Hugh Grant reveals details on Daniel Cleaver’s ‘crammed in’ return in Bridget Jones 4

Hugh Grant has revealed that there was “no obvious role” for him in the new Bridget Jones film, saying he was “crammed in”. 

The Love Actually star, 64, reprises his role as womaniser Daniel Cleaver for the upcoming movie, which is adapted from Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy and follows Bridget (Renee Zellweger) in her 50s as she reenters the dating world following the death of her husband, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). 

During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, the Notting Hill actor said: “It is a good and moving script – it is extremely funny but very sad.

“There was no obvious role for me, but I was crammed in.

“So we didn’t have a 60-year-old Daniel Cleaver wandering around looking at young girls, I made up a good interim story for him,” Hugh said of his character, who was one-third of Bridget’s love triangle with Mark in the first two movies.

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Hugh didn’t appear in the third film, Bridget Jones’s Baby. Instead, Bridget gives a eulogy at his funeral after he dies in a plane crash. However, in the final moments of the movie, a newspaper headline reveals that he was found alive after all. 

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, which comes to UK and US cinemas on 14 February 2025, will see Renee and Hugh reprise their roles, alongside Dame Emma Thompson as Dr Rawlings and Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones as Bridget’s parents. 

Meanwhile, Sarah Solemani, Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson and James Callis will return as Bridget’s pals. 

Newcomers Leo Woodall (One Day) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave, Doctor Strange) have joined the cast, with the former set to play Bridget’s younger love interest Roxster, while the latter portrays the headteacher of Bridget’s kids.

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Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers), Josette Simon (Anatomy of a Scandal), Nico Parker (Suncoast, How to Train Your Dragon) and Leila Farzad (I Hate Suzie) have also joined the cast. 

The fourth film follows 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, which came after Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in 2004 and Bridget Jones’s Diary, which debuted in 2001. 

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Mad About The Boy, which is the third book in the Bridget Jones novel series, is set four years after Mark’s death and finds Bridget as a mother of two. 

The novel synopsis reads: “Bridget Jones stumbles through the challenges of single-motherhood, tweeting, texting and rediscovering her sexuality in what SOME people rudely and outdatedly call ‘middle age’.”

The Graham Norton Show airs on BBC One on Friday at 10.40pm and is also available on the BBC iPlayer.