Mad About the Girl: Why Bridget Jones Endures

Bridget Jones returned to the big screen (or your TVs, if you’re American) this month with the fourth installment in her cinematic life, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Renée Zellweger opened up another diary, this time to document her life as a working mother and widow. Four years after the death of her beloved Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), Bridget is contemplating returning to the dating world. Amid getting back to work and caring for her beloved kids, she finds herself pursued by Roxter (Leo Woodall), a decades-younger park ranger with a big crush, but there’s also Scott (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a teacher at her children’s school. And, of course, there’s Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), the perennial cad who has now become a good friend and confidante.

In Bridget’s homeland, Mad About the Boy has broken box office records. Its Valentine’s Day weekend gross of 11.8 million made it the biggest opening ever for a rom-com in the UK. Americans can watch the film on Peacock, which really feels like Universal leaving good money on the table, but it may also speak to the inimitable Britishness of Ms. Jones and why her fans have stayed loyal to her for decades.

Bridget’s creator Helen Fielding brought her to life via a newspaper column. Following the disappointing sales of her debut novel, Cause Celeb, she was asked by an editor at The Independent to write a weekly column dedicated to her love life as a modern singleton in ’90s London. Finding that idea mortifying, Fielding offered to write a fictional column centered on a woman not unlike herself but more specifically comedic. Taking inspiration from Pride & Prejudice, she created Bridget Jones.

Bridget was your typical 30-something single woman. She had a good job, a tight-knit circle of friends, a meddling mother, and a smothering fear of dying alone and her body being eaten by dogs. She detailed her daily cigarette and alcohol intake, obsessed over her weight, and went to war with the smug married couples who haunted her living days. Her liaisons with her playboy boss Daniel drove her round the bend.

In diary form, Bridget is neurotic, witty, and perennially put down by the pressures of modern life for modern women. The early ’90s seemed dominated by stories of very busy women who could have it all, and those who weren’t keeping up were letting the entire gender down. there’s a familiarity to her struggles, which are mostly low-level but the kind of nagging pains that we’re all used to dealing with at work, home, and with our parents. Heroin chic is in, the Tories are clinging to power as Tony Blair emerges into the spotlight, and Cool Britannia is about to become a philosophy. Wouldn’t you be in an absolute state too?

With Bridget’s neuroses came, of course, a lot of baggage. Fielding was a columnist whose, at the time, only novel was about satirizing the ludicrous nature of celebrities and the supposedly aspirational culture they create. A lot of that carried over to Bridget, particularly in how she tries to navigate social pressures and her own twisted body image. When she laments how large and unlovable she is in the book, she is under nine stone in weight. Fielding often wobbled in finding that balance between poking fun at such mental gymnastics and making Bridget seem like the fattest woman alive. In the book, when she finally reaches her goal, everyone worries that she’s fallen ill and says she looks awful. It was an issue that carried over to the movies, as the typically lithe Zellweger gained weight to play the role and ensured every headline about her for the next decade would be explicitly focused on her body.

After Bridget Jones’s Diary became a paperback bestseller, a movie was inevitable. Kate Winslet was considered a dead cert for the title role, and the choice of an American proved controversial at first. Now, even in 2025, a ton of people in the UK don’t know that Zellweger is Texan. She nailed that role, and that first movie, for which she received an Oscar nomination, brightly brought to life Bridget in all her harried glory. How could it get better than having her Mr. Darcy be played by the Mr. Darcy?!

With the sequels, however, things fell apart. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, based on the follow-up novel, got too wacky and repeated a lot of plot beats from the first movie rather than let Bridget grow up. With Bridget Jones’s Baby, an original story not adapted from a Fielding novel, similar problems befell the story. Plus, she was forced into yet another love triangle, albeit with Patrick Dempsey rather than Hugh Grant. Fans wanted to see Bridget’s relationship with Mark but it felt like the filmmakers were worried that two people in love navigating a marriage would not be interesting. It was a missed opportunity.

Smartly, Mad About the Boy pulls back on those urges to goof up the plot. It drastically tones down Bridget’s more slapstick qualities, which made the middle films far less warm and relatable than the first one. Sure, she can be a klutz and is as prone to muck-ups as any of us, but there were points where the movies made her seem incompetent to the point of being a public health nuisance. In Mad About the Boy, she’s a skilled and sought-after producer, a good mother, a loving friend, and someone you can rely on. She’s still inimitably Bridget, often forgetting to filter her brain before speaking, but she’s also grown up, much like her audience. It’s a sharp contrast to Daniel, who is still a cad but is now older, tired, and feeling the inevitable consequences of a life lived without connections or responsibilities.

Mad About the Boy works because of its bittersweet acknowledgement that life and its many curveballs are rubbish but inevitable, and just getting on with things is often all that we can do. The whole ‘keep calm and carry on’ ethos is one of the aspects of Britishness I somewhat resent for its focus on stoicism over emotional catharsis, but with Bridget’s widowhood, we get to see it in a more empathetic setting. Bridget is certainly not holding it all in, but she doesn’t want to be frozen in time by her grief. She wants to find a way to not repress her innate self and to ensure her kids feel loved and remember their father. There’s hope in finding the light forward.

I imagine if Bridget Jones was introduced in 2025 the Discourse would be nightmarish. She’s too self-centered, too middle-class, too body-obsessed, she doesn’t have any real problems, and so on. She is very much a product of her time, but the newest film also shows what happens when you have to keep up with someone else’s time. Her audience has followed over the years with loyalty and eagerness to see how she does it. Besides, her many literary children have followed in her footsteps and created new paths: Georgia Nicholson, Becky Bloomwood, Carrie Bradshaw, Queenie Jenkins, and too many others to count.

It doesn’t seem unlikely that Fielding will bring us more of Bridget’s life as she enters her 60s and deals with life as a middle-class woman of a certain age. Her audience is clamouring for it. Mad About the Boy certainly proves that her story is not complete.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is now in theatres in the UK, and streaming on Peacock in the US.