As a fourth Bridget Jones movie drops, the two-time Oscar winner reflects on what middle age has taught her beloved character, as well as the life lessons she learned by herself
Words by ROB HASKELL
Photography by MATTHEW BROOKES
Fashion Direction by PETRA FLANNERY
Midway through Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the boy in question, drunk and unguarded and played by Leo Woodall, says, “I wish I had a time machine.” The point is clear enough. This intergenerational romance between Bridget Jones, now a widow and a single mother in her 50s, and 29-year-old Roxster, a scientist with biceps that suggest priorities outside the laboratory, will strain to surmount the age gap. Zeitgeists can be funny things: After a cinematic year that included The Last Showgirl, The Substance, and Babygirl — three films that contemplate the pressures on and desires of middle-aged women — here, right on time, is Renée Zellweger as Bridget, 24 years after Bridget Jones’s Diary made her an international start by celebrating the messy humanity of its title character.
“It’s a really unusual thing for an audience to grow with a character and have shared experiences in different phases of their lives,” Zellweger says. Originally it spoke to a young generation in the middle of that universal experience of trying to determine what the rest of your life is going to look like — facing those big, heavy choices — and feeling that you’re not good enough, correcting yourself, and trying to appease the people you seek validation from. Back in 2001, folks found her relatable because she sort of reflected their life experiences. That applies now.”
It’s a sunny afternoon two weeks after the Eaton and Palisades fires upended life in Southern California, and Zellweger has interrupted her habitual C-Span watching to drive to the Fairmont Breakers in Long Beach, a stone’s throw from the esplanade where she used to go rollerblading as a young actress in the mid-’90, when she was brand-new to L.A. For the past few years Zellweger has lived near Laguna Beach with her partner, the television presenter Ant Anstead, and his 5-year-old son. It’s a convenient stop on the way to Canine Rehabilitation of Orange County, where Chester, her senior German shepherd, will be learning to use his new wheelchair. “So far he’s like, ‘OK, I’m ready to do my usual way of getting around, which is you carry me,’” she says. “But we’ll see.”
Twenty-plus years and four movies later, life still spreads out like an oil slick, and Bridget is skidding across it. At home, she is powerless against the chaos sown by her young children. She faces many challenges that surely bedevil her audience too: rebuilding her life after a tragedy, confronting the judgment of other moms at school pickup, reentering the workforce, and revisiting love and sex in the era of dating apps. “In your 50s, life is simultaneously more and less complicated,” says Zellweger, who is 55. “You lose people. Things don’t turn out the way you expected they might. Bridget’s dealing with grief, and she’s trying to find her way through being a mom on her own and judging herself pretty harshly about her shortcomings. At this age there’s more that you understand about life, because of the inevitabilities of life — what it delivers and what it doesn’t. Over time you sort of learn about what’s extraneous.”
The Bridget Jones films, while never explicitly political, have always held a mirror up to the culture. Zellweger famously put on 20 pounds to play the part the first time, and her character inspired a collective conversation about weight and the tyranny of perfection. Would Girls, for example, have been possible without Bridget? “It was frank about the imperfections of its main character,” Zellweger says. “Bridget thrives anyway, and she gets the guy anyway. It sort of made being less than perfect acceptable.” Mad About the Boy suggests that the series still has the capacity to explore real-world problems sometimes overlooked by Hollywood. “How do you meet people?” asks Zellweger, who says dating apps were never available to her because of her celebrity. “How do you reengage? We certainly don’t talk about grief and what that looks like.”
“I think we’d all be much better off if we had fewer opinions.”
RENÉE ZELLWEGER
Zellweger’s career took off in 1996 with Jerry Maguire, and in the ensuing decade she declared herself a versatile talent and a stylish red-carpet stalwart with a string of successes — including Bridget Jones’s Diary, the musical Chicago, and the wartime drama Cold Mountain, for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress. Mad About the Boy is Zellweger’s first feature film since she took home a second Academy Award, this time as best actress, for Judy, Rupert Goold’s 2019 biopic about Judy Garland. The film was a kind of redemption for Zellweger, who took a hiatus from acting in the preceding years and had faced ruthless scrutiny about her appearance. “I never really existed in the orbit of Hollywood,” she says. “When I first came to L.A. from Texas and I did live in Hollywood — physically — my life was really simple. I would tool around with my Thomas Guide and go to auditions and occasionally go to a small dinner party. It was never really a thing for me to rub shoulders. It’s so fun to go and celebrate the thing that you worked on with these people whom you’ve come to love,” she says of the commotion around Judy. “That’s a wonderful thing, and I don’t slight it by saying that I know that I do well when I’m more quiet. I live a quiet life. It’s easier to do now, I suppose, because I don’t have to go into the rooms as frequently as in the beginning. But Hollywood is magic and spectacular, and it has meaning in ways that I couldn’t imagine when I was a young person. It’s only negative if the wrong things are motivating you, or if you’re doing things that aren’t necessarily healthy.”
It’s hard for Zellweger to imagine what young women coming up in Hollywood must face now that social media — far from adopting Bridget Jones’s lovable disarray — foists unreachable perfection on its audience. “I was having a conversation with Hugh [Grant], actually, and he called Bridget the Instagram antidote,” Zellweger says. “She sort of subverts the notion that you have to create the idea of an unattainable existence and presentation in order to be happy in your life.” This isn’t to say that Bridget has learned to tune out the mean girls altogether. “Some things don’t go away, but we’re just better at managing them. We know it’s a waste of energy to ruminate. The dumb thing that you did that you wish you hadn’t done, you learn to fast-forward to the feeling of, ‘It’s all right.’ I think Bridget still challenges herself with ideas about what she’s supposed to be and what success looks like, and trying to meet a particular standard. We all sometimes subconsciously acquiesce to that standard. With the internet, if you want to feel bad about yourself, you can do it in less than 30 seconds.”
For her part, Zellweger has chosen to avoid social media; the dog videos her friends send are the extent of her investment. She feels better when her world is smaller, and this attitude has helped her find some calm in a political environment that is apt to cause her to wring her hands. “I read all the news — all of it. The whole spectrum, from the standards to the goofy, the local to the international,” she says. “I’ve been digging around for wisdom, like, ‘Teach me, teach me, teach me!’ The most valuable wisdom I’ve found is: Get small. Look at your community. It’s so hard to find consensus in a nation that is so enormous and is populated by so many different kinds of people experiencing different struggles. So look at what you share. Because when you get smaller, the challenges become more uniform, don’t they?”
She pokes a few errant strands of golden hair into her orange University of Texas cap, a reminder of where she comes from. The daughter of a Swiss father and a Norwegian mother, Zellweger grew up in Katy, about 30 miles west of Houston. She majored in English literature at UT but caught the acting bug in a drama elective. After graduation she landed a few acting jobs in Texas (including an uncredited role in Dazed and Confused in 1993) before heading to Los Angeles full time.
“I’m also trying to learn about my own perspective as a liberal person, how I came to sit in the place where I sit,” she says. “One thing I’m doing is trying not to have opinions about things that I don’t need to. I really have to clean up dog poop and make sure that Chester has what he needs, and I don’t need to be spending time trying to decide how I feel about something that is essentially none of my business. I think we’d all be much better off if we had fewer opinions. I don’t need to have an opinion about the guilt or innocence of a person when I’m not on the jury, and I don’t need to have an opinion about who people love or whether they should be parents or whether they should wear dresses if that’s what makes them happy. It’s not an affront. Nobody is putting on a dress to insult you and your beliefs.”
“In your 50s, life is simultaneously more and less complicated.”
RENÉE ZELLWEGER
Environmental calamity notwithstanding, Zellweger says it’s an awfully good time to be a Californian. She loves the state for its natural beauty, and above all she relishes long drives with her dog. “There’s a lot of nature in my California,” she says. “You can surf and ski on the same day — although I’m a horrible surfer, and I’ve never gotten past the big padded blue board, which, by the way, seems just fine to me when I see the noses of my friends who do surf. I’m not a big fan of sharks, so there’s that, too. But I do love it. And I love the desert. I’m a road tripper: up to Carmel, San Francisco, the northern border, and south to Escondido.”
In the Laguna area, her life is simple and domestic. She has a few friends but mainly enjoys time at home with her partner. They just watched The White Lotus. “My fellow had never seen it, so I had to introduce him — the genius of Jennifer Coolidge,” she says. Zellweger has run her own production company, Big Picture, since 2019. They partnered with Blumhouse Productions on The Thing About Pam, a true-crime series in 2022 that she starred in. Today she has several irons in the fire. “I want to make things I’d like to watch and things that have a reason for being made. If it’s entertaining, that’s sometimes good enough. But it’s also nice if it’s necessary.” And if there’s a role that compels her as an actor, even better. “I don’t think it’s true anymore that there are few meaty roles for women over 30. I think at a certain period that was a reality. But streaming has changed all of it, hasn’t it? All these different platforms catering to different audiences who want to see variety in representation and in content. I think that’s great.”
It makes sense for Bridget, after a nine-year break from the big screen, to reappear now, as women are tackling roles about growing up and growing older. Without spoiling the ending, it’s worth pointing out that Bridget has a response to her young beau’s wish that she were closer to his age. She’d like to have a time machine too — so he could jump in, grow up, and meet her where she is.
“Fifty is awesome — it really is,” Zellweger says. “I hope I’m a little bit wiser. I’m definitely better with boundaries and with recognizing what’s important. And I have a better understanding of my business and of what makes me happy, personally, working within it. I’m just better under the radar. That’s good for me.”
Hair by JENNY CHO at A-Frame Agency.
Makeup by KINDRA MANN at Tomlinson Management Group.
Manicure by DIEM TRUONG at Star Touch Agency.
Shot on location at EAST END STUDIOS.
Feature image: BURBERRY coat, $2,320. CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN shoes, $895. POMELLATO bracelet, $3,400.
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of C Magazine.
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