I would love to say I realised, but I didn’t. Not when we were told the new work experience girl was called ‘Bridget’. Not when she did almost zero real work for a fortnight. Not when she turned up with a cake for someone’s leaving drinks that must have cost about £200. I had no idea.
Because back in 2000, I didn’t expect to be sharing an office with Academy Award winner and global sweetheart Renée Zellweger, so, well, I wasn’t really on the lookout. It was only my second job, working in the press office of a publishing house. Yes, admittedly it was the same company that published Bridget Jones’ Diary, but as I said, I wasn’t on the lookout.
Instead, as the most junior person in the office, I was thrilled that there was a dogsbody arriving and made it my business to show her where the fax machine was, teach her how to do a proof mailing, and to tell her where all the good places to get a sandwich at lunch were. In fact, I asked her for a sandwich a few times, but she always seemed to have somewhere to go at 1pm, in a smart black car that slid away as I headed to Pret.
I suppose she did look a little chicer than the rest of us. I was wearing camisoles and second-hand cardigans from Portobello that the stall holder swore was cashmere, whereas her candy-coloured cropped sweaters were unmistakably the real thing. And she was so friendly and always happy to chat, but I just couldn’t figure out how she was getting away with doing so little. The boss didn’t even have a word when instead of cropping our book reviews, she spent half a morning cutting little photos of Jim Carrey out of the papers and sticking them around her monitor! (He was, it turned out, her boyfriend at the time.)
The one thing she loved doing was answering the phone. After all, these were the days when emails were a rarity and still considered less polite than a personal call. But by week two it was starting to irritate me. We sat in cubicles facing each other, as the office junior I was the one answering most calls. 'Hello, publicity!' I’d say cheerily, day in day out. Then, from the other side of the cubicle divider I started to hear what sounded like my own voice taking a call if I was already on the line. 'Hello, publicity!' came her cheery tones as I started to flinch. Was she mocking me? Why?
She was, as it turned out, not mocking me - but most definitely copying me. Because I was part of the team at Pan Macmillan who worked alongside her for three weeks in summer 2000 while she practised her British accent before filming Bridget Jones’ Diary. An accent that twenty-five years later, most people agree she absolutely nailed.
For a decade or so, I didn’t tell anyone this story – I found it a bit embarrassing. But as the new movie comes out and I too find myself a single parent half wishing that Leo Woodall would materialise at the bottom of a tree, I have renewed affection for that me, those days. I’m now working as an English teacher in a secondary school, and recently a teenager told me I sounded just like Bridget Jones.
Au contraire, I told her. Bridget Jones sounds just like me.