Widowed Bridget Jones returns with 30-year-old toyboy in fourth movie
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A widowed Bridget Jones is returning to screens in a fourth movie – this time with a 30-year-old toyboy.
Renée Zellweger will reprise her role as the protagonist in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, based on the fourth book in the popular series.
The two-time Oscar winner will be joined by co-stars Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson in their respective roles as rapscallion Daniel Cleaver and a despairing obstetrician.
Following weeks of whispers about the sequel, producers Universal Pictures and Working Title have now confirmed the cast ahead of the film’s release on Valentine’s Day 2025 in the US – but a UK release date has not yet been revealed.
In the fourth book, based in London four years after the last instalment, Bridget is a widow in her 50s with two children and has a younger lover, a 30-year-old man.
Leo Woodall, 27, an English actor who starred in the Netflix romantic drama One Day, has been confirmed as a new cast member for the fourth film, sparking suggestions he will play Bridget’s toyboy.
In the book, Bridget’s former love interest Mark Darcy, played by Oscar-winner Colin Firth in the earlier films, has died by this point and she starts sleeping with the 30-year-old as she overcomes her bereavement.
Helen Fielding, the British author behind the series, previously said she had decided to write Mark out of the series to avoid Bridget becoming “a smug married”.
Fielding has scripted the new film, suggesting it will closely resemble her book of the same title, which was released in 2013, though the plot may yet diverge.
As well as Woodall, another new face on the cast list is Chiwetel Ejiofor, who starred in 12 Years a Slave.
The new film will be directed by Michael Morris, who previously oversaw To Leslie, the drama starring Andrea Riseborough, who won an Oscar nomination last year.
It marks the first time in the Bridget Jones franchise that a man has been director, as Sharon Maguire directed the first and the third films and Beeban Kidron the second.
It will be Zellweger’s first big screen outing since her leading role as singer and actress Judy Garland in 2019’s Judy, which earned the American a second Academy Award following her first win in 2004 for her supporting role in Cold Mountain.
In the third film, titled Bridget Jones’s Baby, Firth’s character competed with the billionaire US love guru Jack Qwant, played by Patrick Dempsey, for the attention of Bridget after she fell pregnant.
The hit 2016 sequel came 12 years after Zellweger resumed her near-flawless English accent in the second instalment, Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason.
The original adaptation, Bridget Jones’s Diary, starring Zellweger as a 30-something chardonnay-swilling singleton, was released in 2001 to wide acclaim.
When Mad About The Boy was published in 2013, Fielding told BBC News that she had written it in secret to be free of expectations and “so that I could write it like the first one”.
She told Woman’s Hour that Bridget’s treasured diaries remained an integral feature of the plot, intertwined with the modern struggles of social media.
“But she has grown up. My life has moved on and hers will move on too,” said Fielding. “She’s still trying to give up [drinking and smoking], she’s still on a diet. She’s trying a bit harder, and is a bit more successful, but she’s never really going to change.”
