Leo Woodall. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
Leo Woodall is opening up about filming sex scenes with costar Renée Zellweger for the latest Bridget Jones sequel, Mad About the Boy.
“Those intimate scenes are kind of awkward, you know?” Woodall, 28, told Variety in an interview published on Saturday, February 15. “It doesn’t matter how sexy it may appear in the final cut — doing it is kind of awkward. So the best thing is for us to kind of just have a laugh with it, and it shines through.”
Woodall stars as the younger love interest to Zellweger’s beloved Bridget Jones in Mad About the Boy, which sees the main character left as a widowed single mother after the death of her husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth).
Woodall told Variety that he wanted his and Zellweger’s on-screen relationship to “feel real” and not act as a “trope-y mechanism for the plot.” He said of age-gap romances, “They’ve existed and they do exist everywhere. We’re just not used to seeing them on-screen.”
Renée Zellweger’s beau, Ant Anstead, joined her at a party for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy in London. But first, Zellweger, 55, hit the pink carpet on Wednesday, January 29, for her big movie premiere at the Odeon Luxe theater, wearing a show-stopping fuchsia gown with a strapless neckline and long train. The actress […]
Woodall added, “What the Bridget Jones movies do so well is they’re so relatable and they strike so many true chords that people all over the world and across generations can relate to.”
Leo Woodall and Renée Zellweger. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for SiriusXM
Speaking with the outlet at the film’s London premiere, Zellweger agreed with her costar, saying, “I mean, I think it’s nothing new. But maybe the social taboos are melting away. It’s never a bad thing. There are certain things that we probably don’t need to have opinions about. And where people find love, why would that ever be a problem?”
While Zellweger’s Bridget finds herself caught between two love interests in Mad About the Boy, she exclusively told Us Weekly that she initially doubted whether her character would truly be happy without Mark Darcy.
“It was sad as an actress not to share the experience with [Firth] and also know that Mark Darcy’s gone away,” Zellweger told Us at the Wednesday, February 12, red carpet premiere held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.
“[It’s] something really important for Bridget’s journey in this chapter of her life, which is that if she does choose new happiness, does that mean that she didn’t love him enough?” she continued. “I think it’s a familiar struggle for a lot of people.”
Zellweger reprised the role of Bridget Jones after starring in three previous films: Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in 2004 and Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is out now on Peacock.
