Sam Amico
Everyone thinks of Renée Zellweger when they hear about the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, but Colin Firth also played a vital role.
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Except Firth’s character was almost played by someone else, thanks to Firth himself, who portrayed Mark Darcy, the father of Bridget’s baby.
“I started off thinking there was no way in with that character,” Firth told Cinema Blend.
“I originally turned it down, because I didn’t think … how do you play this guy who doesn’t do anything really? He just sort of stands around and scowls and looks imperious. And I thought, ‘Well, sure, I can do that, but will anyone give a damn? It’s not appealing.'”
So while Firth at first gave a firm no, he still considered playing Darcy. Suddenly, he started to find some appeal to the role.
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“I thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s something fun in that. You don’t have to be charming. You just have to be incredibly distant and dislikable,'” Firth said, via Cinema Blend. “And I thought, ‘That’s pretty liberating.’ So that was an incentive.”
The movie was actually inspired by a Jane Austen novel, and Firth said he took that into consideration when attacking the role.
“[Jane Austen] did not presume to write what men think, it seems,” Firth said. “So, what you’ve got is a kind of external view of the guy, so I kind of made it up. I thought, ‘What if he’s highly sexed and passionate and actually pretty wild on the inside, but doesn’t play any of it, never shows it.’ This apparently emotionless man is all a mask. It’s all going on inside. So every time I played him – and each time has been a different writer — you to confer with them a little bit to make sure that it feels like the same guy.”
Given the success of Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequels, Firth is likely glad he accepted, and quickly settled in, to the role of Darcy.
