Helen Fielding: “Bridget having sex and being sexy is to be celebrated”. Photo / Getty Images
The straight-talking creator of the hit rom-com and best-selling books opens up on dating age-gaps, coping with grief and her friendship with Renée Zellweger.
My rendezvous with the Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding gets off to a shambolic start. The trains to Hampstead Heath, near Fielding’s home and the picturesque setting for the fourth Jones film, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, are cancelled “because of a car on the line”. The pub that Fielding’s publicist specified turns out not to exist because autocorrect changed its name. When I finally arrive at the right venue, it is closed and it takes 10 minutes of banging on the door before someone opens up. Another 10 minutes later I see Fielding frantically gesticulating at the window to be let in.
It is exactly the kind of situation in which Bridget - who, 29 years ago, burst on the world as a thirtysomething singleton in big knickers serving blue soup to her friends - finds herself in time and time again. Does Fielding, 66, ever tire of people like me telling her that their chaotic lives could be lifted directly from her oeuvre?
“No, I feel slightly like the Pope: ‘Bless you my child, you are Bridget.’ All the good, proper Bridget jokes come from something real. Take the child and the doctor’s leaflets,” she adds, referring to a scene in the new film in which Bridget’s daughter scatters NHS gonorrhoea pamphlets across the playground. “That really happened to me in front of a teacher, and he was really called Mr Walliker, just as he is in the film.”
With her long, blonde highlighted hair, in chic black trousers and carrying an understated Mulberry bag, Fielding is as glamorous as you might expect, yet nonthreatening. She has a twinkly aura and her soft, native West Yorkshire tones are undimmed.
The four Bridget Jones books have sold more than 40 million copies globally, while the films have made more than £600 million ($1.3 billion). Even if the follow-ups have never quite matched the comic perfection of the original, Fielding, with a screenwriter and executive producer credit on each movie, has nonetheless managed to make each one amusing.
In MATB (based on the 2013 novel), Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is a fiftysomething widowed single mother whose friends warn her that she’s doomed to “labial adhesion” from never having sex again. She proves them spectacularly wrong by having an affair with the 28-year-old “Adonis” - as Fielding calls him - Roxster (Leo Woodall of The White Lotus and One Day). In one scene, destined to go TikTok viral, he rips off his wet shirt to reveal jaw-dropping pecs before embracing Bridget in front of her gaping (and envious) peers.
“I really wanted to smash the idea with this movie that there’s a sexual sell-by-date for women and not for men, and stick it to the awful cougar stereotype. It makes me think of a woman in animal print leering over a friend of my son’s, going, ‘Do you want a sherry, darling?’” Fielding says.
“It’s got to stop because it’s really not reflecting what’s happening. For years and years we’ve seen Hollywood show men 40 years older than their partners, and it’s not even discussed. Now movies are finally exploring a desire between younger men and older women that’s reciprocal, not transactional. Bridget and Roxster both see something they want in each other - and Bridget having sex and being sexy is to be celebrated.”
But the film’s real love story is less Bridget’s paramours (an age-appropriate Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the aforementioned Mr Walliker) and more her old buddies, reprised by Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson and James Callis, still clinking glasses and movingly reflecting on the decades they have spent together. “People living in nuclear families in one household is a fairly recent development,” Fielding asserts. “The notion that everyone is trying to live in a couple is not true.”
She’s not sure if Bridget has any desire to remarry. “What people don’t factor in is: does a woman who’s brought up four children and had older parents and looked after a husband now necessarily want to take on another? Or are women now enjoying a moment of freedom? My mum was gorgeous - a lovely cook, funny - and when my dad died people were turning up on her doorstep to eat her casseroles, but she’d done a lot. She liked having friends, but …” Fielding stops herself from saying more, concluding: “One of my lines that’s important to me is ‘Happy endings are just where you choose to stop the story.’”
Yet despite the many gags, and perhaps inevitably in a film about fiftysomethings, themes of mortality and grief abound (at the screening I attended everyone was sobbing). Fielding is notoriously cagey about her personal life, refusing to discuss her relationship status, but the parallels with her experiences are unmistakable.
For nine years she lived in Los Angeles with Kevin Curran, a writer on The Simpsons and the father of her children, Dashiell, 20, and Romy, 18. They split in 2009 and Fielding returned to London with her children. Then in 2016, after a long illness, Curran died, aged 59. The film shows Bridget and her preteens navigating their grief with humour, just as Fielding did with her children.
“We have a saying in our family: ‘Don’t get too #deathy.’ I’m always reluctant to be too personal but the children’s father did die and he wrote for The Simpsons, so no joke was too dark to make. That made me see you don’t have to sit around feeling sorry for your loss. People still stay the same person when something bad happens. One of the best things someone said to me about grief is, you go into a dark place, like a muddy puddle, and then you come out and you’ve got to enjoy that moment before you go into another puddle. But the puddles get further and further apart and you start to live again.”
In the film the family post homemade cards to Darcy on his birthday and release balloons on the anniversary of his death. “They’re processing what has happened to their father all the time with her. It’s not a taboo area.
“Children have this way - they’ll suddenly say, ‘Why can’t we live in a normal family like Vikram?’ and it’s like a dagger to the heart, thinking yes, Vikram’s got a daddy. But no, it’s because Vikram is allowed to play Minecraft during the week. Or they’ll suddenly say, ‘Mummy, where is Dada?’ and you’re, like, ‘Wait, we were just talking about Fifa points!’
“My children have gone through quite a lot, so they’re quite emotionally intelligent. I don’t want to pretend it’s all perfect, because many ridiculous scenarios go on, but I honestly really enjoy them.”
Fielding’s first-hand depictions of baby boomer and Gen X practices such as smoking, drinking excessively and flirting in the workplace led to a backlash from millennials, who also fulminated about her unfeminist calorie counting and boy craziness. In contrast, Gen Z have embraced a character who is their mother’s age: one Spotify playlist of Bridget Jones-inspired songs called “frazzled English woman”, has more than 20,000 saves.
“Gen Z are the first generation who’ve seen the world fall apart [during the pandemic], so this film seems very timely because it’s all about what do you do when something goes wrong,” Fielding says. In a culture dominated by TikTok and Instagram airbrushing, she thinks 18 to 25-year-olds “relate to Bridget because they find her comforting. They respond to her emotional honesty, to the gap between how you feel you’re expected to be and how you actually are, which has got bigger and bigger with social media. It reassures them to know there is no answer and no perfect path - because no one’s life is perfect when you crack the shell.”
MATB reunites the original trio of Zellweger, 55, Hugh Grant, 64, as the caddish Daniel Cleaver and (in flashbacks) Firth, 64. Fielding is close to all three. “The extraordinary thing about this franchise is there isn’t anything blowing up, no wizardry or superheroes. It’s just the perspective of one woman and her friends. So I find it quite emotional to see the three of them getting back together after all those years.
“When I wrote the first book I couldn’t imagine anyone playing Bridget - but now I write for Renée, and she knows the character so well I don’t mind if she writes her own lines. It’s the same with Hugh - a lot of Daniel’s really good lines are his. It’s funny seeing Renée with him: she’s laughing at Daniel but she’s also laughing at Hugh. They’ve all got jumbled up together.”
What about the longstanding rumour that Firth’s noble, uptight Darcy is based on another human rights lawyer, Keir Starmer? Previously Fielding has said that they have never met; now she says, “I’m going to leave an air of mystery over that, it’s much more fun that way. We invited him to the premiere but I assume he’ll be a little too busy to attend.” She is right: he did not.
The daughter of a textile factory manager, Fielding read English at Oxford University. She was a freelance journalist when The Independent asked her to write an anonymous column chronicling the first generation of women “who didn’t need a man to have a car and a flat”, yet who still endured intense societal pressures to settle down.
“In the 1990s, if you were a single thirtysomething woman, you felt you were Miss Havisham and there’d been some kind of mistake. People were always asking why you weren’t married and that was very painful.”
Having written two other (very good but not bestselling) non-Bridget novels, Fielding is now working on a third, set in Los Angeles. She says she will only write another Bridget novel “if it was a stage of life I had something to say about. Never say never, but I would not be cynical about it. I don’t write the novels or make these movies to make money. But the thing about Bridget is, funny things keep happening and I keep a diary of them to use in some book or another. So I’ll use them for Bridget’s next phase, as long as it seems meaningful.”
Given her past form, I predict in a decade or so we’ll be treated to Bridget and co’s shenanigans in an old folk’s home. “You won’t be allowed to call it an old folk’s home by then - there’ll be more of a Soho House vibe,” Fielding corrects me. Blurry good fun. Vvg.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is in cinemas now.
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London
The infection was linked to eating raw sushi and swimming in Hawaii.