Renée Zellweger, Helen Fielding on Easter Eggs, Grief

The fourth and, supposedly final, entry in the Bridget Jones franchise, Mad About the Boy, now streaming on Peacock, is stuffed full of Easter eggs and callbacks to past movies in the Renée Zellweger-starring rom-com series.

From the blue cocktails Bridget enjoys with her friends after yet another painful dinner with many smug married couples to her red-and-white penguin pajamas, sheer top and short skirt and a memorable sweater, the fourth film features numerous reminders of Bridget’s past.

Director Michael Morris says the Easter eggs are an intentional form of fan service.

“There are more probably than you would ever see in the first run through,” the director told The Hollywood Reporter at the Mad About the Boy New York premiere last month. “You could say Easter eggs are fan service. What’s wrong with fan service? Those are people who have been with the franchise for 25 years. I really wanted to do a little bit of that, the texture and you know it’s there.”

Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding explained that the callbacks aren’t just limited to prior installments in the rom-com series but extend to broader pop culture moments from the character’s origins.

Fielding said the Mad About the Boy scene in which Leo Woodall’s Roxster jumps into a pool to rescue a dog is deliberately meant to evoke the “iconic” ’90s Levi’s “Swimmer” commercial.

“But also the funny thing was the wet shirt because when I first wrote Bridget, the BBC was showing Pride and Prejudice,” Fielding explained at the New York premiere. “The whole thing was about Colin [Firth] diving into the lake in a wet shirt. And I interviewed him once in Rome … and he was promoting some earnest film he was doing, and I just kept asking him about the wet shirt and how many times would he have to take it off and have it be re-wet. Leo had to take his shirt off about 12 times to dive into the pool.”

For Zellweger, the “wonderful” Easter eggs are just authentic parts of someone’s story.

“That’s life, isn’t it? We have our little things that are consistent throughout our lives that people can identify as recognizably true to who we are as people,” she said. “And I don’t throw my dresses away — I wear ’em for 25 years.”

The fourth film sees Bridget confronting a particularly fragile part of life as she deals with her grief over the death of Firth’s Mark Darcy.

Fielding famously killed off Mark Darcy in the Mad About the Boy book, which came out in 2013, and she also lost her own partner Kevin Curran, when he died in 2016. She wrote the Mad About the Boy script during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing her experience with multiple losses, and filtering it through Bridget’s perspective, into the screenplay.

“Our family had lost quite a lot of people and not just the children’s dad but close friends — it was a very hashtag deathy time for us,” Fielding told THR. “Their father was a Simpsons writer, so there was sort of no joke too dark. And I think what we found was a combination of resilience, good friends, community and a sense of humor helps get you through the dark notes as well as the light notes of life because life is like a piano. It has its black notes. It has its white notes. And happy endings are just about where you choose to stop the story. No one’s life goes perfectly. Everyone has to deal with stuff that is tough. And I just found the writing through Bridget’s eyes, who’s basically quite a nice person for all everyone thinks she’s a bit of a mess — she’s basically a decent, kind, moral person; she’s all right to her friends; she doesn’t blame anyone except herself — those values and that resilience are the things that get you through difficult times.”

This question of what a grieving Bridget Jones would be like and trying to find the comedic moments in that experience were what made Morris want to direct the film.

“How does that much joy and warmth contained in this one person tackle grief and sadness? Those two opposing fronts suddenly felt like a film I wanted to make,” he said. “And that’s really what this film is about, is moving on from a great loss. But how do you do that if you’re Bridget Jones?”

And Morris says he pitched the movie to production company Working Title as a “comedy of grief.”

“I think that grief is something that is just part of the human condition,” he added. “It’s going to touch every single one of us, whether it’s a parent or a best friend or a pet or anything that you love, this is something that we have to deal with and it’s not talked about that much, particularly not in terms of a comedy, particularly not with a beloved character that we know. Because I think we know Bridget and Mark for 25 years — we the audience, certainly I, feel his loss going in, so it’s a perfect way in, I think, into the conversation of how we manage that.”

The movie finds Bridget with an extended group of family and friends, including acquaintances she’s grown close to across all four films.

“I think if you’re lucky in life, you will have a little gang that will stick through and see you through the hard times,” Sarah Solemani, who plays one of Bridget’s newer friends and work colleagues Miranda. “And that’s what we have in this movie is her little posse that knows she’s sad and knows she’s suffering and knows she’s in grief but is going to make sure that she keeps on going.”

And Bridget’s loved ones push her to keep going in part by opening herself up to romance once more, this time with young suitor Roxster (Woodall).

And despite what happens between the characters onscreen, Woodall insists Roxster’s feelings are sincere.

“I think when he has that final scene with her, everything he says, he really means. It’s just circumstantial,” he told THR.

Though this fourth Bridget Jones film is said to be the last one, franchise newcomer Chiwetel Ejiofor and Solemani both said they’d be delighted to return if Fielding wants to continue Bridget’s story.

“Oh for sure. I’d be very excited,” Ejiofor said, before cautioning, “I think that we have to take Helen at her word that there are no more.”

Solemani added of being part of more of Bridget’s story, “I’d definitely be up for it. I’m a screenwriter, so I’m always thinking of more story. I come from television so we’re always milking the cow as much as we can. But it’s up to Helen. People say it is the last, but while Renée and Helen are around and creative, who knows what could happen.”

Zellweger, meanwhile, looks back on her 25 years playing Bridget Jones with astonishment that she’s been able to continue in the role for this long.

When asked if she ever thought, when making the first film, that there could be a fourth film in which she was playing this character, Zellweger was quick to say, “Never. Never. No, I just didn’t want to get fired off the first thing, and I didn’t want to let anybody down, and I wanted Helen to be happy.”

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is now streaming on Peacock.