The real Mr Darcy

By Jess Cartner-Morley, The Guardian – April 11, 2001

Barrister Mark Muller thinks the noble hero in the Bridget Jones's Diary film is 'a bit dull'. But wasn't the character modelled on him? 

"Who would play you in a Hollywood film?" is not a question most lawyers ever need face. But Mark Muller, a barrister with chambers in Gray's Inn Square, London, knows the answer to that question: last week he watched Colin Firth play a character modelled on him at the premiere of Bridget Jones's Diary. 

With a lawyer's penchant for niceties, however, Muller is keen to point out that the "real Mark Darcy" tag is overblown: he was a consultant, rather than the inspiration, for the character of Mark Darcy, human rights barrister and noble, reticent rival to love-rat Daniel Cleaver as played by Hugh Grant. And he didn't actually get to pick the actor. Firth, the most English of sex symbols - he made his name playing Jane Austen's Darcy on the Beeb, after all - was part of the Bridget Jones phenomenon from the beginning, as a lust object for Bridget and friends, and so a natural choice for the big screen.

Screen immortality notwithstanding, Muller has pressing concerns in the real world as chairman of the Kurdish Human Rights Project and vice-chairman of the Bar Human Rights Committee. In the film, Darcy is briefly seen defending a Kurdish revolutionary leader who is faced with extradition: this was based on a real case of Muller's, that of Kani Yilmaz. Muller is now representing the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan in a case against Turkey, where he faces the death sentence. "If we win, it will effectively abolish the death penalty in Europe, and the case will become the basis for argument against the death penalty in the USA and elsewhere." Yesterday, Working Title films, the company that produced Bridget Jones's Diary, held a fundraising screening for human rights projects. 

Muller was approached to help the producers, directors and scriptwriters develop the character of Mark Darcy through friends in the film industry: it was on a Kenyan holiday in 1997 that included Eric Fellner of Working Title that he read the first Bridget Jones book. "I enjoyed it, but I remember thinking that beyond this idea of a human rights barrister as a noble beast there wasn't much content to the character." 

Muller was unsurprised by Helen Fielding's choice of career for Darcy. "If you're trying to create a character who's noble but also a bit dark, a barrister is not a bad one to go for. And if you're thinking about a modern day knight in shining armour, most lawyers don't fulfill that criteria, but human rights lawyers do: righting wrongs and representing people who are disadvantaged. Especially if they happen to come from a privileged background and they don't really need to do it." 

The Mark Darcy you will see on screen Muller finds "a bit dull". He was surprised that straw polls at the premiere suggested an even split between those women who favoured Darcy, and those who preferred Bridget's boss, the dastardly Cleaver. "Grant's character is the one most men like to see themselves as, I think, and I would have thought women would have found him more attractive." 

In the interests of dramatic narrative, the two male characters are cartoonishly opposed: Darcy stubbornly upstanding and silent; Cleaver, sly, suave and silver-tongued. "I got married two or three years ago. Before that I would have seen myself more like Hugh Grant; happily I'm more like Colin Firth now." 

On first impressions, he seems somewhere in the middle. Tall and dark like both the film's male leads, he has the plummy voice of Grant but the solider presence of Firth. To cast on looks, you'd have to go for Tom Hanks. He is wearing a dark suit with a pale blue-and-white shirt in large check gingham, spotted tie fastened with a slightly outsize knot in the preferable continental style, rather than the hangman-tight knot favoured by so many Englishmen. It is a strikingly similar ensemble to Firth's best outfit of the film, when at a hellish dinner party crawling with "smug marrieds" Firth almost finds the nerve to ask Bridget out but is swiftly collared by his terrier-like girlfriend. 

Perhaps Mark Darcy could do for lawyers what Al Pacino did for investigative journalists in the film The Insider - make them sexy. But isn't the idea of a lawyer sex symbol a bit incongruous? "There's a certain kind of English barrister who, like Darcy, can seem a bit stuffy. Barristers don't tend to wear their wackiness on their sleeve. But they can have a very dry sense of humour, and they can be very individualistic, very funny, often quite wild." 

Muller is standing as a Labour candidate in the forthcoming general election. Finding himself "ending up in the House of Commons a lot" through his human rights work, he would like to become an MP "to have a public platform to put arguments forward about human rights and foreign policy. I don't intend to give up law and just become an MP." He is standing in Windsor, where he spent part of his childhood. 

This geographical detail currently adds a further complication to his life. His wife, Catherine Maxwell Stuart, is also standing as a Labour candidate, near her ancestral home in Scotland. After meeting as students at the London School of Economics, the couple were friends for many years before marrying. Catherine was previously married to a mutual friend, and Muller became godfather to their daughter, Isabella. They became close after Catherine's first husband died soon after Isabella's birth, and have since married and had a child. 

Despite contracting food poisoning from the canapes at a local Labour party social the previous night, Muller manages to exude enthusiasm for the election campaign. "It will be a challenge, of course, because it's a Tory establishment area. But I hope people in Windsor will see that Labour are now the natural party of government, the party of stability as well as the party of economic fairness." 

Would not it be difficult to divide his time even further, given he already travels between London, and overseas commitments? He brushes such namby pamby worries aside. "Well, you know, I'll manage, it's not so difficult." He has little enthusiasm, however, for the prospect of further forays into the film industry. "I'm not really interested." "Very busy," he adds, sounding for a moment like a true Hollywood player.