Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy‘s new trailer is here, and it confirms a tragic twist that fans had expected.
The fourth movie for Renée Zellweger’s iconic character is due out in cinemas next Valentine’s Day, but it doesn’t look like it’ll only bring tears of laughter.
As expected, Bridget Jones 4 is following the book it’s based on and is set four years after the death of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Firth appears in the trailer so looks like he filmed new scenes for the movie, but only for flashbacks.
Check out the first trailer for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy above.
Related: All you need to know about Bridget Jones 4
The trailer reunites us with many of the returning stars, including Jim Broadbent as Bridget’s father Colin. We see him tell Bridget that “it’s not enough to survive, you’ve got to live” in a sure-to-be emotional scene.
At a trailer preview yesterday (November 11) which Digital Spy attended, director Michael Morris said that he wanted to make a “comedy of grief”.
“[It’s] very much a comedy, very much celebrating life in all the joyfulness that Bridget brings, but life, you can’t ignore the hard bits, you just can’t. It’s going to happen to everybody, so how does Bridget deal with it?,” he explained.
“How do you attack moving on essentially with the kind of Bridget verve and joyfulness? And I think in that way this is a rom-com, but a real-life rom-com is what I wanted to make.”
Related: Bridget Jones trilogy is back on Netflix
The trailer also gives us our first look at Hugh Grant’s returning Daniel Cleaver who, somehow, has become a sort-of uncle to Bridget’s children, while we also get the first look at Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall as Bridget’s new love interests.
Grant has described Bridget Jones 4 as “very sad” and “extremely funny”, and revealed that he actually wrote some of his own scenes.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy will be released in UK cinemas on February 14. It will be released exclusively on Peacock in the US on February 13.
Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he’s covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.