Very busy and important! Bridget Jones’s Diary is turning 20 years old this year, but Ms. Jones and her friends are just as cool as they were in the early ‘00s.
The beloved rom-com, which was released on April 13, 2001, starred Renée Zellweger as the namesake Bridget Jones, a 30-something woman living in London and trying to make sense of her life, her career, her relationships and … everything else.
Based on Helen Fielding‘s novel of the same name, the movie also sampled part of its plot from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In the film, audiences watched as Bridget found herself caught between two very handsome men: Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy (whose name was a nod to Austen’s Fitzwilliam Darcy) and Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver.
The two men, though very different, were portrayed in such a way that fans had a hard time deciding who they truly wanted the heroine to end up with — a concept that worked out well for the film’s two sequels: 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby.
Though the third film left fans with a small sense of closure, Zellweger told Us Weekly exclusively in June 2017 that she would happily return to the franchise for a fourth film.
“Selfishly, I hope so!” she said while attending the Greenwich International Film Festival in Connecticut. “[Bridget’s] a lot of fun!”
Other cast members, meanwhile, have been less inclined to return. Before the third film was even released, Grant made it clear he wouldn’t reprise his womanizing role.
“I decided not to do [the next sequel],” Grant told Free Radio in October 2014. “But I think they’re going to go ahead and do it without Daniel. The book’s excellent, by the way, but the script is completely different — well, the script as I last saw it a few years ago.”
In the years since Bridget Jones’s Diary’s release, the movie’s stars have gone on to win Oscars, welcome children and fall in love all on their own.
Scroll to see what Zellweger, Firth, Grant and the rest of the Bridget Jones’s Diary cast has been up to: