texas. She’s real in that way.”)
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“I don’t sit down and watch the whole catalogue [of Bridget films] because I don’t want to emulate something – Bridget’s not the same person.”
- RenÉE Zellweger
For Bridget, a chronic underachiever who spent more time thinking about men than her career, to become the hero of the times would have been unheard of 10 years earlier. Fielding thought the newspaper column would last six weeks. She hadn’t counted on the fact that at the time, it was predicted that by the year 2000 a quarter of all women in England would be single. Fielding’s creation was inadvertently holding their hands while pouring them a glass of chardonnay, keeping them steady in their stilettos as they marched triumphantly into the new millennium. When the newspaper column became a book in 1996, it was met with rapturous applause in the form of sales and rave reviews, topping best-seller lists and bumping queen of the bonkbuster Jilly Cooper further down the ladder.
A movie deal was inevitable, and when it came through, Fielding says she went out and bought a copy of How to Write a Screenplay – a very Bridget-like thing to do. Hugh Grant and Colin Firth were cast as Bridget’s two love interests: her boss, Daniel Cleaver, and her family friend, Mark Darcy, respectively. But there was one role that was proving impossible to cast. “The one character I couldn’t imagine was Bridget, because I always wrote and saw everything through Bridget’s eyes rather than seeing her,” Fielding says.
And then along came Renée Zellweger. The actor had been building a steady Hollywood career with appearances in the romcom Jerry Maguire, the drama One True Thing, the crime comedy Nurse Betty – which earned her a Golden Globe – and the slapstick comedy Me, Myself & Irene. And yet, when she was cast as the Bridget Jones in a film that required all of those elements – dramatic softness, physical comedy, romance and gleeful chaos – the book’s fans doubted her: she was too thin and too, well, Texan to play a bumbling Brit, they said. But to Fielding, she was exactly right. “She has the qualities of warmth and humour and of being clear-sighted in all the woolly edges and chaos, just like Bridget,” she says. “Where I see the world through Bridget, Renée embodies the person seeing and reacting to all that. She knows the character as well as I do. The accent took a while – Hugh was hilarious teasing her about it – but she nailed it.” Her performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination and her first Oscar and BAFTA nominations.
A Texan Upbringing
She never intended to become an actor and instead was studying English literature. Zellweger describes herself as a “failed journalist”. “Writing was something that just came really naturally to me. I love to write,” she says. “I always just assumed that that’s what I was going to do.” She chose drama as an elective, which gave her a taste for the stage and creative collaboration. “It was a remarkable time in that town, when you know you have a blessed existence, but you don’t know just how special that moment in time is until you look back at it,” she says. “It was that confluence of art, music and film – all of these creative people and these mediums and the boundaries were malleable. If you needed a model or an actor, you’d just ask someone to come in. You made music. Everybody was working together and you were just doing the thing that was your passion at the time.”
Zellweger began picking up small parts in commercials, low-budget independent films and local productions, including 1993’s skater-stoner coming-of-age Dazed and Confused. The next year, she had a minor role in Reality Bites, starring Winona Ryder, Ben Stiller and Ethan Hawke. From there, she was like a horse out of the gate: more films followed, and with them endless awards and rave reviews. But still, she was plagued by imposter syndrome. For years she had been postponing her move to Los Angeles because she doubted her talent and experience, eventually making the leap in 1995. Her big break came the next year when she played Tom Cruise’s love interest in Jerry Maguire. (“You had me at hello.”)
A quick recap of what Bridget’s been up to. If you’ll remember, she spends the first movie obsessing over her inappropriately flirty boss, Daniel Cleaver, while also reluctantly falling for her family friend, the Christmas-jumper enthusiast Mark Darcy. Both men are vying for her attention, and she dates and loses them both in turn. There’s a fistfight, another woman and a run through the snow in her underwear to snog Darcy before the credits roll.
The second film, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), is a silly, sweeping epic that sees her go from the snow-topped mountains of Austria to a Thai women’s prison for accidental drug smuggling. There are magic mushrooms, sex workers and a fertility snake bowl that airport authorities find to be full of cocaine. In prison, she teaches her fellow inmates to dance to Madonna while, unbeknownst to her, Darcy – a human rights lawyer – is coordinating her release. By the end of the whole saga, they’re engaged.
We last saw Bridget in Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016). When it begins, Cleaver has died in a plane crash, Bridget and Darcy have broken up (he’s married), and she considers herself “the last barren husk in London”. She meets Jack (Patrick Dempsey) at a music festival where they have a one-night stand. When she returns home, Darcy reveals he is getting divorced, and they also sleep together. Because where Bridget goes, chaos follows, she finds out she’s pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is. By the end, she’s headed off into the figurative sunset with her baby and her new husband, Darcy. She doesn’t know it yet, but Cleaver has been found alive. Cue credits.
The fourth installment, this year’s Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, is based on Fielding’s third book of the same name from 2013. The movie-verse and the book-verse are slightly jumbled because “nothing goes in a straight line in Bridget’s world”, explains Fielding.
“The third movie [Baby] took so long to make that I actually finished the third novel [Mad About the Boy] before the third film came out.” That meant the third film and the fourth novel – both Bridget Jones’s Baby – were confusingly out at the same time, skipping the third novel, until now. Got it? Never mind. “It’s classic Bridget chaos: clear as mud – but it all works out in the end,” says Fielding.
Bridget, now in her fifties, is single once again, this time because Darcy has been killed by a landmine in Sudan. “When we left Bridget, she was at the beginning of her happily ever after,” says Zellweger, “and when we pick back up with her some years later, she’s raising children on her own and she’s trying to navigate her way through this chapter and dealing with everyone’s ideas about where she should be at this point in her life and what she should try in order to move on”. Grant will return, as will Bridget’s gynaecologist, played by Emma Thompson, and all her friends from the previous movies. New faces include Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall, who plays Bridget’s hot, much younger boyfriend.
Bringing Bridget Back (Again)
“Values have shifted and we’ve evolved culturally in that we’ve become more aware of the way we address certain issues, and how we value women in the workplace and how we look at the way women are treated”
- RenÉE Zellweger
The gaps between Bridget films may not have been by design, but they certainly add to the Bridget Jones lore. Bridget is out there somewhere, living her life, and we simply check up on her occasionally. “It’s an interesting thing to revisit a character in different chapters of her life while having grown personally at the same time,” says Zellweger. “It’s like visiting an old friend.”
Zellweger’s relationship with Hollywood has been similar. After the first Bridget, Zellweger was a big-screen mainstay with a project seemingly every year. Some of those included 2002’s Chicago musical, in which she played murderer and aspiring actor Roxie Hart. In 2003, she played the chicken-neck-snapping farmer Ruby in Cold Mountain. Then there was the second Bridget, which earned her yet another Golden Globe nomination. There was a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a spot on Forbes’ “20 richest women in entertainment” before she disappeared.
In 2010, Zellweger stepped off the Hollywood merry-go-round for six years. She didn’t stop working – she would have gone insane – it was just in a different capacity. She studied public policy and international law, she wrote poems and scripts and music, started a production company, adopted rescue dogs, built a house, fundraised and spent time with family.
Life, Work & Legacy Beyond Bridget
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There’s also the trend now towards hiding any aesthetic insecurities we might have. There’s a lot of confusion about how a woman is supposed to look: we’re body positive but Ozempic is flying off the shelves; we’re embracing ageing while secretly getting baby Botox; we’re biohacking and intermittent fasting but posting photos of burgers and martinis. Social media presents these beauty standards that we know are impossible but still feel guilty for not living up to. Put like that, it’s no wonder sales of Bridget Jones’s Diary were up 22 per cent in 2024 compared to 2023.
“The trend is now to pretend you’re not affected by these things, which is really interesting,” Zellweger says. “It’s Bridget’s honesty and authenticity, the way she so openly shows her vulnerability, that is so universally relatable. She makes you feel OK, that you don’t need to feel frightened or embarrassed by [who you are] or not perfect,” says Zellweger.
Fielding agrees, and has noticed that she has a new audience with gen Z. “I think the heart of why they relate to Bridget is the gap between how people feel they’re expected to be and how they actually are – a gap that has only become wider with the advent of social media. Bridget is emotionally honest and kind. She’s able to laugh at her imperfections and be vulnerable and human.”
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