In her own messy way, Bridget Jones is a trailblazer – Esther Zuckerman

Since first appearing in Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001, as the deliriously chaotic Londoner, Renée Zellweger has persisted. We’ve cringed (but also secretly cheered) as she ended up in bed with the devilishly handsome cad Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). We’ve watched her humiliate herself in front of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), then find herself smitten with him, realising he’s her one great love, even though he’s an insufferable snob. We’ve observed as Bridget and Mark have broken up and got back together many times over. She’s landed better jobs and given birth. And now, in the latest instalment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (in NZ cinemas from February 13), she’s a widow with two young children, trying to start again in her 50s.

The perseverance of Bridget Jones in popular culture undermines the idea that when the credits roll on a rom-com, the characters’ lives turn out perfectly, and while the sequels have varied in quality, that sense of real life is in itself refreshing. (Although, chances are it works out for Bridget at the end of every movie anyway.)

At the same time, having Bridget Jones in our lives all these years reveals a surprising amount about the way we talk about women. The character and specifically Zellweger’s performance have led directly to uncomfortable but sometimes revealing, conversations about body image and ageing in the public eye. Bridget has been, unintentionally, a bellwether.

The beauty of Bridget Jones – a creation of novelist Helen Fielding, who had a hand in all of the screenplays – has always been her messiness. Think of her in comparison with, say, Meg Ryan’s Sally, in When Harry Met Sally…, perhaps the Platonic ideal of a rom-com heroine. While Sally can be a tad overbearing and unlucky in love, she is exacting and neat, almost to a fault. She always looks perfect. She alphabetises her videotapes. Bridget, on the other hand, is unruly. She drinks too much and smokes like a chimney. (The number of cigarettes she puffs in the early movies is downright shocking in 2025.) Her apartment is a disaster, clothes strewn about. And, yes, she weighs too much – or at least she thinks she does.

To talk about Bridget Jones in the zeitgeist is to talk about her weight. In both Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), she is not tiny, although calling her overweight would be an overstatement even though plenty do. At the outset of Diary she resolves to lose 20 pounds (9kg), despite weighing in at only 136 (62kg). In Edge of Reason, she hides from her new boyfriend, Mark, after they have made things official, changing under a sheet, concerned about how he might react to her in the light. He tells her he loves her “wobbly bits”.

Zellweger famously gained weight to play Bridget, a fact that was more discussed than her mastery of a British accent. Though she never revealed exactly how much, the news media spiralled over the idea that this American movie star would deign to eat pizza to bulk up. When interviewers harped on how she put on the pounds, Zellweger would deflect. Speaking with The Guardian, she said, “I understand the intrigue. It sounds like it would be such a liberating experience, but I hope that that won’t be what becomes most important.”

A year after the film’s release, Kate Betts, the former editor of Harper’s Bazaar, issued a mea culpa. Writing in The New York Times, she explained that she had pulled a cover of Zellweger tied to Bridget Jones’s Diary because the actor looked “too fat”. Betts admitted that “fashion’s antifat bias and obsession with thinness, so ingrained among those who make careers in the business, is looking increasingly like a blind spot”. And yet the damage had been done.

Since 2001, society has gone through innumerable cycles of quasi-invasive conversations about how women, famous and otherwise, should look. Whereas “body positivity” might have been the buzzword 10 years ago, today slimmed-down celebrities face questions about whether they have used Ozempic or a similar drug.

It makes rewatching the early Bridget Jones movies a strange experience. Seeing her body on screen is still almost revolutionary given how thinness remains the norm in Hollywood. But she’s brutally self-critical, even though handsome men find her sexy enough to get into fistfights over her. It hurts to watch her self-loathing, but there’s also an honesty to it: How often are we our own worst enemies? The frothiness of the plots means this question isn’t examined, but it nags at you.

When Bridget returned for Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016, more than a decade after The Edge of Reason, the fracas was not over her size; that was also sidelined as an issue for the character. Instead, it was over her face. Upon the release of the trailer, Variety published a column speculating on whether Zellweger had “work” done, and charging that she “doesn’t look like Bridget Jones”.

Zellweger, in turn, responded with an essay in HuffPost. “Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” she wrote. “This fact is of no true import to anyone at all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists and became a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/entertainment confusion and society’s fixation on physicality.”

Bridget Jones, however, is someone who has been shaped by that fixation. You can see that in the way she berates herself because she does not match an unrealistic, media-set standard. By the third film in the franchise, age is a factor. Bridget looks different because more than 10 years have passed since we last saw her. She has crow’s feet and her pregnancy is considered “geriatric”. She may not know who the father of her child is, at least at first, because she’s still the same old chaotic Bridget, but she is older, making her a pioneer, in a way, too. Only now, with films like The Substance, has culture caught up to the conversations Bridget Jones’s Baby provoked about ageing.

In Mad About the Boy, Bridget’s new challenge is the death of Mark Darcy, a grim reminder of the passage of time and our fragile mortality. But Bridget soldiers on, once again with an on-trend love interest, a younger man played by Leo Woodall.

Bridget’s adventures have long been silly and fantastical, but at their heart is just a woman, trying to figure out her life. Her journey might have more hunky men and goofy scenarios than the ones we encounter as audience members, but we can easily recognise her anxieties and how they mirror ours as we age. Every time she gets a happy ending, it’s qualified by a sequel that throws another obstacle in her path. She’s been scrutinised and picked apart – on-screen and off – but always finds her way out of the muck. And that’s why it’s been a blessing to have her around for all these years.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Esther Zuckerman

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