Oh no, Bridget Jones is back!

Kate Muir | The Times – September 6, 2016

Most heroines have fans, but Bridget Jones has a support group. Through thick and thin — and Bridget varies — we root for her, laugh with her and neck cheap chardonnay with her as we too fall over and forgive ourselves.

Bridget has another, slightly more professional support group: the women who created her and brought her to screen in the latest film, Bridget Jones’s Baby. The author, Helen Fielding, worked with Emma Thompson on the script and it was directed by Sharon Maguire, aka Shazzer in the books, who also invented the phrase “men’s emotional f***wittage”.

Maguire is just a tad hungover when we meet for lunch in Islington the day after the London premiere and glamorous rooftop after-party. Today, her hair is in plaits and she’s wearing a Breton top rather than the bouffant up-do and gold dress in which she addressed the crowds at the Odeon Leicester Square.

Maguire revealed that she could hardly breathe because she was wearing “three pairs of Spanx” and told Working Title’s grand be-suited producer, Eric Fellner, on stage: “Eric, you’re looking f***ing hot tonight… Bit more flesh on show next time, love.”

That was the first laugh of an evening that turned the tables on men, and there were many more to come in the third rom-com in the series, which has career-woman Bridget suddenly torn between two lovers — either of whom may be the father of her unborn child.

Her suitors are the uptight lawyer Mark Darcy, once again played by Colin Firth, and Jack Qwant, an American dating magnate and chick magnet played by Patrick Dempsey.

A sign of how engaged Bridget’s fans are came when she staggered, in her white jeans and high heels, into a muddy Bestival-style festival and fell drunkenly into bed with Jack for a no-strings shag. Everyone clapped and cheered in the cinema as the world’s most famous singleton got lucky.

“I just loved that,” says Maguire, who directed the first Bridget Jones movie in 2001. “I don’t think it’s going to get any better than having delivered that to screen. That was a hard-won cheer and we dropped various talking scenes before that. They just bonked. Some people were saying Bridget just wouldn’t do that, but with one of her great loves dead, the other married to a Camilla, she’d been through a lot.”

Spoiler alert here, but Hugh Grant is no longer in the running, since he declined to be part of the third film. (It sounds like the back-room shenanigans on BJB were epic; in his speech Fellner mentioned Fielding being tough to work with, then added how much he adored her.) Anyway, what Maguire refers to as “the dysfunctional Bridget Jones family” dealt with Grant’s missing Daniel Cleaver character in a killingly funny manner.

Of course, the other media-fanned drama on this movie has been whether Renée Zellweger has had cosmetic surgery, after the Variety film critic, Owen Gleiberman, complained: “She doesn’t look like Bridget Jones!” He added: “Celebrities, like anyone else, have the right to look however they want, but the characters they play become part of us. I suddenly felt like something had been taken away.”

Zellweger has denied having surgery. “Not that it’s anyone’s business,” she wrote, “but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes.” She is also 20lb lighter now than she was as the first, pudgier Bridget. However this is, to say the least, a vanity-free performance, and Maguire springs to her defence.

“Reneé’s happy to project a really unvarnished version of herself. Sometimes I’m the one that says, ‘I think this is going too far,’ and she really does not care. She would do her own make-up and rub it off sometimes. She hates make-up, she hates it, and she’d much rather just get on with things rather than sit and be primped.

“In fact I thought, ‘Jesus Christ that’s quite an unglamorous image,’ when I saw the first scene. Owen Wotsit is quite wrong. He should be photographed naked and we should look at him in another 15 years and scrutinise how different he looks, and then let’s judge him.”

Maguire, 55, waxes lyrical about Zellweger’s English-rose complexion: she is 47, but plays 43 in the movie. “All it is, is she’s got older and thinner. My children don’t recognise me from photo albums 15 years ago. I don’t recognise me now! It’s a bit scary. Everything’s fallen.” Maguire’s so resolutely un-Hollywood, you want to hug her.

Fielding and Maguire have been friends since the Nineties, when Bridget was first conceived as a diary in The Independent. Maguire worked with Tracey MacLeod at the BBC on The Late Show at the time, and some of this background has gone in to making Bridget a major “hard news” television producer in the new film.

The three friends “did spend a number of years just going out ranting about our lives and drinking too much”, says Maguire. “I did once slip down a wall shouting about emotional f***wittage, so that was me, but I think Shazzer is a combination of me and Tracey.”

Like Bridget, Maguire was late to motherhood, and at 42 turned up single and five months’ pregnant to see her Irish Catholic mother. “Bridget has always reflected my life back at me. That’s what I like about her. When Helen invented her we were in our thirties, and life hadn’t handed us marriage, babies or any of those things, and we were out there floundering. Alarm bells were ringing from society and the answer was to just go out and get trashed.”

Now Maguire is more sober, with a daughter of 12 and a son of 6 with her partner, the director Anand Tucker. She missed shooting the second Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in 2004 while pregnant, made Incendiary with Ewan McGregor in 2008 and since then has been mothering. “It took so long to have babies and I had to go through seven kinds of science-fiction to have them. But then my son was about to start school and they offered me Bridget Jones’s Baby and it did feel like destiny.”

The other cast members have also changed since they all first met 15 years ago. In the hiatus, Firth has received an Oscar for The King’s Speech and a Bafta for Tom Ford’s A Single Man. Maguire says that Firth mark II had a firm idea of what his character should be — very uptight, serious and unemotional — a gamble they had to take with him.

“Colin’s always saying Tom Ford is brilliant. I had to say, ‘If this is going any further you’ll have to stop quoting Tom Ford and saying how instrumental he was to your career. I gave you that reindeer jumper, don’t forget!’” Indeed, Mark is seen in the film finding the offending jumper in the back of a drawer.

However, Zellweger and Firth still have plenty of chemistry, repressed in his case. Maguire decides to explain how she deals with their bedroom scene. “I throw a lot of technology at it because I get very embarrassed and adolescent about shooting sex scenes, so I had a huge 100ft techno-crane hanging over them, prowling.” She imitates a crane noise. “When Eric Fellner walked into to this little set in a hotel room he went, ‘F***ing hell, you don’t usually have techno-cranes in sex.’”

Interviewing Maguire, even while she’s sober, is like being on some mad girls’ night out. She continues: “I sort of sit behind the monitor like this” — she peers through her fingers — “then I can’t watch it, and Renée sees my shoulder shaking and she gets the giggles, and then Colin’s saying, ‘Can we all grow up and just get on with it so we can all go home?’”

The conversation then segues on to “modesty garments”, little skin-coloured pouches to cover the worst on film, and whether Bridget should have kept her bra on like they do in most American rom-coms to keep the ratings low. “I said, ‘If there’s a black bra, you’re going to be wearing it, Colin.’”

A PR is lurking to take Maguire away from the restaurant, but nothing will stop her now. “Sex is a very subjective thing: what works for one person doesn’t for another. I find it very hard to judge, but it has to be funny. I really like the idea that Mark Darcy’s very repressed but he’s a bit of a tiger in bed. But Colin just goes, ‘I don’t want to know, I’ll just do it. What do I have to say?’”

And there I think we have it. A director, an auteur, whose actors love her so much they’ll do almost anything — and it shows in the warmth and generosity of the movie.