Patrick Dempsey on Bridget Jones and life after Grey’s Anatomy

Is this Bridget Jones’s baby daddy? Samuel Fishwick meets Patrick Dempsey to talk love, money and house-hunting in the capital
YMC jumper, £170 (youmustcreate.com). JAMES PERSE T-Shirt, £95, at mrporter.com. TAG HEUER Monaco Calibre 12 watch, £4,050 (tagheuer.co.uk). Jeans, Patrick’s own
Francesca Allen

As a Hollywood heart-throb cashing blockbuster pay cheques, Patrick Dempsey is not the sort of person you’d expect to find ranting about London property prices. Still, sitting in a Fulham photo studio, wearing Rag & Bone jeans and a plainwhite T-shirt, that’s exactly what the star of the upcoming movie Bridget Jones’s Baby is doing. ‘It’s out of control. The space you get,’ he complains, motioning to the tiny box room we’re sitting in, ‘it’s like this room we’re in now.’

Dempsey became a committed Anglophile while filming Bridget Jones’s Baby last August, and started searching for a property in Notting Hill. He loved people-watching in the Royal Parks, chatting to strangers on the Tube and taking his kids to Winter Wonderland. At the weekends, he’d jump into one of his vintage cars and head for the home counties. ‘Some places have a wonderful quality, and some are very haunting. Especially when you’re in the countryside around London. It’s the roads, the sheep, the agricultural aspect… When you see the leaves, and how beautiful the old oaks are...’ As ‘McDreamy’, aka Dr Derek Shepherd in the TV sensation Grey’s Anatomy, Dempsey occupied the waking fantasies of millions of fans worldwide. His own dreams seem a little less... steamy. Still, even there he has problems. ‘If you start to look at country houses, the Downton Abbey effect has skyrocketed the value of these estates. So… it’s best to rent.’

Dempsey is about to be propelled back into the nation’s ventricles. Bridget Jones’s Baby hits screens in September; he plays Jack Qwant, millionaire founder of a fictional Tinder equivalent: ‘He invented this dating app that brings people together, yet he hasn’t found anyone — and he finds her accidentally,’ says Dempsey, who dukes it out with Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth (‘he’s very, very funny. So dry’), for the paternity of Jones’s baby.

Hugh Grant, who played Darcy’s rival, Daniel Cleaver, in the first two films, was originally approached to return to that role but decided against it. ‘The book’s excellent, by the way, but the script is completely different,’ Grant told reporters at the time. Dempsey’s more upbeat. ‘She’s completely iconic,’ he gushes of Renée Zellweger’s Jones. Anyway, he says, Emma Thompson — who plays an obstetrician and co-wrote the script with David Nicholls and Helen Fielding — found it funny ‘if you can get her to laugh, you know you’re in good shape’.

Neither does he buy into the criticism that Bridget, with her calorie-counting and fixation on finding a man, is out of step with our more feminist times. ‘The first movie was done 15 years ago, so it’s not current.’

SUNSPEL shirt, £75 (sunspel.com). JAMES PERSE T-Shirt, £95, at mrporter.com. Brunello Cucinelli suit trousers, £3,130 for full suit (3 Burlington Gardens, W1S). CONVERSE shoes, £60 (converse.com)
Francesca Allen

He points to the fact that his character is a dating-app mogul, and feels the swipe-right culture has heralded a new age of female empowerment. We’ll be meeting a changed Bridget, he reassures me. ‘I think it’s good, where she’s at in her life, what her desires are — and her goals are completely different.’

It’s been just over a year since the California-based actor left Grey’s Anatomy. In April 2015 his character, the brilliant neurosurgeon slash hospital hunk who spawned the worldwide ‘McDreamy’ fan base, was killed off in series 11. ‘They’re still upset I’m not there,’ he says of his fans. ‘It’s shocking, sometimes, what people say. I don’t know if it’s just the nature of television, or being able to watch something so close on your iPhone or your iPad, that the intimacy or relationship with that character makes them more like a family member… or a lover.’ Some of them are explicit. ‘That’s the thing that’s either good or bad about social media. You don’t know who’s sending it. They can hide behind whatever name you come up with, and those things can either be empowering or dangerous.’ In the real world, he has found things just as challenging. ‘You never have a private moment if you’re out — either someone is taping you, or shooting a picture or wanting contact with you. So you’re on, all the time’.

YMC jumper, £170 (youmustcreate.com)
Francesca Allen

On the upside, ‘I made a tremendous amount of money,’ he says, straight-faced. The money has fuelled his love of the finer things — particularly watches, cars (he bought himself a vintage Porsche with his first major pay cheque, for the Eighties rom-com Can’t Buy Me Love, and maintains a vintage collection) and motor racing (he owns his own motorsports team, Dempsey Racing, finished second at the famous Le Mans 24-hour race last June and won the FIA WEC Six Hours of Fuji competition last October). He’s also maintained a lucrative sideline in endorsements — he’s modelled for L’Oréal and Versace and is an ‘ambassador’ for the watch brand Tag Heuer. Today he wears a replica of the iconic Monaco watch face worn by Steve McQueen, another actor-cum-petrolhead. That’s not a coincidence — Tag Heuer is a favourite among major British and American racers.

In January last year, after 15 years of marriage, Dempsey’s wife, Jillian Fink, a respected make-up artist, filed for divorce, according to reports she cited the strain of his motoring obsession. Yet she’s with him in London today and divorce proceedings have reportedly been dropped. Are they reconciled? ‘Yeah, I think so,’ he says. ‘You have to work at everything. And you cannot do everything. Something has to be sacrificed.’ That something, it would seem, is racing.

After last year’s race-track successes he’s reined in the time he devotes to the sport. Instead, he wants to spend more time with his children. — he has a daughter, Tallulah Fyfe, 14, and twin boys, Sullivan Patrick and Darby Galen, 9. ‘I’ve sort of stepped back — I’m the team owner, but time goes by so quickly with my kids that I don’t want to miss that. Last year we had a good team, and a good car, it was the right moment... where I could focus 100 per cent on doing a full season. Now it’s time to put that personal philosophy into my kids, allowing them to find their goals, their passions.’

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He is assistant soccer coach for his sons’ football team, and he’s teaching all three children to cook. He’s conscious of setting a good example in his work, too. ‘You do think: how much violence is in the script? Is it necessary violence? Is this the right step for the career? Does this change the game?’

The filming on Bridget Jones’s Baby wrapped last autumn and now he’s back ­living in California. But something tells me we’ll being seeing a lot more of Dempsey in London. ‘I’d love to be here,’ he says, wistfully. The US primaries have left him in despair. ‘Our election has been so dragged out… It’s a complete circus. I don’t think any of them are the best candidates for the positions. The people who are the most qualified don’t even want to step into that arena. I haven’t landed on anyone.’ Trump? ‘A complete catastrophe.’

A loyal Top Gear fan he says it would be ‘fun’ to be a guest when the relaunch hits screens later this month. And he’s developed a taste for Mayfair’s shopping scene. ‘I went to this amazing hat store, Lock & Co in St James Street, one of the oldest hat stores in the world. The history of it, and the interaction with the gentleman who was helping me, we’ve almost lost that. Because you can almost order anything on your computer. It’s nice to go into a specialist store that’s not been swallowed up by a Walmart or something.’ What did he buy? ‘Caps — the peaked type.’ What a hipster. He’ll be renting a flatshare in Deptford in no time.

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