The Oscar winner admits he never saw the first sequel 12 years ago and it was 15 years since he had watched the original when producer Eric Fellner suggested the new film, so he felt he had some catching up to do.
“I thought, ‘I haven’t been carrying this character around in my head’,” Colin tells LatinoReview. “I haven’t been living with him. I haven’t even seen the first movie for 15 years’. An awful lot of other people out there probably know it a lot better than I do, probably seen it more recently and more often.
“So I thought, ‘I’m just supposed to step into this guy as if it’s me?’ and I thought, ‘I’m not even sure who it is’. So I looked at the first film again as a form of revision, just to see what it is I have to conform to. In reality, it’s actually not that hard. There was just an anxiety that I didn’t really own the character, so it began with the sense that I had to imitate something that I’d done a long time ago. In the end, it’s not rocket science. He is the guy he is.”
Firth admits the new script helped and he offered a few clues to his character to the film’s writers, adding, “(I said), ‘Don’t make him too verbose, don’t make him too emotionally expressive’. I do think he is a very emotional character, actually. I think he’s perceptive. To me, the secret of the character is that one of the reasons he’s so bound-up is I think he’s a very, very passionate man. The problem is he isn’t able to find a way to express it.”
But Colin admits he had some doubts about the new film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, when he learned Hugh Grant would not be back as his character’s love rival.
“There were several versions where he was involved, and he was involved in discussions,” he adds. “I can’t go into or don’t know really why he ended up not being in this one. I think when it seemed like Hugh wasn’t able to do it, then they decided it was worth having a shot creating a story differently without him. I had my concerns about that because Hugh was critical to the drama of the first two films, so it was quite a challenge actually to try to make something very differently.”
