Spoilers forward for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
“Mark gone.”
Those are the one two phrases Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones can conjure for her diary on the day that her husband, Mark Darcy (performed, as all the time, by Colin Firth), dies. In Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth installment within the franchise streaming on Peacock February 13, Bridget has gone from being a “smug married” to a designation even darker: a widow.
Fans fell in love with Bridget and Mark’s Jane Austen–impressed romance throughout three movies’ value of makeups and breakups. After assembly not-so-cute at her dad and mom’ vacation social gathering in 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary—when you’ll keep in mind, he calls her a “verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother”—Darcy famously finds that he likes Jones simply as she is. They’re on-and-off throughout the sequels, like 2004’s The Edge of Reason, which features a randy romantic detour in Thailand with Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver. But by the tip of 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, Mark and Bridget lastly experience off into the sundown with their new child son, Billy (performed within the new movie by Casper Knopf).
It’s solely after the couple settles into domesticity and welcomes their second baby, a daughter named Mabel (Mila Jankovic), that tragedy strikes. As Bridget says within the franchise’s first movie, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.” In the fourth installment, we study that Mark, a human rights lawyer, has been killed in a land-mine accident whereas on a humanitarian mission in Sudan.
Mark meets the identical destiny within the 2013 Helen Fielding novel on which the movie is predicated. “Pain and confusion and those sorts of things are where the jokes come from,” Fielding instructed Time in 2013 about why she needed to kill off her main man. “There has to be an integrity to what those jokes mean.” In 2016, tragically, life imitated artwork, and Fielding was left to lift her two youngsters alone after her personal ex-husband’s dying.
Rest assured: In Mad About the Boy, Bridget’s oldest son is one thing of a “miniature Darcy,” as Grant’s Cleaver says. “His presence is very much there in the book and in the child,” Fielding mentioned of the movie’s supply materials again in 2013, recalling that she jokingly instructed Colin Firth: “His memory will live on and he will rise from the dead rather like Jesus.”
She wasn’t far off. Firth’s Darcy looms over a lot of the fourth Bridget Jones movie, which begins on the fourth anniversary of his dying. His son Billy remains to be grieving, which impedes his skill to socialize at college; his daughter Mabel asks every man who enters their life, mailman included, if they’re to be her “new daddy.” And then there may be Firth’s literal presence within the movie. Darcy seems in spirit kind throughout key moments in his household’s life—when the youngsters make do-it-yourself playing cards for his birthday, launch balloons on his dying anniversary, and through a major faculty musical efficiency that can go away viewers misty-eyed.