Red carpet premieres are black tie sorts of things. Everyone knows the drill: the female star wears a ballgown, the male wears a smart dark suit, and they pose stiffly, giving their best “blue steel” for the cameras. At the Bridget Jones premiere last week, Leo Woodall was having none of that. The 28-year-old middle-class boy from west London pitched up wearing a brown corduroy suit, looking nothing at all like a geography teacher from 1988. He smiled goofily and looked ever so slightly mussed, like he’d just got out of bed.
He and his co-star Renée Zellweger looked like they were actually enjoying themselves, which in the usually grumpy world of A-list actors is quite something. Talking about his character in the film, Woodall said: “He’s a bit like me — he’s young and happy and just wants to have a good time.” And just like that he might have propelled himself to the top of the list to be the next James Bond.
“He’s young and happy and just wants to have a good time.”
What Bridget Jones might be about to prove is what One Day suggested: that Woodall has cross-generational appeal. Middle-aged women can swoon over his puppyish good looks and uncomplicated charm without feeling pervy, as indeed does Bridget Jones herself in the trailer. Gen Z can swoon over how in touch he might be with his emotions, or whatever it is that Gen Z swoon over.
He’s tall, blond and handsome, but in an unthreatening way, not the “scary, complicated, don’t mess with me” way of Daniel Craig. He has a natural voice of indeterminate poshness and the range to play Bond. In The White Lotus he was an appealingly cheeky wrong ‘un, a Cockney narcissist. In One Day he was an appealingly cheeky chancer, cocky but with a heart of gold, if you looked hard enough. In Prime Target, the hot new Apple TV+ thriller, he moves beyond rom-coms to play an action hero/maths genius.
And now in Bridget Jones he appears, from the trailer at least, to be a wholesome park ranger who rescues our heroine when she gets stuck up a tree. He emerges from a swimming pool clutching a small dog, in his very own Mr. Darcy wet shirt moment. Friends who’ve seen the film say that when he first appeared on screen everyone in the audience started to giggle excitedly, because they’d all watched the trailer and this was the bit they’d been waiting for.
Interestingly he was only cast in Bridget Jones after One Day was a hit. The latter was beloved of the middle-aged women who’d been at university in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the book was set. By happy chance they’re exactly the demographic the Bridget Jones producers were looking for.
Woodall has cross-generational appeal.
Which leads us to Bond, whose producers are in a bind. A recent piece by Jonathan Dean in The Sunday Times said that the consensus was that the next Bond would be white, male and early to mid-thirties, so he could devote a decade to the franchise. He needs to have what Dean called a “Goldilocks” level of fame: not too much, not too little.
For Woodall it’s tick, tick, tick. All the many actors who’ve been touted for the role in the three years since No Time to Die was released are now out of the picture for one reason or another: Tom Hardy, Tom Hiddleston, Aidan Turner, Paul Mescal, Regé-Jean Page, James Norton … all too old, too busy, too overexposed or too flash-in-the-pan. Woodall also looks like he’s probably not a dick, which is a useful and much underrated trait on the set of a franchise like Bond, where everyone’s going to be working with him for years to come.
Finally, in his personal life he could have his pick of popsicles from Love Island, but like Robert Pattinson — another nice boy from west London — he doesn’t don’t really go for Love Islanders. Woodall met his girlfriend, Meghann Fahy, 34, on the set of The White Lotus two years ago and she’s smart, cool and a talented actress in her own right. She’s also older than him, which shouldn’t be appealing but is. And while she flew in from the US to support him last week, she stayed discreetly backstage. They went to the afterparty together, but it was his night, not hers, so she left the red carpet to him. Then again, maybe it was the brown cords.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is in theaters starting February 14
Hilary Rose is a longtime columnist and features writer at The Times of London
