Three years after starring in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Renee Zellweger found slipping back into the role of the titular British singleton for the sequel challenging beyond the much ballyhooed weight gain.
For “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” the Texan actress–who has slimmed back down and sports a brunette do–admits that she had difficulty relearning Bridget’s signature quirky way of speaking.
“It was like starting over again,” says the actress. “I was terrified of it because it was something that evolved and became very colloquial in a very specific way last time. I had [voice and dialect coach] Barbara Berkery there every day saying, `No, that was too precise. Slushier, slushier,’ because Bridget has kind of a lispy thing that she does.”
Despite her struggles to re-create the British accent, Zellweger has won the heart of the England for embodying the plucky protagonist.
“I think the truth is, if anything, we consider Renee Zellweger a national treasure. I do not think that we have given her up to you,” says director Beeban Kidron to a roomful of American reporters.
“Edge of Reason” picks up several weeks after the original “Bridget Jones” left off, with Bridget enjoying a blissful relationship–complete with many shags–with the very proper lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Being Bridget, however, she soon loses her man, fouls up her job and even lands in a Thai prison before she gets her happy ending.
To reprise the critically acclaimed role, Zellweger had to come to terms with Bridget’s seemingly desperate actions, especially when, after having only dated six weeks, she demands that Darcy reveal whether or not he’d consider marrying her.
“I think it becomes pretty evident that she knows that she’s made a big mistake there. And that not only is it unreasonable, but it probably might have been the catalyst to the end of this relationship for having terrified the man with the outburst,” says Zellweger. “But she never fails to trudge forward and to believe that she’s gonna be fine and she always moves on. That’s strength to me.”
Besides the character work, the petite actress also had physical challenges to meet. The fair-skinned Zellweger pokes fun at herself for her sensitivity to the sun, which became problematic while shooting in Thailand. Although castmate Hugh Grant describes her work ethic as “redoubtable,” he was appalled by the lengths she took to protect her skin.
“She’s got this thing that she believes the sun will make her skin come up in boils and peel off her bones,” Grant explains. “So she’s dressed up like Julie Andrews at the beginning of ‘The Sound Of Music,’ like a nun–umbrellas and gloves and everything. It’s a nightmare.”
Zellweger fared better in Austria’s colder climate, where she performed her own skiing stunts. During two snowy sequences, the actress falls out of a ski lift, glides backwards for several feet, skis down a slalom course and ends up skiing straight into the front door of a shop.
The modest actress makes light of her risky behavior, though, and instead praises the cameraman who mimicked each of her stunts–while skiing backwards.
Kidron reveals that the filmmakers had initially hired two stunt doubles for Zellweger’s scenes who just weren’t convincing on film as the star.
“These people could not embody the Bridget ‘onesiness,’ the Bridget aspiration, the Bridget attempt-and-failure in that body during that sequence,” says the director. “The thing about Renee is that she is a proper comedian…[not only] because of the way she says the words. She’s a comedian from the soles of her feet to the top of her head.”
