How I became Jude in Bridget Jones's Diary

By Tracey MacLeod, Evening Standard - April 3, 2001

THE first time I went out in a threesome with Helen (Fielding) and Sharon (Maguire), nearly 10 years ago, we chose to go to the theatre. It was an uncharacteristically cultural outing, and one never to be repeated over the next few years of dedicated partying, clothes- shopping and talking about boys. But in retrospect there was something oddly appropriate about the play we chose for that first evening together - Jim Cartwright's The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. The story of a Northern girl with a prodigious talent who transforms the humdrum existences of those closest to her, it anticipated the huge effect Helen's success with Bridget Jones would subsequently have on all our lives.

Helen hadn't yet started writing the column at that point. And when she did, she didn't hold out any great hopes for it; in fact she didn't even mention it to us. I remember standing in my kitchen, and casually asking her and Sharon "Have either of you read that Bridget Jones column in The Independent?"

"Trace, I write it," Helen yelped, before I could say anything more.

Over the next few years it was fun to scan the column every week, looking for resonances with Helen's own life and those of our mutual friends. But Bridget's adventures were usually so comically farfetched that they bore little relation to real events. So it never occurred to me that Bridget's two gal pals might be in any way modelled on me and Shazzer. (OK, one of them was called Shazzer, but that could just have been a coincidence, right?) Occasionally, some real-life incident or joke would creep into the column (Sharon's coinage "emotional f***wittage" to describe a boyfriend's unpredictable behaviour being a notable example). But Bridget's escapades with Jude and Shazzer were always much more exciting and actionpacked (not to mention drunken) than our own.

Then at the launch party for the first Bridget book, I was cornered by a smug married friend. "So what's it like being Jude?" she asked. I was outraged. Of course I wasn't Jude, with her self- help books and horrible boyfriend. My boyfriend wasn't anything like Vile Richard.

Was he? If I was anyone, I argued to myself, surely I was much more like the outspoken, self-confident Shazzer, ranting feminist and scourge of emotional f***wits everywhere.

But as more people began to believe that Jude and Shazzer were thinly-veiled portraits of myself and Sharon, I secretly got to like the idea.

After all, Jude held down a tough job in the City, in between managing Bridget's emotional crises, whereas I was a media flake who often found it difficult to get out of bed before lunchtime.

I wasn't the only one of Helen's circle who began to enjoy their stolen moment of roman-a-clef notoriety. At least three of her gay friends were simultaneously going around claiming to be the original Tom (although as soon as Tom had a facelift in the column, they all started to distance themselves frantically). And all of us could vent our frustration with troublesome boyfriends by complaining about them to Helen, in the hope they'd be ridiculed in print.

As word-of-mouth propelled the novel up the best-seller list, it became a mixed blessing to be a known associate.

Acquaintances I hadn't heard from in years - magazine editors, broadsheet profile-writers, producers of BBC theme nights - would leave messages on my answerphone.

I'd call back, excited at the prospect of some new assignment, and would rapidly realise that all they wanted was to be put in contact with Helen.

And if I was getting lots of calls, Helen herself was overwhelmed as the publicity whirlwind engulfed her. Our long lazy sessions spent painting each other's toenails were gradually replaced by giddy phone calls and emails from faraway hotel rooms.

Four years on, Helen is installed in the Hollywood Hills, researching a new novel.

And now it's Sharon's turn for a Little Voice moment, as the director of the new film version of Bridget Jones's Diary. It's her first feature film (she has previously made documentaries and commercials). But Helen always believed that Sharon's vision of Bridget's world would be truer than some of the more experienced candidates who were considered. After all, she was there.

When I heard that Sharon had got the job, my delight on her behalf was only tempered by the fear that if the film took off like the books, she would be next to be whisked to Hollywood. So before they both got dragged off to have their toenails paraded round the world, I was determined to have my own moment in the spotlight, by appearing in the film.

SHARON regretfully pointed out that she was obliged to hire professional comic actresses to play Jude and Shazzer. But there was one place I could be squeezed in, playing a guest at the literary launch party Bridget attends as part of her work as a publishing PR. In one of the big set-pieces of the movie, Bridget makes a disastrous speech about the novel Kafka's Motorbike, first calling it "the finest book of our time", then trying to backtrack when she spots various other famous authors in the crowd.

Which is how I came to be standing, on a hot day last June, in a stuffy room at the ICA, surrounded by a phalanx of London's most illustrious literary talent. Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Faulks, Amanda Foreman, Alain de Botton and Julian Barnes had all obligingly agreed to play themselves, and Jeffrey Archer was due to turn up too (in the meantime, a lookalike was standing in for him, and confusing everyone by insisting on staying in character throughout the day).

The other party guests were professional extras, all wearing their own, wildly varying interpretations of suitable literary garb. Some of them had got it right - an ageing exquisite in velvet jacket, earring and waxed moustache was a dead ringer for a certain eccentric book-prize administrator.

Others hadn't quite hit the mark, and were wearing full evening dress, and even feather boas. They were discreetly repositioned at the back of the crowd.

I wasn't just an extra, though. Thanks to Sharon, I was a "featured player" like the authors, with my name on the call-sheet and everything. We all pretended to be very laid-back, but it was extraordinary how quickly this posse of literary giants degenerated into extra-like behaviour, whispering about who was being paid what and who was getting the most closeups. As Julian Barnes was submitting to the attentions of the makeup lady, a male voice behind me whispered, in mock-camp tones, "Julie takes a lot of powder, doesn't she?" The nearest thing to a literary discussion was a gossipy session about a female columnist who had just had her teeth fixed.

Football proved a much more popular subject, with Salman Rushdie holding forth knowledgeably on England's flat back four.

BETWEEN takes, the writers amiably fended off approaches from their readers: a lady wearing mahjong tile jewellery tackled Sebastian Faulks with a grievance about the ending of Charlotte Gray, while a crew member had brought in an Alain de Botton paperback for the author to sign. "I'm ploughing through your new one at the moment," he announced, rather crushingly, as De Botton obliged.

As a veteran movie actor (previous credits: "interviewer" in Hanif Kureishi's London Kills Me), I knew there was a strong chance that I might only appear in the background of the finished film, despite being a close personal friend of the director. I was therefore wearing my loudest green check trouser suit, so that I'd be able to spot my fleeting appearance in the crowd. This turned out to be a mistake. The sun was shining, the room was white and full of overdressed people. It was very hot.

Salman Rushdie was complaining that he'd been wearing the same suit for three days (he had a speaking role, much to the disgust of the other authors).

The principal actors were carrying electric hand fans, which gave rise to the memorable sight of Hugh Grant fanning Julian Barnes's face to cool him off, a scene which must represent the ultimate fantasy for a certain section of the audience.

Both Colin Firth and Hugh Grant were wearing handmade suits and looking so impossibly lean, tanned and handsome that it was unsettling to be around them. Several times during the day I found myself just gazing at them, as though they were beautiful statues.

Hugh's hair was so lustrous and big that I was convinced he had silver highlights, but it was just movie-star shininess. At lunchtime, conforming to Darcy-Cleaver type, Colin read The Guardian, while Hugh relaxed with The Telegraph.

During the many rehearsals and takes of Bridget's speech, Colin and Hugh remained in their positions among the extras, even though they weren't on camera (apparently it's good acting manners to give your co-stars something real to bounce off). It's a tribute to Renee Zellweger's talent as a comic actress that we watched her stumble her way through Bridget's disastrous speech for take after take and it just kept getting funnier.

When Renee Zellweger first arrived in London to begin her transformation into Bridget, Sharon brought her out for a rowdy night on the town (it ended with her wandering off drunkenly through a dodgy part of west London in search of a taxi, which showed an admirable dedication to character research). Now, a couple of months later, she was a stone or so heavier, thanks to an intensive eating regime, and completely convincing as a publishing publicity girl.

Between takes, she slipped on her Walkman headphones. I assumed she was listening to a tape of her voice coach and tuning up her English accent for the next scene, but Sharon told me it was a Smashing Pumpkins CD, to eliminate any possible distractions.

With the main scene wrapped, the famous authors dispersed, some of them to real literary parties.

I stayed on to watch the next scene, and got my big break, when Sharon placed me in the foreground. My task was to make small talk with Colin Firth and Salman Rushdie, while Colin, as Mark Darcy, gazed tormentedly over my shoulder at Bridget getting off with his archenemy, Daniel Cleaver. It was so fascinating to watch Colin doing real acting, like closeup magic, that I kept forgetting to make small talk. His face was such a mask of distracted agony when he turned back to me after watching Daniel leave with Bridget that I wanted to reassure him "It turns out all right for you in the end - I've read the script."

Bridget's friends, Jude and Shazzer, weren't in either of the scenes filmed that day, so I didn't get a chance to assess my screen double until nearly a year later, at one of the film's previews.

Because the film focuses on the central love triangle, the role played by the friends has inevitably shrunk. But despite the changes, it's still incredibly faithful to the spirit of the book. Sally Phillips, playing Shazzer, gets to swear a lot, while Shirley Henderson, as Jude, is small, dark and urgent, thereby providing further fuel for my theory that being tall, blonde and foulmouthed, I'm actually far more like Shazzer than Jude.

Sharon had already warned me that the literary party scene had been cut down, but I caught two distinct sightings of myself, thanks to the clownish green suit - first, standing in the crowd next to Salman Rushdie during Bridget's speech (my embarrassed look when it goes wrong struck me as quite convincing). Then, during my scene with Colin, as I like to think of it, I'm firmly there, centre-screen, and looking a bit uncomfortable.

But my hair looks nice, which is the main thing.

AT the end of screening, as the audience of journalists poured out into Leicester Square, I bumped into several acquaintances who had spotted me on screen.

One of them said: "You looked really thin!"

This gratified me almost as much as the generally ecstatic reaction to the film.

So perhaps I'm not as different from Bridget and her friends as I like to think.