Bridget Jones, as a character, has always hovered uncomfortably between the hard light of reality and the rosy glow of romance. When she first appeared, in newspaper columns written by the British journalist Helen Fielding during the mid-1990s, the 30-something Bridget was claimed as a totem of womanhood at the time: a calorie-counting, self-improvement-obsessed, chain-smoking, wine-guzzling singleton (a neologism Fielding immortalized); an earnest vassal of Cosmo culture and the embodiment of fearmongering Newsweek coverage about the plight of unmarried career girls. With Bridget, Fielding “articulated the traumas of a generation,” the writer Alain de Botton observed.
But when Bridget’s diary entries were published in book form, in 1996, her true narrative arc was revealed. It didn’t chart a postmodern Gen X nightmare. It was lovingly cribbed from Pride and Prejudice. The most notorious single woman of an era, as her fans learned in the book and its 1999 sequel, and from the movies they inspired in 2001 and 2004, would be largely protected by the tired old trappings of the marriage plot: She would bag her Mr. Darcy and live happily ever after—with a few detours—in his dreamy detached house in Holland Park.
Her trajectory over the next decade-plus (in another round of newspaper columns; another book; and a third movie, Bridget Jones’s Baby, in 2016, not based on a book) certainly had its requisite stumbles. But the character was steadied throughout by the Texan actor Renée Zellweger as the very English Bridget, an unpredictably brilliant piece of casting that just works.
On paper, Bridget can be compellingly hard to pin down, inconstant and ironic, messily self-aware, undeniably human. Early on, she cops to highly compromised feminist principles: She will not “sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.” On-screen, though, Zellweger makes her all heart, guileless as a toddler, impossibly hopeful and lovably absurd. Whatever cards she’s dealt—not least professional humiliation and an accidental pregnancy (paternity unclear, thanks to separate one-night stands and a box of expired eco-friendly condoms)—she muddles through with gusto. We know that Bridget will get her happy ending; this is just about the last romantic-comedy franchise standing. But Zellweger makes us also deeply want her to win, formulaic predictability be damned.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, an adaptation of the slapdash third novel that starts streaming on Peacock on February 13, keeps the trope-laden structure, but finds surprising depth in a devastating plot twist. Bridget, now in her 50s, is single once again: Her beloved husband, Mark Darcy (played in grand metafictional form by an actor who played the other Mr. Darcy, Colin Firth), has died while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan, leaving Bridget to raise their two children alone. The book uses Mark’s death mostly as a narrative device to launch Bridget, with her typically obsessive energy, into cougardom: She starts dating a hunky man in his late 20s named—inanely—Roxster, which exposes Bridget to a whole new range of body-image issues, and exposes Roxster to her children’s head lice.
The movie, though, is more interested in documenting Bridget’s loss, and in the process, it presents a more honest and moving version of her than we’ve seen before. How will the last cockeyed optimist in popular culture deal with such desolation? Widowhood is no laughing matter, parenting alone even less so—though we have to laugh at Bridget burying her face in the fridge to curse, and being surprised by her son’s uptight science teacher while buying an astonishing variety of contraceptives. Pathos underpins the plot. “Do you miss Dada sometimes?” Mabel, Bridget’s daughter, asks her in the movie. “I miss him all of the times,” Bridget replies.
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). Bottom: With Roxster (Leo Woodall) in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025). (Tony Jones / Getty; Peacock)
Grief is a tough sell for a rom-com, which is maybe why the movie has marketed itself as something more timely, once again positioning Bridget as representative of her moment. Cinema lately has been consumed with what viewers call the “age-gap romance,” or, less decorously, the “MILF setup.” In 2024’s The Idea of You, Anne Hathaway plays a divorcée not unlike Bridget in her ditziness, who careens her way into a love affair with a handsome British boy-bander. In two separate movie projects within the space of a year, A Family Affair and Babygirl, Nicole Kidman parses the power differentials at play when older women find fulfillment with younger men.
Bridget’s adventures with the age gap are characteristically sweet and laced with goofiness: When she meets Roxster, she’s shinnying up a tree that both of her children have managed to get stuck in. When he later messages her on Tinder, it’s via an account that her friends have set up: “Tragic Widow Seeks Sexual Awakening.” Mortification, for Bridget, is only ever a degree or two removed from triumph.
Yet Mad About the Boy, for all its familiar, delightful notes, is also wincingly astute regarding modern-day dynamics, good and bad, for women of Bridget’s age. When her friends encourage her to pursue Roxster, the idea is plausible not just because Zellweger is still luminously endearing in midlife, but because the world really has changed: Women can date men a decade or more younger without inciting mass hysteria. But they’ve remained undesirable in other ways: Bridget works as a producer for a daytime TV show where formerly hard-hitting female news reporters now gush their way through cooking segments and softball interviews. For female journalists over a certain age, “HDTV was an extinction-level event,” Bridget’s friend Talitha mutters.
The tension between sharp contemporary verisimilitude and age-old romantic archetype helps explain why Bridget potters on while so many other ’90s heroines have fallen by the wayside. (Remember Ally McBeal? She of the miniskirts and the catfights and the ludicrous workplace dilemmas?) The book version of Bridget has come in for derision as an embarrassing relic of postfeminism, screwing up even the most basic personal and professional tasks, and fixated on her thigh circumference and her office crushes. In 2023, a New York Times retrospective finally declared her “nuttiness and self-loathing” to be well past its expiration date for modern readers. Yet her movie comebacks continue to be irresistible, in part because no one is more aware of her failings than Bridget herself.
Crucially, she never lets her self-critique shake a confidence lodged someplace inside her (even if she’s not quite sure where). The academic Kelly A. Marsh has argued that despite her ongoing preoccupation with becoming better, Bridget at her core represents, through all her phases, the victory of self-acceptance. She flourishes not just because of the love stories that the novels’ framing forces on her, but thanks to the faithful love of her friends and her own stouthearted spirit.
There’s something poignant, too, about seeing Zellweger in the role, despite all the indignities the actor has suffered along the way—the 2000 cover shoot for Harper’s Bazaar, rudely shelved because Zellweger had gained weight for the role and was deemed too fat for a fashion magazine; the tabloid coverage declaring her “scary skinny” when she then duly dieted; the discourse about her changing face, so rabid and intrusive that she had to strike it down in a personal essay for HuffPost. At 55, Zellweger is in what Germaine Greer once cited as a decade of new “invisibility” for women—a phenomenon that Bridget herself analyzes in her diary. And yet here they both are: undaunted, blond, adorable, enduring, changing the world by refusing to shrink away from it. That, as Bridget might say, is v.v. good to see.
This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Bridget Jones Never Gets Old.”
