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RENÉE ZELLWEGER:
“About the weight issue, I don’t know where the notion came from that I had a negative feeling about the experience the first time around. It didn’t come from me. It contributed so much to the experience of bringing Bridget Jones to life the first time. And so I knew that it was essential in repeating the journey. It had to be authentic to me. And if you’re not going to become the character and be the character, then I don’t really see the point in undertaking the experience.”
COLIN FIRTH:
“Renée is ridiculously generous. She gave as much off- camera as on. If she were crying in a scene on-camera, she’d do it again off-camera. She even stayed for a shot on my feet at five in the morning. I told her, ‘My feet don’t need you.’ She said, ‘No, no. I’ll be here. It makes a difference. It makes it real.’ It was astonishing to all of us.”
HUGH GRANT:
“For years I sat in these interviews and everyone said, ‘You’re always Mr Nice Guy, why don’t you ever play someone nasty?’ So in fact it’s been a relief to be Daniel, for the real me to come out more on camera! I don’t have any particular burning desire to go back to being cuddly.”
ZELLWEGER on getting back into character:
“There are certain things about this character that just feel right, and in playing her they just seemed to surface from somewhere. On the other hand, I had to pay a lot of attention to the dialect. It was like starting over again.”
GRANT on the fight scene he has with Colin Firth:
“We just made sure that it was as crap as we wanted it to be. The key is to stop the stunt coordinator from coming in to make it look like a film fight. We just wanted it to be two pathetic Englishmen, scared of each other, throwing their handbags at each other basically.”
FIRTH:
“We didn’t rehearse the fight scene very much. I’m ashamed to say the reason it looked real is because we were two normal fellows who don’t know how to fight. My experience of violent confrontation dates back to the playground age, about six or seven years old, so that’s what I drew from. If you get two very angry yuppies and then put them together, I think you will get a fight that looks much more like that than Jackie Chan.”
ZELLWEGER:
“What I admire most about Bridget is her ever present optimism in the face of so much adversity. I love that she’s able to laugh at herself and get back up and keep on trying.”
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THE CONCEPT:
