Twenty-five years later, Bridget Jones has walked away from her first stumble, smoked her way into cinematic history, and taken one sip at a time, it’s Renee Zellweger with a bit of warm gratitude now. Zellweger revealed at a cast event at the Tribeca Film Festival to mark the 10th anniversary of the beloved romantic comedy what the character meant to her during the film’s original run and still means to her today. As an actress who embodies the jazz age singer and the small town Texas tornado, it was Bridget—messy, heartfelt, gloriously unpolished—who gave her something she’d never had on set: freedom.
“It was really liberating to play Bridget Jones,” Zellweger said, “because I’m getting to play a character who is having ‘authentic experiences authentically. This was important to her. She continued to say that most romantic comedy heroines, particularly in the late nineties and early two thousands, were on-screen “fully-pitched”. They never had a messy hair. They didn’t get their masks running. They were always made vulnerable in a manner that they look cute. However Bridget was a different person. Bridget was a woman that looked as if she lived her life. She had an extra portion at dinner, she had a love of Chardonnay and she didn’t have a regular gym membership. But at the same time, she was never presented as less than. She was already pretty, anyway. She managed to get the guy after all. But more, Zellweger said: “Maybe more so, because she’s so very herself that it makes her more attractive.”
This idea, which seemed so simple and radical at the time—that a woman can be herself and still be desirable—was not typical. Zellweger remembered that Bridget “sort of broke a norm in an unexpected way that it kind of spoke to people, me included.” When others discuss weight and the character, they usually fail to get to the heart of the matter, she said. “No, I don’t think she’s someone who’s… I don’t think there’s anything that could be done,” she said. I believe it puts a new spin on what a leading lady can look like,” I think.
It was a challenge for Zellweger to walk in Bridget’s shoes – it was also a change of her own.For Zellweger, it meant changing shoes, as well as changing the relentless pressure to look perfect on camera. But it was freeing, she said, that was very freeing. She said that she loved it. I loved that when I cried I could have a runny nose and snot and nobody had to come running in and brush my hair all the time, so that it is perfect. As she remarks on it, you’re struck by the feeling that those little sloppy moments were the ones that somehow felt most real. They were also the ones that audiences were most related to. It’s almost like seeing a woman break apart on the screen, and not treating it like a tragedy or a punchline, right? Bridget’s calamities were never to be mended. They were supposed to be lived, ridiculed and learned.
Zellweger went on to say that it was one of her favorite things to come back to, and that she would have to remind herself every time she returned to Bridget, “Always remember, we don’t have to worry about that, I don’t have to think about that, we’re not doing the make up, pimples – great!” This is a feeling many actors may never experience! The movie’s leading ladies were expected to be flawless in most romantic comedy films of that time. On the contrary, Bridget Jones’s Diary, based on Helen Fielding’s novel, did. It was the time when it was celebrating the difference between woman’s thoughts and her reality. And it discovered, in that hole, laughter and warmth, even romance.
The character over the years, however, hasn’t been without its critics, of course. The image of Bridget in an unhelpful relationship with her own body, constantly criticizing and counting calories, which Fielding has said was modeled after his own university diaries, has been criticized as something that can uncomfortable be witnessed today. There’s a good debate to be had on the validity of Bridget’s inner thoughts and how they mirrored the very pressures the story was taking a crack at mocking. Her obsession with her weight and love life, on the other hand, is as painfully relatable as they come from magazines and diet culture. Other young viewers today don’t think the same way, however, and might be left bewildered at how a character who’s so vocal about being authentic can have to apologize for her body so much.
