When the long-awaited trailer for Bridget Jones’s Baby arrived online, we had an inkling that Sarah Solemani’s Miranda – Bridget’s new straight-talking, Tinder-swiping colleague – would be something to look forward to. Happily, our suspicions were correct. In a film where old favourites like Mark Darcy and Shazza et al are joined by a host of, as Bridget might put it, ‘v. good’ new characters, it’s TV anchor-woman Miranda who we want to adopt as our fictional best friend.
‘Like most women, you grow up feeling like Bridget is your best friend, so it wasn’t a stretch to play it in the film,’ Sarah says. A younger sidekick to the now 40-something Bridget, her character lacks the introspection of most on-screen millennials – and is all the funnier for it. Instead of pandering to Bridget’s remaining neuroses, Miranda takes a bulldozer to them. ‘She loves to have a good old time and she makes sure that Bridget has fun by putting her on Tinder, taking her to musical festivals – they generally have a riot together,’ Sarah says.
‘She’s really confident, she doesn’t care about what people think. Bridget’s the same, but there are still anxieties there about getting older, not having a child – I don’t think Miranda has that,’ she adds. 'Sometimes people find it hard to believe that women can go about their lives and not feel ashamed or insecure. Some women are just cool with things; they want to bring everyone up and have a good time.’
As far as good times go, it seems that the Bridget wrap party was full of them. ‘[Actress] Beattie Edmondson and I decided to jump fully clothed into the swimming pool of the posh hotel. We weren’t supposed to go in because there were candles floating in it; it was a safety hazard, but we did – and we got chucked out,’ Sarah reminisces. ‘The person who laughed the hardest and took the most photos was Renée…’
While you’ll recognise the 34-year-old actress from the BBC3 sit-coms Him & Her and Bad Education, the third Bridget Jones installment is certainly her biggest role to date. Was it daunting to join such a well-loved franchise? ‘I’m a huge fan, which made the audition very nerve wracking, because I felt very connected to the whole world of it, all the characters, and all the actors I loved in it,’ she tells us. ‘It was an honour to be in a scene with them.’ On set, though, there was no sense of new crowd versus old handers. ‘There were a lot of comic actors that I’ve worked with before like Joanna Scanlan, Nick Mohammed and Beattie Edmondson, and obviously Patrick Dempsey had also joined the cast. It was just genuinely a really open, playful set, and that was thanks to Sharon Macguire, the director.’
As a lifelong Bridget fan, what does Sarah see as the secret to Bridget’s enduring success? ‘Who knows what that magic is – something to do with her honesty and her sense of joy. Even though she falls down and makes mistakes, she picks herself up and carries on. She finds the joy in things.’
Watch our full interview with Sarah Solemani
Watch director Sharon Macguire and producer Debra Hayward discuss Bridget's enduring appeal in the video below
READ MORE: Renée Zellweger: 'The Secret To Bridget's Success? Her Humanity'