Katie Fustich

Despite my profound passion for the film genre that can only be described as “early 2000’s romantic comedy with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 37%” I had never, until recently, seen Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). Then, within the span of a week, I had seen all four.

Though I had never seen the series, I was familiar with the films. More specifically, I was familiar with the dialogue surrounding Bridget Jones’ — and therefore Renée Zellweger’s — weight. When an actor gains or loses a significant amount of weight for a role, people practically mythologize the experience. I wasn’t even ten years old when the first Bridget Jones movie debuted, yet I remember well the public scrutiny typically-slender Zellweger faced for her transformation into the curvy Bridget Jones. It was essentially imprinted upon me that a woman weighing 136 pounds was shockingly and disgustingly fat to the point of no return. Cue the lifelong body dysmorphia experienced by millennial women the world around…

And yet, actually watching Bridget Jones’s Diary, I was surprised to find my impression of the film’s discussion around body image in stark contrast to what was portrayed. Yes, Bridget Jones is fixated on her weight. She records the numbers on the scale in her diary, forces her body into uncomfortable shapewear, and withstands the belittling comments of her family and friends. Are these not universal experiences?

More importantly, Bridget Jones is actually portrayed as sexy and lovable. Despite her mother’s attempts to stuff her into the matronly and shapeless sacks that haunt the plus size section, Bridget Jones wears miniskirts and gauzy tops to the office. She confidently shows up to a garden party in a Playboy Bunny ensemble (weird this movie came out four months before Legally Blonde) And of course, she wins the hearts of both Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, with the latter proclaiming he loves Bridget “just the way she is.”

This refreshing tone continued in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), with Bridget continuing to navigate many of the self-doubts and societal pressures that plagued her in the original. Imagine my shock when I pressed play on my pirated copy of Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016) only to find the titular character a wisp of her former self. As a slender Bridget struts confidently across London’s Tower Bridge, her internal monologue reveals she has finally reached her “ideal weight.” I am sure my neighbors heard me yelp “WHAT?!” at the TV. I braced, awaiting some further explanation, and received none. In a single line, the series resolved one of the main character’s most enduring anxieties.

As one does, I took to the World Wide Web for further explanation. My first guess was that Zellweger was hesitant to go through another round of bodily transformation for the character — understandable given that many actors say the process is very hard on the body. But no, this wasn’t it. In fact, Zellweger was eager to retake Bridget’s signature shape but was shot down by production.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Bridget Jones’s Baby director Sharon Maguire explained the change: “We all really loved the notion that Bridget, 15 years on, had finally reached her ideal weight … somewhere between a UK size 10 or 12 [US 6 or 8] … but still hadn’t solved any of her issues about love and loneliness.”

Well, hm. I suppose it’s technically true that skinny people can have problems, too (so I’ve heard). Yet I can’t help but bristle that the director’s desire to represent that there’s more to life than obsessing over weight is achieved via thinness. Why not have the character decide to embrace herself — to quote Colin Firth — just the way she is? I found this decision even stranger considering the third film centers on Bridget’s journey through pregnancy and into motherhood. It’s documented that many who struggle with body dysmorphia and self-image face new challenges as the body changes during pregnancy. The director’s attempt to wipe the story clean of any negative body talk ultimately achieves the opposite of the stated intention — thinness wins.

The most recent installment of the series, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025) finds our heroine widowed, raising two children, and struggling to (please forgive me for this horrible cliche) get her groove back. As with the third film, Mad About the Boy is mum on the subject of body image. Zellweger explained: “There’s going to be an obvious evolution, because [Bridget has] moved on in her life and she has a lot of responsibilities. She doesn’t have the luxury of obsessing about certain things that she might have in the past.”

Of course after Bridget’s “miraculous” transformation in movie #3, I didn’t suddenly expect them to reintroduce the calorie-counting angle (And certainly Zellweger’s perspective is more well-reasoned than the director’s “skinny people can be lonely too :(” take. ((And this is all to say nothing of the fact that Mad About the Boy feels like it takes place in an entirely different universe than the first three films)). But given that Mad About the Boy is to be the final installment in the Bridget Jones franchise, and many are reflecting on the series’ 25-year legacy, body image is inevitably a recurring theme.

In many ways, it seems that the films are destined to be chalked up to “that series about the British lady who thinks she’s morbidly obese but isn’t even fat and therefore gave all women under 40 lifelong eating disorders.” There are certainly critiques to be made. But I think there is also a great deal of irony in the way that we internalize the film’s messages — the same way that Wolf of Wall Street inspired legions of manchildren who think that the point of the film is to depict what is Good and what You Should Want to Be.

Bridget Jones, as a character, is an uncomfortably realistic portrayal of what it is to be a woman existing in a culture where thinness = beauty. No, it is not good that she uses the adjective “lard” in relation to herself on a regular basis, but it is refreshing in its honesty. Bridget isn’t even “fat” but she thinks she is fat because of the same pressures that give way to the voices in our heads distorting our self-perception.

Am I overthinking this? Ever so slightly. Maybe what this really comes down to is that I would rather watch a romantic comedy in which the woman wallowing while eating ice cream actually eats ice cream.