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Agreeing to impersonate
Mark Darcy in the film of Bridget Jones's Diary could be the smartest
thing he has done. Helen Fielding's fictional columnist, Bridget Jones,
has a massive crush on the Firth/Mr. Darcy/Mark Darcy figure. Who else
would Fielding and her panting fans have wanted to see in Mark Darcy's
ridiculous hand-knitted reindeer sweater but Colin Firth? And what better
strategy for Firth than to join in the joke?
Firth has deliberately avoided frilly shirts and breeches since Pride and
Prejudice. He has stood, a bemused and slightly appalled onlooker, above
the hysteria that turned him into a heart-throb. "There's this other
person called Mr. Darcy who I have very little to do with," he says. "He's
like a bizarre doppelganger that I've spawned who walks around doing
things without me. I've not really allowed myself to get hung up about it.
Life has gone on perfectly satisfactorily. It hasn't held me back. It
dominates what gets written about me, but it doesn't affect me any closer
than that."
He claims that he didn't worry about compounding "the Darcy thing" by
playing the very character inspired by him in the Diary because he wasn't
being required to reproduce the role. "There was an ironic slant on it. It
was an in-joke, a reference point. I think that's acceptable."
Firth did have some worries about the film. Would it be boring? Would the
script be good enough? Would the humorously cumulative effect of
Fielding's prose translate into film? Had a film version anywhere to go?
"There's a great danger in striving to make a designer hit just because
all the elements are right," he says judiciously. "It's not necessarily
going to work because the book has been a phenomenal bestseller." (The
other "elements" are Hugh Grant as the love rat and Renee Zellweger as the
neurotic Jones, plus a strong supporting cast led by Jim Broadbent and
Gemma Jones.)
But Firth's real dilemma was this: how could he not act his own character,
having been given flattering immortality in Fielding's book? Wouldn't that
just have played into the hands of all those deluded women who confuse him
anyway with hard-to-get, brooding Darcy? And wouldn't he have come across
as a humourless snob?
To his surprise, Firth is finding it a relief to talk about his part in
Bridget Jones because at least it's current work. Usually, interviewers
(exactly like Bridget Jones in The Edge of Reason) ask a few dutiful
questions about his latest film but can't wait to hark back to Mr. Darcy
and the wet shirt. He could understand it, he says, if he were doing a
long-running weekly Pride and Prejudice series and had signed a 20-year
option. "But it has not been a part of my life for six years," he groans.
" 'What's it like to be a heart-throb?' they ask. I don't think anyone on
earth can meaningfully answer a question beginning: 'What's it like . . .'
"
Though he insists that he doesn't wake up in the middle of the night
fretting about it, Firth is resigned to being shackled to Darcy for ever.
"I can't think of a single headline in the last five years that didn't
have the D-word in it. It would be so, no matter what I did now. Probably
for the rest of my life. Even if I changed my profession."
He alludes to Mr. Darcy as if he were an embarrassing relative - and he
has the same rather detached view of his part in the chaotic world of
Bridget Jones. "I have to say it was not the most challenging hour of my
life," he says dryly. His enthusiasm is reserved for the brilliance of his
co-stars, Grant and Zellweger, and the serious challenges of making "a
very light film."
"Hugh is a brilliant light comedian. It is a very substantial craft.
Because of its lightness, its substance is often overlooked."
Needless to say, Firth as Darcy is everything his fans expect him to be -
dark, difficult, devastating. He glowers magnificently in the reindeer
sweater. He admits his affection through clenched teeth. And, when the
moment comes for him to be truly human, he strips down to his shirtsleeves
and rescues Bridget's dinner party by knocking up an omelet.
Amusing as all this may have been to film, it is clear that Bridget
Jones's Diary lacks a certain relevance to Firth's life: he is a
professional man with no social hang-ups, no cellulite and infinite job
security - plus his wife of four years, Livia, is due to give birth any
day now.
He admires the phenomenon from a safe distance. "I don't feel it's about
me. I don't weigh myself every day. I don't see the world divided into
married and single people. I certainly don't see married people as smug.
Fielding is very, very funny about those things - but I'm reading about
somebody else."
Apparently, he gets the same feeling when reading about himself in
articles. "It's very little to do with who I feel myself to be when I go
to Sainsbury's."
Fielding first met Firth when she visited the set of Fever Pitch, where
Firth played the emotionally retarded Arsenal fan in Nick Hornby's memoir
of love and football. They met again over lunch in Rome when he agreed to
be interviewed by her as Bridget Jones and soon lapsed into a double act
of Bridget and Darcy. "She went into Bridget mode and I fell into it. It
was a game, a little pantomime" - one that ended up as one of the funniest
sequences in the diary's sequel, The Edge of Reason.
Firth's friendship with Hornby has continued to be productive. Last year,
he came out of the literary closet by contributing to an anthology of
short stories edited by Hornby, Speaking with the Angel. The book was to
raise money for TreeHouse Trust, the charity that runs the school for
autistic children attended by Hornby's son, Danny. Firth has been "writing
and putting stuff in a drawer" for years but The Department of Nothing is
his first published piece.
"Writing has not been a deadly serious secret pursuit before launching
myself on the world. It's a hobby I enjoy - something I might do in Biro
on an aero plane." But he has found committing himself to print "a lot
more exposing" than he imagined.
Firth treats acting and writing as a way of continuing his lacklustre
education by more enjoyable means. So, when researching his next role as a
prominent Nazi lawyer in Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, he continued
reading Holocaust literature all through Christmas and long after the film
was shot. Here, he plays the part of a man who puts the case for mass
sterilisation over a buffet lunch at a Third Reich gathering in 1942.
"He talks about it as if it were a meeting to discuss foot and mouth
disease," says Firth. "That's what's astonishing: these men cracking
jokes, passing the cheese, looking at their watches . . . and talking
about genocide. I think what is shocking is how you can get reeled in. Put
yourself in that position: could you be one of the men round the table?"
Later this year, Firth will embark on another personal journey of
enlightenment as he prepares to play Hamlet at the Riverside Studios, with
Geraldine James as Gertrude. "I'm 40 now. I would say it's getting to last
call for me to do Hamlet." He admits that he has often thought we should
"put Shakespeare away for 10 or 20 years" and then come back to it, "but
so long as there are people like me who want to have a crack at it, then
it's going to be with us".
He admits that, as a schoolboy, nothing would have delighted him more than
to see Shakespeare banned. "I would like to have been put in the position
of being able rebelliously to discover Hamlet. Maybe if Hamlet were
forbidden he would become like Eminem . .."
And maybe, if Bridget Jones were to see his Hamlet ("v. eligible
bachelor", after all), she would grow up a bit.
'Bridget Jones's Diary' is released on April 13. |
