Director Michael Morris discusses what it was like filming Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and becoming part of this legacy franchise.
Spoiler alert: It takes 20 minutes before the title card rolls in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
Was this something in the script? MATB director Michael Morris, of course, has the answer.
“No, that came about after the script,” says Morris. “No decision is without risk, and to me, it was super important that we didn’t just bring the beginning of the movie right in the first scene. I needed the audience to go on a little bit of a journey of what’s been happening. And one of the things is Mark’s gone, and she has not moved on. I don’t think until you know all of that, she’s not ready to write in her diary. Until she’s had the experience of remembering her dad say, ‘Promise me you’ll live.'”
What Happens in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy?
And so she opens her diary and starts writing again!
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy finds our favorite British singleton (Renee Zellweger), widowed with two children, on the journey toward finding love again. When she and her kids get stuck climbing a tree, she has a meet-cute with a park ranger, Leo Woodall.
“The first time we’d ever met [the child actors], and they were literally 20 feet up on a branch. We were very careful. We did everything properly. We had harnesses and, you know, everything was strapped down. Renee famously like never complains about a thing. And then it was only later, actually, at the end of that endless sequence we shot over a couple of days, where she was like, ‘Do you almost have the shot?’ I was like, yeah, sure. It was only then she told us the harness had come unbuckled, and she was holding on!”
But of course, romance is never simple in a Bridget Jones movie. She also spars with one of her children’s teachers, Scott (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who shares a lot of similar traits as her late husband, Mark Darcy. Does Bridget have a type?
“I think you can see even from the first movie that she sees right through a certain type of English kind of properness. And she is the right key for that lock. You know, Chiwetel’s character is all about order and science, and you can define everything and what he needs. You know, he confesses later, later on in the movie, you know, it never happened for him — love, family, kids. It’s just what he needs is chaos.”
Someone who personifies chaos and returns to the fold is Daniel Cleaver, played by Hugh Grant — not as a romantic love interest, but as a dear friend to Bridget, despite breaking her heart in the first film (and getting into two very public fights with Darcy).
“In my internal mythology of this story, by the time she married Mark Darcy and had children with him, that part of her life of Daniel-versus-Mark was over. And she’s a big person, Bridget. She’s a warm and loving person. And the hurt that happened in the past, she would have found it really easy to move on from that, I think.”
Final Bridget Jones Movie?
Morris says he’s proud to be part of this legacy franchise and really wanted to make a film that had something joyful to say about grief.
“I actually wanted to engage with something that I don’t think we engage with enough in culture or in movies, potentially, certainly not movies that don’t want to destroy your week. We all deal with it. It’s part of all our experiences of life.”
While many fans were bummed that the film didn’t run in American theaters, Morris says he feels streaming on Peacock was also a good fit.
“I got so many pictures of people from their basements with eight friends or having a girls’ night with pizza. And, you know, in ways you can’t do at the movies. I’m a big fan of the films. And this is a film that was released elsewhere. So I’ve been able to see both sides of it. But I do think streaming on Peacock has a certain vibe to it, too.”
Since clearly there’s still steam in this franchise, can we expect any more Bridget Jones films down the line?
“That question belongs to Helen Fielding, you know, who created it, wrote the books. And this was a book that she had written, and it was the last one of the books. And so in that sense, you know, we respect her journey with the character that she made up and this amazing universe she made. On the other hand, there are endless stories for Bridget. The depth of all these actors and their world is so rich.”
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is streaming on Peacock.
