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Renée Zellweger reveals finding her Bridget Jones voice ‘took a minute’

Renée Zellweger was thrilled to be reunited with Hugh Grant.

Renée Zellweger has admitted it took her a while to find her Bridget Jones voice again when she reprised the role for the fourth film.

Having played the hopeless romantic three times before, Zellweger thought she would be able to drop back into Jones’s English accent easily. However, she soon discovered that wasn’t the case and enlisted the help of dialect coaches to help her get it back.

“It was weird this time. I thought it would be familiar and easy, but it wasn’t,” she said on The Graham Norton Show. “I tried talking like Bridget as soon as I arrived in London, but it took a minute. I thought it would be habit by now but it’s not. Luckily, I had very strict dialect coaches along the way.”

American actress Zellweger made her debut as the British singleton in 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary before returning for 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby. She is now back for a fourth time in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, in which the character returns to the dating scene following the death of her husband Mark Darcy.

This outing sees the return of Hugh Grant as Jones’s earlier love interest Daniel Cleaver after he sat out of the 2016 film. In a teaser at the end that movie, it was revealed that Cleaver had survived a plane crash, giving Grant the option to return.

Zellweger told Norton that she was thrilled to reunite with the Notting Hill star.

“I was hopeful but also surprised ’cause he was dead. But if you are going to bring someone back to life let it be Daniel Cleaver. I am so glad they found him alive at the end of the third film so he could come back if he wanted to. He is so brilliant,” the Chicago star shared.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, also starring Emma Thompson, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall, will be released in U.K. cinemas on Valentine’s Day.

The Graham Norton Show airs in the U.K. on Friday nights.

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