Spoilers ahead for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
“Mark gone.”
Those are the only two words Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones can conjure for her diary on the day that her husband, Mark Darcy (played, as always, by Colin Firth), dies. In Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth installment in 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–inspired romance across three films’ worth of makeups and breakups. After meeting not-so-cute at her parents’ holiday party in 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary—if you’ll remember, 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 just as she is. They’re on-and-off during the sequels, like 2004’s The Edge of Reason, which includes a randy romantic detour in Thailand with Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver. But by the end of 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, Mark and Bridget finally ride off into the sunset with their newborn son, Billy (played in the new film by Casper Knopf).
It’s only after the couple settles into domesticity and welcomes their second child, a daughter named Mabel (Mila Jankovic), that tragedy strikes. As Bridget says in the franchise’s first film, “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 learn that Mark, a human rights lawyer, has been killed in a land-mine accident while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan.
Mark meets the same fate in the 2013 Helen Fielding novel on which the film is based. “Pain and confusion and those sorts of things are where the jokes come from,” Fielding told Time in 2013 about why she had to kill off her leading man. “There has to be an integrity to what those jokes mean.” In 2016, tragically, life imitated art, and Fielding was left to raise her two children alone after her own ex-husband’s death.
Rest assured: In Mad About the Boy, Bridget’s oldest son is something of a “miniature Darcy,” as Grant’s Cleaver says. “His presence is very much there in the book and in the child,” Fielding said of the film’s source material back in 2013, recalling that she jokingly told 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 much of the fourth Bridget Jones film, which begins on the fourth anniversary of his death. His son Billy is still grieving, which impedes his ability to socialize at school; his daughter Mabel asks each man who enters their life, mailman included, if they are to be her “new daddy.” And then there is Firth’s literal presence in the film. Darcy appears in spirit form during key moments in his family’s life—when the children make homemade cards for his birthday, release balloons on his death anniversary, and during a primary school musical performance that will leave viewers misty-eyed.
