Content warning: this story discusses weight loss.
Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001) may be — in my humble but also correct opinion — one of the greatest films ever made, but there’s no denying it has a weight problem. Watching Bridget (Renée Zellweger) obsessing about the number on the scale and making a New Year’s resolution to “obviously lose twenty pounds” is jarring in 2025. Today, we’d diagnose Bridget as suffering from disordered eating. In 2001, the extra kilos was Bridget’s defining character flaw.
Remember the scary oversized knickers?
For those woefully unfamiliar, Bridget Jones Diary follows the eponymous Bridget Jones as she navigates life as a (gasp) single woman in early 2000s London. She romances two men — publishing boss and #MeToo nightmare Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), and human rights lawyer and uptight family friend Mark Darcy (Collin Firth) — while on a non-stop self-improvement plan to fix her life. And by fix it, I mean to lose weight and get a boyfriend.
By the end of the film (spoilers, if you can count 20+ years to be a spoiler), she hasn’t lost the weight but she does gain a boyfriend: Mark Darcy, who likes her “just as she is”. (“Not thinner?” Bridget’s friend Shazza remarks, voicing the deep fear some women have felt for decades that to be above a size eight is to be unloveable.)
Before we go any further, it needs to be said: Bridget was not fat. She was roughly a size 12. And if she was fat, she wasn’t any less worthy of love.
Zellweger famously put on 14 kilos for the first film, then almost immediately lost it again. She regained the weight for the quickly released sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, where her character tells Darcy in an argument that “I will always be a little bit fat”. However, by the time the third film, Bridget Jones’ Baby, Bridget was noticeably slimmer. Her weight loss was explained in a single line, spoken as a voice-over while Bridget power walks down a London street: “At least now, I’d reached my goal weight.”
And now, in the upcoming Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, Bridget’s weight isn’t mentioned — at all.
“I mean, there’s going to be an obvious evolution, because she’s moved on in her life and she has a lot of responsibilities,” Zellweger told PEDESTRIAN.TV while promoting the film in Sydney. “She doesn’t have the luxury of obsessing about certain things that she might have in the past.”
Mad About The Boy takes place several years after the events of Baby. Mark Darcy has been killed in Sudan, and Bridget is raising their two children — Billie (Casper Knopf) and Mable (Mila Jankovic) — alone. And since it’s been four entire years since her husband’s death, Bridget’s friends, family and gynaecologist (the utterly wonderful Emma Thompson) are urging her to move on. And by move on, they mean get laid.
Instead of worrying about her weight, Bridget is grieving Mark, worrying about her kids, trying not to compete with her school-mum nemesis ‘Perfect’ Nicolette (Leila Farzad), returning to work, wondering if she can really date a younger man (The White Lotus breakout star Leo Woodall) and if her kids’ teacher, Mr Walliker (Chiwetel Ejiofor) will ever stop bumping into her at her most embarrassing moments.
However, while Bridget may have moved on from thinking about her weight, the character’s obsession with losing it in her earlier years is still something Zellweger thinks about.
“With respect to that, I always saw it as representative of the thing that we all do — it wasn’t necessarily that Bridget needed to change anything about herself, it’s just that she found the thing about herself that she was going to pick on,” she said.
Zellweger says Helen Fielding, on whose 1996 book the film was based on, was “speaking to all the noise at the time” bombarding women “of a particular age” about what they were “supposed to look like, and achieve, and on what timeline”.
“And [Bridget] is taking up the responsibility of, ‘Yes, okay, I will count calories and I will stop doing all of these things that I do because they’re meant to be bad for me’,” Zellweger continued. “But she doesn’t really do anything to change her life. She’s not really interested in that. I never thought of her as a person who needed to change herself, at all! There’s nothing wrong there.”
The true lesson of Bridget Jones, Zellweger says, is realising we don’t need to confirm to society’s standards to succeed in life.
“It may not be weight for some people, but there is something that we feel like we ought to try and change about ourselves, or that we wish we could so that we felt that we measured up, or were more fitting of the social norm of that paradigm, right?” she said.
“I think that’s part of what’s so relatable, is that we see ourselves in that struggle, of trying to confirm in some way to something that we might not even really want to be. It’s liberating that when Bridget issues that, and that when she’s her most vulnerable and authentic, messy self, she triumphs.”
And that’s that on character growth.
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is in Australian cinemas from February 13, 2025.
To get help around disordered eating or simply learn more, head to The Butterfly Foundation or call them on 1800 33 4673.
The post Renée Zellweger On Bridget Jones’ Weight Obsession: ‘She Never Needed To Change’ appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
