Bridget Jones 4: Where is Colin Firth Now? | Vanity Fair

“Mark gone.”

Those are the only two words Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones can conjure for her diary on the day that her husband, Mark Darcy (played, as always, by Colin Firth), dies. In Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth installment in the franchise streaming on Peacock February 13, Bridget has gone from being a “smug married” to a designation even darker: a widow.

Fans fell in love with Bridget and Mark’s Jane Austen–inspired romance across three films’ worth of makeups and breakups. After meeting not-so-cute at her parents’ holiday party in 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary—if you’ll remember, he calls her a “verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother”—Darcy famously finds that he likes Jones just as she is. They’re on-and-off during the sequels, like 2004’s The Edge of Reason, which includes a randy romantic detour in Thailand with Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver. But by the end of 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, Mark and Bridget finally ride off into the sunset with their newborn son, Billy (played in the new film by Casper Knopf).

It’s only after the couple settles into domesticity and welcomes their second child, a daughter named Mabel (Mila Jankovic), that tragedy strikes. As Bridget says in the franchise’s first film, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.” In the fourth installment, we learn that Mark, a human rights lawyer, has been killed in a land-mine accident while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan.

Mark meets the same fate in the 2013 Helen Fielding novel on which the film is based. “Pain and confusion and those sorts of things are where the jokes come from,” Fielding told Time in 2013 about why she had to kill off her leading man. “There has to be an integrity to what those jokes mean.” In 2016, tragically, life imitated art, and Fielding was left to raise her two children alone after her own ex-husband’s death.

Rest assured: In Mad About the Boy, Bridget’s oldest son is something of a “miniature Darcy,” as Grant’s Cleaver says. “His presence is very much there in the book and in the child,” Fielding said of the film’s source material back in 2013, recalling that she jokingly told Colin Firth: “His memory will live on and he will rise from the dead rather like Jesus.”

She wasn’t far off. Firth’s Darcy looms over much of the fourth Bridget Jones film, which begins on the fourth anniversary of his death. His son Billy is still grieving, which impedes his ability to socialize at school; his daughter Mabel asks each man who enters their life, mailman included, if they are to be her “new daddy.” And then there is Firth’s literal presence in the film. Darcy appears in spirit form during key moments in his family’s life—when the children make homemade cards for his birthday, release balloons on his death anniversary, and during a primary school musical performance that will leave viewers misty-eyed.

Audiences are reunited with Bridget as she haphazardly readies herself for a dinner in which she’s likely to be the only single attendee. In need of last-minute childcare, Grant’s rakish Cleaver—or “Uncle Daniel,” as Bridget’s kids call him—comes to the rescue. At this point in their lives, Bridget and Daniel have figured out a comfortably flirty friendship—devoid of any romantic pressures. (Grant has also returned to the franchise after skipping the third film: “I really couldn’t fit my character in—he just didn’t belong, so I stepped aside,” he told Vanity Fair last fall.)

Left alone with a bottle of white wine and a Netflix account she can’t remember the password to, Bridget recalls the sage words of her also dearly departed father, played by Jim Broadbent, who appears in the new film via flashback, “It’s not enough to survive: You have to live,” he tells her. That leads Bridge back to her trusty diary, where she decides to pick up the pen for the first time in four years. “Bridget Jones, it’s time to live,” she writes.

Bridget’s new lease on life, as directed by Michael Morris, means both going back to work as a TV producer and dipping her toe back into the dating pool as well. As in the first three movies, Bridget is torn between a pair of dashing blokes.

The first is Leo Woodall’s Roxster McDuff, a much younger park ranger with whom she connects on Tinder (not the fictional dating website Patrick Dempsey’s Jack made billions from creating in Bridget Jones’s Baby). “I was occupying a new space in her life,” Woodall has told Vanity Fair of taking over leading man duties from Firth, “so I didn’t feel like I was replacing him.”

Perhaps that’s because Darcy’s essence can be felt far more in Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Mr. Wallaker, a no-nonsense, unusually ripped (ding, dong) science teacher at Bridget’s children’s school. He and Bridget break the ice after Wallaker spots Mabel toting informational pamphlets about sexually transmitted diseases that she swiped from a doctor’s appointment. “That really happened to me in front of a teacher, and he was really called Mr. Wallaker, just as he is in the film,” Fielding recently told The Times.

Even with new love interests, Mark Darcy’s memory is never far from the movie’s mind, as evidenced by several tender-hearted callbacks to his character—including the appearance of that horrid reindeer jumper he wore when first meeting Bridget. Zellweger has said that she knew filming with Firth for the last time would be emotionally charged. “But I didn’t realize just how sad I was gonna feel on the day, looking at my friend on the sidewalk there in his Mark Darcy coat with his Mark Darcy buttoned-up suit and his briefcase, strolling in the London night,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “It was just so sad thinking this character I love, and Mark and Bridget, was no more.”

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