Hugh Grant Cried Reading the Script for ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’

Hugh Grant says he wept reading the script for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.

Grant, 64, reprises his role as dastardly Daniel Cleaver in the fourth Bridget Jones movie, which hits theaters on Valentine’s Day 2025.

“I loved the script — it made me cry, and I wanted to help with this one,” the actor told Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday, September 11. “But really there’s no part for Daniel Cleaver in it at all. They wanted him in it, and in the end, they’d done something I wasn’t crazy about.”

Putting on his screenwriter’s hat, Grant “wrote some scenes” that director Michael Morris approved and weaved into the plot. Then Grant signed on to costar alongside Renée Zellweger, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Emma Thompson and Leo Woodall, the last of whom plays Bridget's rumored new love interest.

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“There are people in my life who have always said, ‘Oh, that’s much more like the real Hugh,’” Grant said of Daniel, who seduces Bridget with his devilish charm in the first two movies. 

He declined an offer to appear in the third Bridget film, 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, telling Vanity Fair, “I really couldn’t fit my character in — he just didn’t belong, so I stepped aside.”

But Grant was proud to participate in Mad About the Boy. “It’s absolutely the best [Bridget Jones book], and I think it’s very funny and very, very moving,” he said.  “I’m not in a lot, I did a week’s work, that’s it. … But when you see the film, you’ll be very moved.”

Fans of the beloved franchise rejoiced when the film’s poster was unveiled in August. 

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“New decade. New diary,” read the tagline for the nostalgic ad, which featured Zellweger, 55, sporting a pink cardigan with her character’s iconic red diary in her hand.

The actress made her debut as Bridget Jones in 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Based on the book of the same name by Helen Fielding, the Pride and Prejudice–inspired story follows Bridget as she finds herself in a love triangle with enemies Daniel and Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the latter of whom ultimately wins her heart. In Bridget Jones’s Baby, she and Mark are happily married with a son. 

However, Mad About the Boy is based on the third novel in the Bridget Jones series, which picks up with Bridget navigating dating life and being a single mother following — spoiler alert — Mark’s unexpected death.

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It is unknown whether Mark will meet the same fate in the upcoming film. Firth, 64, was spotted filming with Zellweger over the summer in photos and video obtained by the Daily Mail.

Fielding, 66, opened up about the decision to kill off Mark in a 2013 interview on Today, recalling that telling Firth of his character’s demise was “the hardest thing.” She explained: “It was one of the strangest conversations of my life because I had to ask if he had someone with him, if he was sitting down, and it was literally as if someone really had died. Then we sort of started laughing because they hadn’t.”