4 saturday review Saturday June 11 2022 | the timesit was.” But a lot of singular talents up
there? “Yes, exactly, but for me that was
fantastic because I knew that when Ste-
phen Fry walked on set I could hand him
the baton and say, ‘Right, it’s your job to be
funny for the next three minutes.’”
Does the pressure get worse with age?
“No, but it’s just as bad. Just thinking that
whatever you’re doing, you could do bet-
ter, that’s the problem. You think it was
OK, but surely there’s something better
there somewhere? It’s the perfectionist
feeling, I suppose. And perfectionism is all
very well, but it is a kind of disease.”
When he sees the final product, can
he laugh? “I can, but I rarely laugh, physi-
cally, out loud at anything. I can just see
when it works.”
Rarely totally satisfied, Atkinson sayscover story
‘Perfectionism is a kind of
disease, always thinking
you could be doing it better’
Rowan Atkinson talks to Andrew Billen about the success of Blackadder and Mr Bean,
and why he’s his own harshest judge, as he stars in a new Netflix series, Man vs Bee
agenda in relation to the bee.” So, the focus
is on Trevor’s pratfalls, although Atkin-
son’s comedy is not really slapstick. He can
make us laugh with a hand gesture and, of
course, with his infinitely malleable face;
the “gift that gives on giving”, as Davies
puts it. The only big laugh Mr Bean
probably ever got with his face invisible
was the turkey-on-the-head Christmas
episode of Mr Bean.
“Yes, that was bad for my neck and
shoulders,” Atkinson says.
And then Friends copied it for its
Thanksgiving episode (the turkey ended
up on Monica’s nut). “It was ripped off by
Friends, and then we used it again in the
movie, the first Mr Bean movie, then they
accused us of ripping it off them.”
Did they really? “Anyway, I’m not accus-
ing them. As far I’m concerned, there’s no
such thing as a copyright on jokes. What-
ever you can get away with.”Man vs Bee required more exertion than
you might think, what with the running
around and the repeated takes. “One never
does these things once. You might be
bending down to do something and do it
ten times.” So a physical therapist was
on set. Atkinson is 67 now, but a dozen
years ago tore a calf muscle having failed
to warm up between takes of a running
scene in Johnny English Reborn. “When I
look at the footage now of me running
around in Hong Kong, I can see I’ve got
a bit of a limp.
“But the real stress is not physical stress;
it’s the mental stress. That I do find hard
when shooting. I find it very hard. I find the
writing bit is fun. We had our first script
meeting just over three years ago for this
and started shooting a year ago. And I’m
always involved a lot in the post-produc-
tion and all that stuff. It’s the meat in
the sandwich that I don’t like. The bits of
bread are fine.”
Performance is where, of course,
typically the pressure falls on him alone.
He recalls Blackadder in the Eighties with
Tony Robinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen
Fry and company. There were conflicts
between writers, producers and, some-
times, the cast. “So it was slightly tricky
at times. I mean, not awful. People weren’t
coming to blows. It wasn’t like Oasis
towards the end of the 1990s or wheneverknows Atkinson from the Johnny English
franchise, says it is one of Atkinson’s
favourite tales and that he has been unsuc-
cessfully pitching bee battles to Atkinson
for years. He divulges this over Zoom from
Los Angeles, after my Atkinson encounter.
Atkinson, averse to discussing his personal
life, perhaps views family folklore as part of
it. He is much happier discussing anxiety
— his and his audience’s.
I say that Man vs Bee is a funny but tense
watch. The couple Trevor housesits for are
not easy to like, but their Corbusian home
is beautiful, decorated with works of art
including, apparently, a Kandinsky mobile,
a Mondrian and an illuminated manu-
script. You don’t really want to see any
of it destroyed or see Trevor, a barely
employable divorcee scrabbling to
fund a holiday with his daughter,
in trouble.
“Of course,” Atkinson says,
“it was a complaint we often
had with Mr Bean episodes.
A lot of people didn’t like the
inevitable and justifiable feel-
ing that things were going to
go wrong.”
And we feel for Trevor? “Yes,
he is more of an everyman char-
acter,” Clark says. “You feel like
he is a fish out of water in this
house. That’s something that every-
body can relate to in some way.”
Does the bee (CGI of course) represent
nature taking revenge on the encroach-
ments of mankind? “That’s a perfectly
valid interpretation,” says Atkinson, who
concedes that the idea might have been
explorable in a more rounded storyline.
“I mean, we don’t have any particularC
harlie Chaplin’s Tramp is
history’s most famous
silent clown, but Rowan
Atkinson’s taciturn Mr
Bean is far more watched.
Aided by his transition
after just 14 ITV sitcom
episodes into a cartoon, Mr Bean has
amassed an incredible 11 billion views on
YouTube alone. Like Chaplin, Atkinson
has done so very well out of saying so little,
it must be hard for him to see the point of
interviews, and he doesn’t give many. So
this afternoon’s is a treat, at least for me.
For Atkinson, I am not so sure. Dressed in
a sober suit and tie, he answers my ques-
tions with a matching seriousness, smiling
so sparingly that it comes as only a mild
shock when he tells me he rarely laughs at
all. An early critic of his asked whether it
was possible for a comedian to lack a sense
of humour — nonsense, obviously, but I
can see how the thought arose.
To promote his nine-part, word-spare
Netflix series Man vs Bee, he is chaperoned
in the Soho Hotel by one of the show’s pro-
ducers, Chris Clark, a veteran of his Johnny
English films. In this project, Atkinson
plays Trevor, a tyro housesitter whose ef-
forts to safeguard a rich couple’s modernist
mansion are threatened by his over-reac-
tion to an importunate bee. It is, I note, an
interesting inversion of the premise of Mr
Bean, in which Bean himself is the irritant.
“Trevor is different,” says Atkinson, who
speaks in a musical basso profondo occa-
sionally interrupted by the traces of a
lifelong stammer. “He is a much nicer
and much sweeter and more normal
person, I hope — and that was cer-
tainly our aim — than Mr Bean,
who was a self-centred, narcis-
sistic anarchist.”
With some emotional retar-
dation thrown in? “Yes, he
was a nine-year-old trapped
in a man’s body, and Trevor
definitely isn’t. He seems like
a sweet, well-intentioned,
perfectly intelligent man, but,
of course, he’s got fault lines,
his weak spots, and his weak
spot is his obsessiveness.”
Personal history links bees to
Atkinson (besides him being educat-
ed at St Bees School in Cumbria). His
grandfather liked cars almost as much as
Atkinson, who drives racing cars, owns vin-
tage models and has an HGV licence. One
day a bee got into his car and a fight ensued,
resulting in a bad smash, although neither
grandfather nor bee was hurt. Will Davies,
who wrote Man vs Bee and, like Clark,quackers Rowan
Atkinson as Mr Bean
in 2007. Below: in
Four Weddings and
a Funeral in 1994‘Mr Bean was a
nine-year-old trapped
in a man’s body.
Trevor is not that’