Bridget Jones is to get her very own statue in Leicester Square (and yes, she will be wearing her famous mummy pants)
Bridget Jones will be immortalized with a statue in the heart of the city where her chaotic life of single life attracted millions of fans.
A bronze statue of the much-loved fictional character, modeled on the role played by Renée Zellweger for two decades, will be unveiled in London’s West End on Monday.
Fittingly, the quirky rom-com hero will be part of a film trail celebrating the centenary of British cinema alongside Paddington and Harry Potter in Leicester Square, in the heart of London’s film and theater district.
Writer Helen Fielding, who first brought Bridget to life in a newspaper column and then in a best-selling book series first published in 1996, revealed that the statue even includes a secret homage to the legendary ‘mummy trousers’ the character wears under her clothes.
The description of Bridget’s favorite pair of large support knickers entered common parlance when her famous boss, Daniel Cleaver, played by actor Hugh Grant, uttered the phrase ‘hello mum’ when he first met her during a mix-up in the first of the four Bridget Jones films.
Ms Fielding, who previewed the statue, said: ‘It’s got Renée’s head from the first film and I think she’s wearing the mummy trousers because she’s got such a flat tummy!’
He told the BBC it was “wonderful” to have a character like Bridget who “started life so modestly in an anonymous column in a newspaper and persisted for thirty years and ended up as a statue in Leicester Square”.
Bridget Jones will be immortalized with a statue in the heart of the city, where she led the chaotic life of singlehood and attracted millions of fans along the way.
A bronze statue of the much-loved fictional character, modeled on the role Renée Zellweger played for two decades, will be unveiled in London’s West End on Monday.
Fittingly, the quirky romantic comedy hero will be part of a film trail celebrating the centenary of British cinema alongside Paddington and Harry Potter in Leicester Square, in the heart of London’s film and theater district.
‘He’s just an emotionally honest, original, slightly messy, humane, normal person with a great sense of humour. “It’s a very British thing to do and it’s a great honor to be celebrating with Paddington Bear,” he added.
Ms. Zellweger and Ms. Fielding are expected to attend the opening on Monday, hosted by actress Sally Phillips, who plays Bridget’s loyal friend Shazzer.
Actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall, who played Bridget’s love interest in the last movie released at the beginning of this year, will also attend the ceremony.
Ms Fielding said Bridget was now a role model for a whole new Gen Z audience and believed the character had made a refreshing change for them as they were under so much pressure to be perfect.
‘When Bridget first set out I didn’t understand why, but after a while I realized it spoke to the gap between how we all feel we should be and how we actually are inside; The side we show to our friends and people who love us for who we are.
She told Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘For the new generation of young women, especially social media, it’s a lot harder for them than it was for Bridget; “There are so many images of perfection thrown at them, filtered images, and they still worry about their shape, and on top of that they keep the body positivity movement so secret that they feel guilty for worrying about their shape, too,” she said.
‘There’s a lot of pressure on them, and it makes me happy when they come up to me to get their books signed and talk to me about the idea of just being a human being, being kind, being good to your friends, being good enough, having a sense of humor and a sense of resilience – those are the important things in life, not how they’re presented to the world.’
Next year marks a quarter of a century since the first film, Bridget Jones’s Diary, was released in 2001, chronicling Bridget’s disastrous love life torn between the unfaithful Cleaver and the man who turns out to be her eventual partner: the devoted Mr. Darcy, played by Colin Firth.
The film’s sequels, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget Jones’s Baby, and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, chronicle her life as a wife, mother, and then widow. In the latest film, we see Bridget come full circle and come back to life as a single, hilariously learning to navigate the dating scene again.
