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, Bridget’s rumored new love interest.

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 had 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. 

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.