Director Michael Morris has opened up about Colin Firth’s involvement in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, including his reaction to scenes in the new film.
Speculation had swirled that Firth would be axed from the film entirely, and there were doubts whether his character Mark Darcy would be killed off.
The film is the fourth instalment of the popular franchise that became a cultural phenomenon when romantic comedy Bridget Jones's Diary was released in 2001.The diary originated as a column written by The Independent journalist Helen Fielding, the film version became a box office smash and received an Oscar nomination for its leading actor Renée Zellweger.
*Spoilers ahead*
“From the book there are no secrets because you know that Mark Darcy has died,” Morris told The Independent.
However, the To Leslie director was adamant on keeping Firth’s plot line a secret.
“We did want to protect that because it was really important to me. There's lots of ways to tell that story. The simple way of saying, ‘Mark Darcy’s died,’ but I didn't want to tell it that way.”
He added: “I wanted the first 10-15 minutes for us not to know. Just to witness a day in her life, a chaotic night in her life where she's got to be somewhere, she's late, and one of the things that happens is she sees him.
“And it's very important to me to present that relationship as if it were real and happening because that's how Bridget at the beginning of the film is dealing with loss.”
The film follows serious themes of grief, interspersed with Zellweger’s character involved in an age-gap fling with a younger man, Roxter, played by Leo Woodall.
“She's not dealing with it in the way that perhaps she ought to, which is to sort of accept it,” he said.
“She's pretending and she sees him when she needs him and she gets comfort from him and there's still so much love between them.”
He added: “That's one one secret that I wanted to save because I didn't want it to be known how we were going to use him.”
The filmmaker revealed Firth’s emotional reaction to his role in the film as he shared: “For Colin, he was on board and it was so sad that we couldn't use him more. But he's so brilliant and he's so iconic in this role.”
He continued: “Colin said something really interesting to me. He said when he came to the set that we built of the house, and there were all these pictures from the last 25 years on the bookshelves of Bridget and Mark, of him as a young man in his 20s, and he walked through that set that he hadn't been part of.
“He just came and he was like, ‘It’s odd, I've walked through this, this is like a whole other life and they were all real pictures.’
“And he said, ‘I felt like that memory. I felt what we were making in the film, that I wasn't there, but I am there, I'm not there, but I am.’ So it was really touching.”
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is in cinemas now
