Break out the big pants and the vodka shots because the lovelorn Bridget Jones is back on our screens from next February in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy.
Renee Zellweger returns to her signature role as Bridget, who is now reconciling with personal tragedy and possible new suitors in her life.
Jones is a widow, bereft after the death of her on-off partner turned husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). With two children to bring up, she struggles to find her place in the world but realises it’s time to get back out there. Two potential new suitors arrive in her life when she is least expecting it, the impetuous Roxster played by Leo Woodall from The White Lotus, and Chiwetel Ejiofor who starred in 12 Years a Slave as straight-laced teacher Mr Wallaker.
Is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy based on a book?
Yes, as with Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), and Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016), the new movie is based on a book by author Helen Fielding. However, the fourth film in the series is based on Fielding’s third book, published in 2013. Fielding contributed to the screenplay along with Borat’s Dan Mazer and Suffragette’s Abi Morgan.
Is Colin Firth in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy?
The trailer shows that Colin Firth does appear in a poignant context, designed to emphasise Bridget’s loneliness as a mother bringing up two young children. Bridget and Mark had a love-hate animosity in the first film before they finally made it work at the end of that film and secured themselves as a couple in the sequel. Bridget and Mark had split up at the start of Bridget Jones’s Baby, but Bridget was forced to reconcile with the possibility of him being the father of her child. The end of the film revealed it was so and they reconciled.
Is Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy?
Grant returns as the caddish Daniel Cleaver, the man who broke Bridget’s heart in the first film and who crossed her path again in the sequel. He didn’t appear in the third film but he’s back for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Bridget’s children appear to be acquainted with him, leading to some fabulously naughty insinuations that only Grant can carry off.
Grant has described the new Bridget movie as “very sad” and insisted that a correct backstory between Bridget and Daniel be included so the emotional undertow of the film wasn’t ruined.
When is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy released?
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is released on February 14, 2025. That’s right, St Valentine’s Day so whether you belong to a smug married couple or are a lovelorn singleton, mark it in your calendars.
What does the trailer tell us?
The trailer for the film starts with Bridget walking alone, down a London street, before she reunites with a vision of her husband at the front door of a friend’s house.
“In life, there are memories that will never leave us,”she says, before Darcy disappears in the blink of an eye. “But sometimes, those memories are suddenly all we’re left with.”
Darcy has been killed on a humanitarian mission in the Sudan, leaving a 50-something Bridget with nine-year-old Billy and four-year-old Mabel, stuck in a ‘state of emotional limbo, raising her children with help from her loyal friends.
In the book of the same name on which the film is based, Darcy is similarly written out and, in the past, author Helen Fielding has said this was because she didn’t want Bridget to become ‘a smug married’.
Friends including straight-talking obstetrician Dr Rawlings played by Emma Thompson, sex-mad colleague Miranda (Sarah Solemani) as well as fan-favourites Shazza and Tom (Sally Phillips and James Callis) – feel she should be back in the relationship game.
“It’s been four years now,” Shazza tells her and that she “just has to get laid” while the Daniel Cleaver, portrayed as rakishly as ever by Hugh Grant, puts it in his more earthy way, calling Bridget “effectively a nun – a very, very naughty nun”.
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