‘Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy’ Fashion Includes ‘Loads’ Of Easter Eggs

As a veteran costume designer, it’s important for Molly Emma Rowe to get to know the characters she’s dressing on any given project—their backstories, their nuances, their full picture.

When Rowe landed the job as costume designer for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy—the fourth installment in the franchise, which hits Peacock on February 13 and theaters the next day in the U.K.—she already had a running start, having grown up with the character written by Helen Fielding and portrayed on screen since 2001 by Renée Zellweger.

“It was a very, very emotional job for me, because really, I can’t really believe it still,” Rowe tells me via Zoom. “It really is a dream come true. It’s a cliché, but it’s true.”

When she found out that she landed the role as lead costume designer for the film—the first in the franchise since 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, following 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and the original film, 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary—Rowe cried, she says.

“I am just such a fangirl,” Rowe says, adding that everyone on set was a fan of the Bridget Jones series: “I think that you can see it on screen,” she adds.

Love, care and meticulous attention to detail were cornerstones of the 15- to 20-person costume design team, headed by Rowe, who says she had about 12 weeks to prepare for the project. Longtime fans of the franchise will spot Easter eggs from the three previous films in this new iteration—“loads, actually,” Rowe says.

“I got a few pieces out of archive from Universal,” she adds of Bridget’s past wardrobe. “I got her gray coat, which she wears with a plum-colored scarf. I got both of those pieces, actually—she wears them when we first meet her in the first Bridget Jones, on her way to the turkey curry buffet. So that was really amazing, actually. I didn’t tell Renée, and when she came in for her first fitting, it was really amazing. It was really emotional.”

“It was amazing to kind of bring back things that have been seen before. It felt really cool to do that.”

Of Zellweger—who has starred as the titular character in all four films over nearly a quarter century—“Renée is such an incredible actor, and she’s so encompassing of the characters that she plays that I could see that it took her somewhere,” Rowe says of seeing the archived pieces from prior films. “And that was all part of me trying to understand as well what it is for Renée, and what can help her inhabit Bridget as well. And essentially, it’s authenticity, and Renée really needs to believe it. She really needs to believe that Bridget would wear something, which is fantastic.”

Another Easter egg from the past? Bridget’s classic Tiffany heart necklace, which has been worn in all of the films—including Mad About the Boy. “That was a very kind of typical gift that parents would maybe give their daughters in those kind of ‘90s, early 2000s—or maybe it’s something that Bridget bought for herself, but it feels like a bit of a kind of family jewelry kind of gift,” Rowe says. “Maybe it’s the 18th or 21st [birthday gift] or something.”

Bridget’s penguin pajamas from the third film are brought back again, as well. “It was amazing to kind of bring back things that have been seen before,” Rowe says. “It felt really cool to do that.” She adds that she found it important to bring iconic pieces back “as a kind of collection of Bridget’s wardrobe over the years.”

New pieces—like a look worn by Bridget at the start of the film—pay homage to past scenes, although the outfit itself is new: “I think probably one of my favorite looks of hers is the one right at the beginning,” Rowe says. “She’s wearing a green dress, which is—we wanted to choose green because Mark [Darcy, played by Colin Firth] appears in the scene, and she wears a green dress in the third film when they get together to conceive Billy. So there’s lots of things like that that we’ve done to very subtly bring in things.”

Rowe—who is known for her bold use of color as a costume designer—says, “I wanted to create a journey for Bridget. We meet her very, very deep in her grief, so it felt very important to kind of strip out some of the color and vibrancy from Bridget’s wardrobe. So that’s kind of how we used it throughout our film. So you can kind of see her coming back to life. She goes through a kind of blues phase as she’s sort of finding her feet again, and then we get back into the Bridget pinks and oranges and those kind of really feminine, fun colors that I think are quite synonymous with Bridget.”

The beginning of Rowe’s process creating the wardrobe for the film started with Bridget herself and meeting Zellweger. “Renée is honestly one of the most extraordinary people that I’ve ever met,” she says. “She’s so smart and intelligent and funny and magical, and she works so incredibly hard. She’s so inspiring. She talks to everybody. She knows who everyone is.”

Rowe adds, “She brings so much joy to the workplace and it’s really infectious, and she’s just the most special person. She really is.”

“Renée is honestly one of the most extraordinary people that I’ve ever met.”

Of meeting with Zellweger early in the process, “She’s created Bridget over 20 years,” Rowe says. “And I think that I grew up with Bridget, I grew up with Helen’s columns, I grew up with the book. Bridget Jones changed our lives. It had huge, huge impact. And I think I was very conscious that, or I started to become conscious that, because so many people find themselves in Bridget, that actually, am I putting myself and my own bias onto her? So I really wanted to find out from Renée without any of my thoughts why Bridget wears what she wears and what she thinks about and what she does, because I have my own ideas—but it felt incredibly important to find out who she is to Renée.”

Rowe met privately with Zellweger for a chat, where she took a few pieces to show her and talked through her ideas for the film—and tried to understand more about the character of Bridget from Zellweger.

“It was more to kind of see how Renée tries things on,” Rowe says. “And I do this quite often to see how an actor, what their process is—and I can tell how much clothes mean to them and how I want to move forward with them and try and understand them a little bit more.”

“And I think the other thing that was very important for me was that I really wanted to honor the work of all the filmmakers who have created Bridget before,” Rowe continues. “So three amazing costume designers have worked on the other three films, and it was very important to include bits of their work within this film to show fashion [is] cyclical. People are cyclical—people are nostalgic as well. So I think that all felt like a big part of the prep was to kind of unpack all of that so that then we could start our work of what’s happening to Bridget within our story now.”

From there, Rowe delved deep into the characters—not just Bridget but also Daniel Cleaver, played by Hugh Grant, who returns for Mad About the Boy after being absent for Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016.

“So Daniel was last in the film just under 20 years ago in the second film, and that’s a really long time,” Rowe says. “So, again, I had a conversation with Hugh to kind of find out from him why Daniel wore what he wore, who his tailor was, what we wanted to do, how we wanted to progress it. So I went on a real journey with him, too, which was amazing.”

Rowe—who has a background as a stylist—is keen on collaboration between her team and the talent. “It’s really, really important for me that it’s a discussion between us rather than me telling people what to wear,” she says.

In addition to continuing the costume design journey for characters like Bridget and Daniel, Rowe also had the creative license to introduce new characters’ wardrobes, like Leo Woodall’s Roxster (Bridget’s new love interest) and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mr. Wallaker, a teacher at Bridget’s children’s school.

“So obviously we got to create those stories ourselves,” Rowe says. “So there was a little bit of legacy and a little bit of creative freedom for us, too.”

In the film, when Bridget goes on her first date with a significantly younger Roxster, “she’s kind of slowly putting her foot back into what her life might be like without Mark,” Rowe says. “We really wanted to create an outfit that just made Bridget look very kind of comfortable and cool and sweet. And so we brought her short skirts back. And I think it’s a very small thing, but yes, a 50-year-old woman should be in a short skirt if that’s what she wants to wear. And I think my work has always been subtly about empowering people to say that—dress for yourself. If you are excited and happy about what you’re wearing, then it’s really infectious and it’s really visible and it can really change your day. And don’t dress for someone else’s gaze—dress for yourself and your own kind of confidence. And I think being part of that—because that’s what I think Bridget stands for—feels really good.”

“I feel very proud to be part of something that I feel is empowering,” she continues, adding she’s also proud that “the people that have created these characters trusted me to continue telling their story.”

Ahead of the film’s release, The Guardian reported that pre-sales for the movie are expected to break box office records, topping even the likes of 2023’s Barbie, according to the outlet. In addition to being on course to become the biggest ever Bridget Jones film, Robert Mitchell, director of theatrical insights at Gower Street Analytics, told The Guardian that Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is anticipated to be “the biggest British film of the year, and the biggest box office for the first half of 2025.”

Of working on the project, Rowe tells me, “It’s very cliché, but it’s just so special,” adding that she feels “very proud that I brought some new things to Bridget, and I feel very proud that I had the most incredible team on this film.”