When British Vogue dropped in on Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding for a glass of white Burgundy back in 1998, the author wasn’t quite sure what would become of the vaguely autobiographical character she’d created. “I don’t know what will happen to her,” she said, cozied up in the candlelit living room of her Notting Hill flat. “I hope I will know when the time is right to kill her off. Though it’s also possible I could end up writing about a 60-year-old Bridget. She could be like Bertie Wooster and go on and on forever.”
And—would you look at that—Bridge, like every other aughts blonde with questionable feminist principles, is back. (Incredibly, when tasked with translating her first book into a script for director Sharon Maguire, Fielding, then a Daily Telegraph columnist, “went out and bought a copy of How to Write a Screenplay, very Bridget-like behavior”; happily, she seems to have found her feet in the writers’ room 25-odd years later.) Mad About the Boy, the fourth installment of the Pride Prejudice-inspired Ms. Jones franchise, is officially slated for a February 13 release (absolutely of course), with production now complete.
The film’s plot comes courtesy of Fielding’s 2013 novel of the same name, set four years after Bridget Jones’s Baby (the less said about which, the better). Mark the bore is now dead, having been “killed by a landmine in Sudan” (…), leaving Bridget a single, widowed mother raising two kids in her 50s, which doesn’t sound like it would necessitate much vodka consumption at all. (Remember: she’s passionately committed to communicating with children.)
If Colin Firth won’t be returning for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Hugh Grant will, reprising his role as the “alcoholic, workaholic, sexaholic, commitment-phobic, megalomaniac, emotional fuckwit” with very good hair that is Daniel Cleaver. I can only assume this means that further minibreaks at Stoke Park are in Bridget and Daniel’s future. Even more intriguingly, both Chiwetel Ejiofor (whom Da’Vine Joy Randolph was absolutely on the money about) and Leo Woodall have joined the cast—as Mr. Wallaker, the weirdly fit teacher at Bridget’s children’s school who helps her when she gets stuck up a tree (as one does), and Roxster, the 30-something, exit-out-of-grief-sex fling she meets on Twitter (“suddenly feel like screen goddess in manner of Ambika Mod”). “Bridget Jones, already a legend”—and now fodder for a thousand cougar-themed think pieces, too.
Watch the first trailer below—and let the countdown begin.