Renee Zellweger is sitting on a couch looking at the rain-covered Opera House.
"It's not failure to not succeed," she says. "You just go on and do the next thing."
Zellweger is sitting beside actor Patrick Dempsey, her co-star in Bridget Jones's Baby, the third instalment in the Bridget Jones franchise. He is nodding, opening his mouth to say something.
"And it's being yourself, being a genuine article," Zellweger says. "Because there's plenty of people to do the other jobs of what you're not. The appeal is to be unique in your specialness. Be unique."
Zellweger is talking about Bridget Jones, the fictional character that lit up so many women's lives in the late 1990s and who became a trailblazer in the quest to be oneself rather than who we are expected to be.
Heroine of imperfection, her greatest power might be the determination to KBO, keep buggering on, the mantra used by writer Helen Fielding (after Winston Churchill) when she introduced the self-improvement-obsessed singleton 20 years ago in an anonymously written newspaper column.
Zellweger is also talking about ideals of human perfection, in particular what is perceived as the epitome of female beauty.
We are "made to believe that there's some value in meeting a social paradigm", Zellweger says. "It's been that way for centuries. It's always been that way with paradigms of beauty.
"But that's why Bridget's so much fun. She reminds us that outside of that there's a different truth. And the truth is that everybody has something to contribute. And everybody has appeal in what they are as individuals.
"And it's much more powerful than looking like everybody else and meeting that standard that is unattainable in most cases, especially today.
"And, who cares by the way?
"It's so much more fun to be around a person who isn't consumed with thoughts about that. But is just busy doing and being who they are. It's so ... it's magic."
Dempsey jumps up in his seat.
"Bridget's an archetype that's inspired other generations of women, Tina Fey in 30 Rock, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck, talking about ideas of perfection and beauty," he says. "And they're talking about it openly and honestly, that's the thing.
"It's not in denial. It's not swept under the carpet. It's 'Here's the truth'."
It is 21 years since Fielding first introduced Bridget Jones in her columns in The Independent newspaper, the first of which appeared on February 28, 1995.
It began:
"8st 13, alcohol units 2 (excellent), cigarettes 7, calories 3100 (poor).
"2pm. Oh why hasn't Daniel rung? Hideous, wasted weekend glaring psychopathically at the phone, and eating things. I cannot believe I convinced myself I was keeping the entire weekend free to work, when in fact I was on permanent date-with-Daniel standby."
Only Fielding's section editor knew who was writing the frank and cuttingly witty column about a single, working woman taking on life and love with accident-prone optimism.
Fielding has said she did not want any other colleagues at the newspaper to know it was her work because "all the journalists on my desk were frightfully serious and writing about New Labour and global warming – I didn't want them to know that I was writing about why it takes three hours between waking up in the morning and leaving the house".
But the column's success led Fielding to be revealed as the author and, in 1996, the novel Bridget Jones's Diary, loosely inspired by Pride and Prejudice, was published. In 2001, it was adapted into a successful film starring Zellweger as the heroine, Colin Firth as her frosty barrister true love, Mark Darcy, and Hugh Grant as publisher and caddish womaniser, Daniel Cleaver.
Its sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, ended with Bridget, freed from a Thai jail, experienced in lesbian kissing, and engaged to Mark Darcy. She signs off with the declaration: "Bridget Jones has cocked things up for the very last time."
But, in Bridget Jones's Baby, set 15 years later, she does. Bridget is 43, successful as a TV news producer, triumphant with weight issues but still frustrated by love and loneliness. After unexpected dalliances with handsome billionaire dating guru Jack Qwant, played by Dempsey, and an about-to-be divorced Mark Darcy, she discovers she is pregnant but does not know who the father is.
The story is based on columns by Fielding and not her most recent book Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, which follows Bridget's life five years after the death of Darcy as she raises their two children. Published in 2013, it sat at the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list for six months.
Zellweger describes Fielding as "hilarious" in person.
"She's soft-spoken but her words are filled with irony and wit and she's quick," she says. "So quick with words. She's easy to make laugh. She's a beauty.
"She was a little bit surprised at how much of a phenomenon Bridget became. Because it was so personal for her. It was just before the second film when she was writing the script she talked about her delight at how many people related, you know?
"Her writing resonates so beautifully about someone who is part of the everyday."
Such is Bridget Jones' reach it is hard to believe she pre-dates Sex and the City, Tinder and text messages. She writes her diary on an iPad now and her once grimy neighbourhood is now the home of bearded hipsters but, as Zellweger says, Bridget still has her inner dialogue, her insecurities and what she wishes she could change about herself.
"And that's what we relate to because we all have those moments when we say, 'Oh if only .. ' and 'Why is my hair so stupid?' and 'Why can't I?' And 'Why is this?'. We all have that," Zellweger says.
"And it's shaped by social pressures and cultural pressures but also by an ideal that we set for ourselves. What we prefer. And where does that come from? I don't know. A lot of stuff."
In 2014, Zellweger was, famously, the subject of media comment exclaiming, somewhat bizarrely, that she looked different than she used to years previously.
In June this year an article in Variety prompted the actress to write an essay titled "We Can Do Better" for The Huffington Post discussing not whether she had had plastic surgery on her face, or even how the basics of human ageing worked, but how "humiliating tabloid stories, mean-spirited judgments and false information" are harmful and a waste of news reporting.
"Maybe we could talk more about why we seem to collectively share an appetite for witnessing people diminished and humiliated with attacks on appearance and character and how it impacts younger generations and struggles for equality," she wrote in the essay.
Bridget represents someone who is is ultimately triumphant despite ideals of what is perfect, she tells me.
"We know that by being privy to her inner dialogue about it," she says. "It's so beautiful because we're going through that ourselves with everything.
"There's apprehension, we have anxieties and, you know, you're not allowed to. You're supposed to put on a brave face and you've got to go on through and say 'What am I afraid of?' and you've gotta be perfect with your dress and get everything right.
"And, gosh, it's so nice to think, 'Oh right, I understand that, she understands me as I struggle with those things as well'. Bridget is undefeated."
Bridget Jones's Baby is also empowering, it can be argued, because it features a lot of kissing and, in particular Colin Firth as Mark Darcy, the modern-day version of Jane Austen's Mr Darcy.
In the film Bridget wanders mistakenly into Jack Qwant's yurt (think glamping) at a music festival and, after a short discussion about whose yurt it is, they engage in proper romance.
Later, when Bridget encounters Mark Darcy at a christening, and discovers he is no longer with his wife, they also embark on thrillingly lingering kissing, et al.
Zellweger attributes the smouldering romance, in particular Firth's burningly intense lip-brushing kisses with Bridget to Sharon Maguire, who directed Bridget Jones's Baby and Bridget Jones's Diary.
"What can I say?" she says "Woman director. Woman director knows women.
"It's the truly scary moment, the about to kiss moment, not the taking the clothes off. It's that bit when you're hoping it's going to happen and it's [high voice] 'Oh ... will ... oh will he kiss me'."
"There's something old fashioned about it," Dempsey says. "I think you look at the romantic comedies and the comedies that are coming out now, we've lost something.
"The courtship and the sophistication of the 1920s and '30s, it's just been overshadowed by these big blockbusters."
Bridget Jones's Baby keeps audiences guessing who the father of Bridget's baby is until the end. It also leaves the question of who Bridget will end up with, Mark Darcy or Jack Qwant, until very late in the plot.
But then, fans of Bridget, who began reading her in their 20s and have lived through two decades of finding and losing love, saying the wrong thing, trying to eat right, drinking too many glasses of wine and dealing with sociopath managers at work have also waited a long time to see what happens to her.
Dempsey jumps up again.
"You know, if I may quote Colin, I'm sure he won't mind, he said he's happy that it took time for them to come back to this," he says. "Because it allowed the characters to live and breathe so that there's a stronger point of view coming into it.
"He said it's nice that there's been a bit of a break and there's now a hunger for Bridget and returning to the story.
"I think we're living in a world of superheroes but her super strength is her humanity. The vulnerability, the character flaws, all of that is what is so accessible about her."
Zellweger claps her hands.
"She makes it OK for us to not be perfect," she says. "And I think we all crave that."
KBO. Keep buggering on.
Bridget Jones's Baby opens on September 15.
