From Mr Bean to Blackadder, Rowan Atkinson breaks down his most iconic characters

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is called iconic characters oh i see no i don't do idents or introductions [Music] man vs b trevor bingley who's our hero in man vs b is just a very very nice man actually kind of nicer than most of the characters that i play who tend to be very selfish or self-centered or self-obsessed in some way you know particularly mr bean so actually we decided to create a character who was in many ways more real more three-dimensional he's a decent sort of family man who's just gone through a divorce he's very short of money but he gets this job house-sitting for this very very wealthy couple who are going on holiday for a week and he has a lot of trouble with a b on all 14 counts of dangerous driving the destruction of priceless artwork oh arson that's basically the story man vs b was very difficult to shoot actually because we couldn't find a real house to shoot in because it was during covid and no one who owned an extremely nice house wanted a film crew in it so we had to create a house of our own in the studio which of course means you don't have a garden and we need a garden and so we had four different locations for the garden two or three different locations for the interior and one big interior set and to be honest i preferred the simplicity and the cheapness if you like of some of the early mr bean stuff which as you say we start wide you know there's a lot of wide shooting and i like wide shooting i'm a great believer in what charlie chaplin said is that a life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long shot if you sit back visually on a situation it automatically becomes funnier i mentioned which is a french comedian called jack tatty who said that comedy begins in the legs making a character more real and more sympathetic uh and more identifiable doesn't necessarily make him funny because in many ways what's funny about mr bean for example is his complete sort of selfishness and he's a natural born anarchist so he's a child trapped in a man's body whereas trevor is an adult so it's not necessarily funny to make him more three-dimensional but he becomes very obsessed and very self-centered so in other words he leaves his niceness behind and that is when he becomes funny in reality we didn't have a bee you'll be unsurprised to hear we had a we had a plastic b on the end of a rod if we wanted to be to crawl across the worktop then we had some professional puppeteers and quite a lot of it you know when i was just you know acting like that in a room we didn't have anything at all it was just down to me to imagine the bee and to be able to mime the situation if you like well enough to make it look convincing it was nice to look at a bee because your eyes of course always look different you know that if if he's close you look like that and the beats further away you look like that and i think the b i mean the cgi the b is amazing i think it's one of the finest cgi animals ever to be seen on screen mr bean i probably enjoyed playing mr bean the most because he's a character who's furthest away from my own character as a person i don't like him at all i think he's very odd and pretty weird and not very nice what's fun about it is it it's it's an escape you know when you play the character you don't care what you do it's a weird kind of release first time we did the character i'm fairly certain was 1979 on stage and that was when we had developed i think two sketches one was the beach sketch in which he's trying to change into his swimming trunks on the beach and then there's the one in the church in which he's sitting in the church and he misbehaves while someone's spouting a sermon the character didn't have a name he didn't have to have a name because there were no words spoken in the sketches in which he featured they were silent sketches but then when we thought actually these sketches are quite funny it's quite an interesting idea to develop a comedy character who doesn't use words television comedy had developed from radio comedy which was a very wordy you know tradition and we had to give him a name in order to give the television show a name so we came up with the name of mr bean we were thinking mr white for a while that was an idea but that sounded a bit dull we thought of you know vegetables and mr bean seemed to be short sharp and to the point the one i remember shattering me the most making me the most tired and exhausted i have ever been was a movie we did called mr bean's holiday in which she travels down through france to the south france to the cannes film festival and we did a sequence in provence which was where he gets caught up with a peloton of cyclists and he overtakes them with with great ease [Music] i didn't overtake them with great ease i had to put in a tremendous amount of effort and once we've done a couple of takes of that i was absolutely dead because i'm not a cyclist i'm not fit i'm not an athlete they cycled very slowly to make sure that i overtook them very very hard i remember i remember thinking that i nearly killed killed myself with the exhaustion in those days we tended to do things for real because it was cheaper and cgi didn't really exist with the sophistication that it now has i mean certainly the wider shots if you can see the wheels of the car on the road then we were doing it for real if it's a tighter shot then we may have been on a trailer being pulled along just to make it easy we tended i tended to just you know do it i remember you know we went to the shot of the of the car coming straight towards camera you know the cameraman was here and i just drove straight at him you know and you would never do to do that in this day and age i mean i stopped you know before i hit him but i might not have done all the brakes might have failed because of that you're not allowed to do that kind of thing anymore but in those days we did [Applause] [Music] the black adder is a recurring character in history we wrote a sitcom in which over four series you see him in four different eras of british history the essence of the blackout it's about hierarchy there's a you know either it's the royal court or it's the uh or it's the army which has a very you know definable you know levels of status effectively in every subsequent series i play you know the ancestor the descendant of the person in the previous series in the first series he's a prince precisely in the second series he's a lord bloke you executed today sure he's dead what chopped his head off that usually does the trick third series he's a butler lead on my girl i shall and in the fourth series he's a captain in the british army in the first world war yeah must be pretty impressed having squadron commander the lord flash heart drop in on your squally bit of line actually no i was more impressed by the contents of my handkerchief the last time i blew my nose in the first series he was a bit more of an idiot in the second third and fourth series he's a cleverer man sort of stuck in the middle of a hierarchy he'd love to move up but he finds it very very difficult to do so and he certainly doesn't want to move down towards his sidekick baldrick yes and your definition of dog is not a cat excellent and he's always the middle guy he's the sort of middle management guy who resents those above him and he resents those below it but he had a wonderful sort of weary cynicism about the world and that i think is what made him surprisingly identifiable and also made him funny the big changes in the first series in the second series was we went from a very extravagant location-based semi-film-like texture to something well we just had to make something much more effective and much more funny and much more cheaply so we ended up with with a sort of three-set sitcom so there are only three sets and the action just moves between the three sets and then the third series yeah we were in in the region c period with george iii on the throne and the prince regent in charge is that right sorry history was never my strong point you know richard and ben elton richie curtis and ben elton who really made the blackout of what it was it was just whatever they thought was going to work best whenever i've been invited to do one of his films i think i've always said yes so if i'm not in one of his films then he hasn't invited me which which which he's perfectly entitled not to do well like love actually you know is a case in point which was when he asked me to do the small part of the salesman in the in the shop could we be quite quick [Music] it was just a sweet funny little part it took one all-night shoot in selfridges on oxford street and uh and it was a very nice thing to have done johnny english johnny english is a british spy who's not as good as he thinks he is he always overreaches himself his ambition is always greater than his skill the joke is in that discrepancy between you know reality and ambition the master criminal sees not a room but a series of opportunities should i come in through the window possibly should i drop down from the ceiling perhaps actually because one thing i think we can be fairly confident about that is that they didn't come up through the fruit he's a curious thing actually a relatively rare character because he used to be called richard latham and he was a character in some commercials that we made for barclaycard in the 90s no ordinary buyer two clicks of a cap and it will render any assailant immobile very dangerous in the wrong hands take over for a buff would you moment we made the commercials to look like feature films we'll never make that plane sir nonsense our carriage awaits it was a bit of a no-brainer to say well actually why don't we just make a feature when we're trying to think of a name for for the movies i like sort of you know the name of the character in there like mr bean and so in trying to think of a name we thought richard latham was a bit dull but johnny english had a certain johnny english i'm here to see pegasus still no sense rushing things i did some most of the driving stuff i did i did what i was allowed to do they are very very reluctant to allow the star actors to do them but i remember doing those things here in the first johnny english when i fly down on the rope and grab the crown from john malkovich's head [Music] i hated every single one of them i must have done it 25 times this swinging on a big rope so i did some and i didn't do others [Music]
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Channel: British GQ
Views: 5,929,388
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: blackadder, blackadder rowan atkinson, british gq, gq, gq heroes, gq rowan atkinson, iconic characters, johnny english, man vs bee, man vs bee rowan atkinson, mr bean, mr bean funny, mr bean rowan atkinson, rowan atkinson, rowan atkinson 2022, rowan atkinson blackadder, rowan atkinson blackadder interview, rowan atkinson gq, rowan atkinson iconic characters, rowan atkinson interview, rowan atkinson interview 2022, rowan atkinson mr bean, rowan atkinson mr bean interview
Id: wq2T1h6tgDY
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Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)
Published: Fri Jun 24 2022
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