“When people asked me, ‘What would be the thing that you want to do?,’ it’s always been to do a rom-com with Working Title,” “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” costume designer Molly Emma Rowe told IndieWire during a recent interview. “So to do the rom-com with them was really… I was like, ‘OK, the manifestation of that went really well, I have to say.’”
Yes, Bridget is back — and in a more melancholy offering than the previous three installments. There is still plenty of slapstick (Bridget is older, but she’s still relatably messy) and romantic entanglements, but life for Bridget hasn’t been smooth since she reunited with Mark Darcy at the end of “Bridget Jones’ Baby.”
Now four years widowed, Bridget finds herself at a crossroads when the film begins, until she makes the choice to do more than survive. She’s going to live! She promptly meets two new romantic entanglements — the younger Roxster (Leo Woodall) and her son’s new school teacher, Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor) — and returns to work, where she still mildly flails but, on the whole, feels more grounded.
Picking up a beloved character in her fifties is a big task, particularly one with whom audiences fell in love in her mid-thirties. But Renée Zellweger’s central performance keeps the film on track — as do Rowe’s costumes, which feel of a piece with what came before while firmly establishing both Bridget’s current identity and those of the new men in her life.
IndieWire spoke to Rowe about her work on the film, finding the line between sexy and funny, and making sure Bridget didn’t lose her iconic short skirts.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
IndieWire: Congratulations on the movie. I saw it yesterday, and I alternated between sobbing, cackling, and gay gasping every time Leo Woodall walked onto the screen.
Molly Emma Rowe: OK, so we did the good thing.
Obviously, I want to talk about Bridget’s outfits. But let’s talk about the men first, because you got to help create Leo as Roxster and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mr. Wallaker. And what was it like coming up with where Daniel Cleaver [Hugh Grant] is at this point in his life, sartorially speaking?
That was very interesting for me. Daniel wasn’t in the third film, so we’ve got like 20 years from when we last met him. I really wanted to speak to Hugh, first and foremost, and understand Daniel Cleaver from his point of view and why he wore what he wore. A tailor called Richard James made Daniel’s suits for the first two movies. Richard is no longer a tailor, but my tailor very kindly found me a tailor who used to work with Richard. His work was always very slinky and sexy and cool.
We wanted to make sure that Daniel felt current. And Richard always made his shirt stand, which is the sort of bit that the collar then comes off of, very deep. So when Daniel has three buttons undone, the collars still stand quite proud and frame his face. Hugh kindly lent me a couple of his shirts from the first films. So [my shirtmaker] Dima and I could see what the little tricks were and recreate them for Hugh.
And then there’s Roxster in the white shirt and the jeans, soaking wet. What went into selecting those garments?
With Roxster, it was about creating something very timeless that would feel youthful. It’s a very sort of James Dean kind of T-shirt and jeans, but it’s quite hard to get those things right, so there were a lot of T-shirts and a lot of jeans until we got the right fit for Leo. With the white shirt, my assistant designer Lauren spent a day at the pool with Leo, testing out white shirts. [Laughs] I think she had a nice day at work.
Life is so unfair.
I didn’t even get to go! But we really wanted to echo the very famous Mr. Darcy “Pride and Prejudice” scene, of course. There’s lots of Easter eggs of all sorts, with dialogue, with jokes, with clothes. Like the first time we meet Bridget in the film, she’s wearing a green dress, and Mark appears. We wanted it to kind of remind you, she wears a green dress at the christening when they get together in the third film. And New Year’s Eve, she’s wearing a little headband with silver, which is to remind you of when she’s drunk doing karaoke in the first film. So it’s really subtle little Bridget-y things in there that felt quite important, and I think that [Roxster’s wet shirt] was definitely a sort of extra one. We really wanted to find something that clung but wasn’t see through. Again, it’s much harder than it seems to get the right thing. But that was a Paul Smith shirt that does exactly the right things.
Yes, because if it’s too see-through, it stops being sexy, and it becomes a joke.
Yes, exactly. And I think throughout the film, we really wanted to use clothes in an authentic way so that they weren’t caricatures or jokes. It’s not right if he feels comedic in that moment.
Roxster’s clothes are youthful but not young. And it’s so important when you see him standing next to Bridget that he looks younger but not young.
Yes, I think so because then, visually, it’s too much. It’s interesting because, with Bridget, I was very, very keen on making sure that Bridget felt like Bridget. And for me, with all my research going back over the films, Bridget’s short skirts are the most Bridget thing. And I was like, “Yeah, OK, she’s in her fifties, but why shouldn’t she?” You know, I’m in my mid-forties, and I wear shorter skirts than I ever have.
What I think you did so brilliantly with Bridget’s costumes is there is still the sense of chaos, but it’s contained. The layers, the patterns — there’s so much going on visually, but it’s all cohesive and still feels just the right side of disheveled.
Hearing you say that makes me very happy. It makes me think that we kind of achieved what we set out to do. We didn’t want anything to distract from what’s happening. And Renée is very, very, very certain about who Bridget is and what she will wear. I can’t really put it into words. It’s a feeling and it just works or not. And it was very important, for me, that I respected the work [of] the previous three costume designers.
So there are things that are back [from previous films]. Bridget wears her gray hooded belted coat, which is from the first film when she goes to Turkey Curry Buffet. She wears her plum scarf from the same scene. The pajamas. There’s the see-through gold top with the mini skirt that we had to recreate, which was essentially some of the hardest work, because none of us could work out what it was actually fucking made of. [Laughs]
Where were you sourcing Bridget’s clothes? Was it bespoke? Vintage?
It was a mixture. One thing I did when I met Renée and understood her process a little bit more, I went to Hampstead and wrote a list of all the shops there. Bridget and Mark live in Hampstead in the story, so basically we went shopping in the consignment stores and the charity shops in Hampstead. So then if there was something super interesting or a label or something like that, Bridget could have gone to the charity shop and bought it because that’s what we did. There was an authenticity that meant that I could maybe get it past Renée.
There’s a real melancholy to this film that I’m not sure people are expecting, and a lot of it comes from having this character in our lives for so long, seeing how she’s evolved and what life has thrown at her.
Michael Morris is such an incredible director. The way that he handles grief is so — my dad died when I was quite young, so I drew on my experiences quite a lot. I remember that my mom used to wear a lot of his clothes, so we did that with Bridget. When she goes to Hampstead Heath, she’s wearing a shirt that was Mark’s that we monogrammed with MD. She wears this kind of oversized gray cashmere cardigan that’s really bobbly, and that’s like her comfort blanket that we’re saying was Mark’s.
We have to talk about Mr. Wallaker.
We do have to talk about Mr. Wallaker because I love him so much.
He’s so buttoned up in a completely different way than Mark Darcy.
That was something that I was very, very conscious of. This character absolutely could not be anything like Mark Darcy as far as I was concerned, costume-wise. It was trying to find a line where he felt buttoned up or serious enough, but that there was a warmth that we could understand the kids were a bit drawn to him.
I thought a lot about our schoolteachers and kind of stereotypical schoolteachers from our past. My English teacher was very tweedy and cords and things like that. So I took that, and then I thought a lot about friends of mine who are teachers now. So he’s slick and smart. All of his clothes were tailored by my tailor, Chris Kerr. Everything is made for Chiwetel specifically, and then it meant that I could choose fabrics that were really nice herringbones with oranges, and he wears this overcoat at the end, which is like a green and black check. I really wanted him to have personality and style, so he wears denim shirts under his suits and things like that. I don’t think it’s super kind of statement-y, but it sort of brings his character somewhere else, I think, from anyone that we’ve seen with Bridget before.
That transparent top, I think, might be your triumph. I truly assumed it was from the archives.
My God, I spent a whole flight back from L.A., and I was like, “Right, I’m gonna sit here for 10 hours.” And I literally just watched that scene and freeze-framed it and ran it back. I was like, “I have to work out what the hell this is.” I mean, still I haven’t. That top probably came from Topshop, and who knew it was going to become that iconic?
“Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” is now streaming on Peacock.
