Colin Firth (24 page)

Round two was a scuffle in the sequel which would include a clever revival of Colin’s famous Darcy moment when both men end up in a pond. The promise of Colin in a dripping wet shirt was guaranteed to get the female punters queuing at the box office.

Unfortunately, because of filming schedules, the double dip had to be shot during a cold November, in London’s Hyde Park. There were a great many takes and the shivering actors were unable to get dry in between. Before the shoot, the pair had been promised warm water in the pond but, as Hugh joked to a US newspaper, ‘Being British special effects guys they were unable to do this.’ Instead, the screen rivals were forced to cuddle up to each other. ‘They did set us up a little paddling pool with warm water. And so, in between takes, Colin and I would leap in and embrace each other to stay warm. I believe there are several photographs!’

Never one to miss an opportunity for revenge on the quick-witted Hugh, Colin claimed he coped admirably with the day and added, ‘I believe Hugh asked for the nurse several times, as well as for hot water bottles and various medications.’

Actually, it was Colin who suffered after the event. The two-day shoot left him with a stinking cold and a very hoarse throat. ‘I lost my voice while filming,’ he said later. ‘I spent a couple of days in a very, very cold pond with Hugh Grant, which socially was pleasant enough, but has left me a little worse for wear.’

The scene, which was to prove a favourite for fans, was totally improvised, giving the pair free rein to punch and kick however they liked. In fact there was a lot of girly hair-pulling instead. ‘We made the decision right away this time not to stage anything,’ Colin explained to the
Daily Express
. ‘We simply showed up that morning and started pulling each other’s hair, kicking at one another, flailing about and complaining. It came completely naturally to me.’

‘They fight like a couple of girls,’ he told
Empire
. ‘Once the gloves come off, they’re two pathetic, rather sissy, frightened, angry yuppies.’

In real life, Colin joked, he wouldn’t be such a wuss and confidently asserted that he would be the victor in any fisticuffs with Hugh. ‘No contest. I could whip him any day of the week.’

In
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
the insecure heroine begins the film four weeks into the relationship with ‘human rights lawyer and sex god’ Mark, but she is already experiencing wobbles. Her own paranoia and jealousy over his leggy brunette secretary drive a wedge between them and she takes off to Thailand with the unreliable Daniel, only to end up in a Bangkok jail accused of drug smuggling.

Once again, Renée was forced to pile on the pounds for the role, a task which the naturally healthy actress didn’t enjoy. But Colin urged his co-star not to worry, saying that he, like most men, preferred women with a shapely figure. ‘She’s truly very funny,’ he told
Glamour
mag. ‘We all had a ball making it. I do feel sorry for Renée because there’s such a fuss over her weight. I mean, it’s ridiculous because she looks so good with a bit more weight on her and she’s hardly fat! Most men prefer her with her curves. She’s a very good actress and very game and the looks thing gets in the way. I can understand the obsession. It’s the same for all actresses. Actually, it’s probably the same for all women. They get judged on the way they look.’

For his part, Colin was also keeping up his fitness regime in order to impress in yet another clingy wet shirt, but he was far from obsessive about his regime. ‘I go for a run,’ he said. ‘I know that if I ate everything I wanted I’d turn into a blob and that’s age. But I could never take the time it would require to get my body up to LA standards. I would change profession first.’

Filming this time around was a real pleasure for Colin. Having never been involved in a sequel before, the happy reunion brought none of the usual nervousness of first meetings and getting to know fellow cast members. He was particularly fond of Renée, who he says was as generous an actress as he’d ever met.

‘She’ll be there for you off-camera whether you need it or not,’ he said. ‘There are some actors who don’t want to be there for you even if you do need it. But I remember on one occasion, Renée was there for me even when it was a shot of my feet, at four or five in the morning!’

On another occasion, when the pair flew to LA together, ‘she tried to get my incredibly heavy suitcase off the carousel for me,’ Colin recalled. ‘There are a lot of people who’d have people doing that for them. I had to get in there and say, “Wait, Renée, don’t! You’re making me look bad!”’

As well as enjoying time in amiable company, Colin was happy with the way the film was going. ‘I think this film is very funny, funnier than the last,’ he said to
Glamour
. ‘If the first one had bombed then we’d never have made this second film, but it was a sort of unwritten rule that if the first was successful we’d all agree to do another one. I also like getting the chance to take a swing at that obnoxious Hugh Grant again!’

The banter between the two actors reached a new high when the DVD of
Love Actually
was released in 2004. His light-hearted commentary constantly aimed digs at Colin’s acting, his looks and his ageing physique. ‘Hugh is a brilliant raconteur, a very funny guy,’ Colin conceded. ‘He has a go at me from the beginning to the end so much so that the legal department at Universal sent me a copy just in case I wanted to nix anything. He basically sighs or snores whenever I appear on the scene, makes comments about how the actress is having to do all the work, or how I must be using a rinse to colour my hair, or being photographed cleverly to make my jawline look better. I like to think of it as a Bette Davis–Joan Crawford sort of thing.’

Asked which of the
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
actresses he would be he laughed. ‘I would probably say that I’m capable of confining Hugh to a wheelchair and serving him rats. Let him take the Joan Crawford role.’

Away from the
Bridget Jones
set, their paths rarely crossed, but Colin found his name being constantly mentioned in the same breath as Hugh’s. So much so that, referring to his co-star’s ex-girlfriend, he told one journalist, ‘I feel as if I’ve turned into a replacement Liz Hurley. My name’s always
being linked with Hugh’s. Do you think there’s something in it? I actually hardly know the poor man, although I’m sure we’d make a lovely couple.’

In March 2004 Colin achieved a comedy badge of honour when he was asked to be the guest host on
Saturday Night Live
. He introduced himself as ‘the stuffy alternative’ to Hugh Grant.

The comedy on and off screen merely made both men more beloved by the British public.
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
was released in November 2004 to mixed reviews, but the actors won the heartiest praise. Christopher Tookey, in the
Daily Mail
,
said, ‘In Firth, Grant and Paul Bettany (who stood head and shoulders above the mediocrity of the film
Wimbledon
), Britain has the world’s three best rom-com actors.’

Bridget had undoubtedly boosted Colin’s career but he was still keen to draw a line under the Darcy phenomenon and move on.

He stopped short of ruling himself out of another sequel, but he told the
Calgary Sun
, ‘I’m quite content to never do another Bridget Jones movie again, I’ve enjoyed myself, but I want Darcy to get out of my life.’

C
OLIN
MAY
HAVE
thought his brood was noisy when they were all together but in April 2005 he walked on to a set with a lot more potential for chaos. As a widowed father of seven unruly youngsters in
Nanny McPhee
, he had accepted his first role in a fully fledged kids’ movie and his co-stars included children from the ages of fifteen years to six months. Written and directed by
Love Actually
co-star Emma Thompson, and adapted from a children’s book by Christianna Brand, it is the story of a magical nanny who appears at the door when the harried father is at the end of his tether and the kids are out of control.

Thomas Sangster, who had leapt to fame playing Liam Neeson’s stepson in
Love Actually
, was the oldest lad. Ironically, Kelly Macdonald, who had played Colin’s daughter in
My Life So Far
,
now became his love interest as the family maid. Unlike many dads in the industry, Colin was initially reluctant to throw himself into a simple family movie, being habitually drawn towards complex characters.

‘I’d never done a film for children of this age and I wasn’t sure about it,’ he told
Courier-Mail
. ‘I usually play the fairly complicated characters and I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for the innocence of it. Once I got over myself a bit, and it took a couple of days, I had a great time doing it.’ When he arrived on set, however, his reservations disappeared. ‘I thought, “This is an opportunity to have a very enjoyable time.”’ As a joke, he even dressed up in Nanny McPhee’s Victorian nanny costume – complete with bulbous nose, crooked teeth and hairy warts – to surprise his fellow cast members.

In her wonderful diaries from the shoot, Emma Thompson recalled that her leading man needed a little coaxing to leave his darker side behind. ‘Colin, who has come to us from a series of more serious pieces, has to be dragged from the dramatic into comic exaggeration like someone being pulled from a pit. He is teased mercilessly. He and Kelly are so approachable and don’t seem to mind interference (mine).’

She also revealed that the script called for Colin to ‘skitter’, meaning to run to and fro in a blind panic, and Colin told her, ‘I don’t like skittering’.

On 27 April 2005, she wrote, ‘I am in heaven. I am in an orchard next to Mrs Quickly’s house. The children are playing with some geese. Colin jumped over a bush to grab Evangeline, and in his green frock coat he looks like a gigantic frog. Then he smoulders most effectively at her, which gave me a fright after all the comic invention. I suddenly remembered he’s a sex symbol’.

Once he was busy filming in the beautiful countryside of Buckinghamshire and Dorset, Colin entered into the spirit of the film and relished the idea of making children laugh with
his slapstick antics. ‘Really, the film is just trying to delight all kids,’ he explained. ‘There is something quite uplifting about that. We are actually just trying to please children. It’s that simple.’

Although targeting tots for the first time in his career, he decided not to show it to his own children, who would be five and three when it was released in October 2005.

‘I don’t push myself at them,’ he said. ‘The little ones are very little. It’s weird to see a parent on the screen and I don’t think I’m going to hasten towards that moment. They’ve seen me in magazines and on buses, but they probably think everyone’s dads are on buses.’

He did take his children on set, however, just before filming a massive food fight when everyone ended up covered in brightly coloured icing. ‘What looks a rollicking good time is a painstaking and drawn-out process,’ he explained. ‘Those things weren’t edible. My children came to the set and saw all these pink and purple buns – I had to tell them not only would you break your teeth if you tried to eat one, you’d be hospitalized if you succeeded.’

While working on the movie, Colin met Angela Lansbury, who proved useful when he was researching his next role. In
Where the Truth Lies
he was to play a fading entertainer with a very dark side. His screen partner was Kevin Bacon and, although the story was fictional, the characters in the original Rupert Holmes novel were loosely based on the relationship between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Angela had known the Rat Pack in the fifties, at the height of their fame, ‘and she was fantastic with her advice’, said Colin.

Although the part was originally for an Italian-American, like Martin, director Atom Egoyan asked Colin to play it in the style more akin to British stars David Niven and Rex Harrison. The film is set in the seventies, fifteen years after a young woman was found dead in the double act’s hotel suite. Neither was charged with the crime and they haven’t spoken about it since but an investigative reporter attempts to get to the bottom of the fateful night for a book. Colin’s character is a beloved entertainer and comic whose onstage persona hides a violent streak and a penchant for seedy sex.

One notorious scene called for Colin and Kevin to indulge in a threesome with the hotel maid, played by Rachel Blanchard, who is later found dead.

‘Actually, I was saved by Kevin’s butt,’ joked the British star to the
Sydney Morning Herald
. ‘I hadn’t been filming the week that some solid shagging took place between Kevin and various women, so by the time I showed up there was no interest at all. The crew were so sick of the sight of his butt and mine offered nothing new. People make a lot of the sexual thing but that’s really only one more weird thing we get to do.’

In fact, Colin found the spontaneous violence harder to cope with than the nudity, but he welcomed the contradiction his character represented. ‘It was a chance for me to play with the perception of me that I carry around, which is the buttoned-up Englishman, well-educated, formally charming sort of chap,’ he said. ‘I’m a rather ropey shabby individual. What you see on stage is what you might expect to see, the educated Englishman, so when I walk off stage and beat someone to a pulp or behave with sexual excess it is more of a shock.