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Rowan Atkinson Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Rowan Atkinson Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters
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Summary
Core Theme
This content is a reflection on the creation and performance of iconic comedic characters, particularly focusing on the evolution of the actor's approach from physical comedy and silent performances to more nuanced character development and the challenges of modern filmmaking.
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is called iconic characters oh i see no
i don't do idents or introductions [Music]
[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
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
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
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
behind
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
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
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
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
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
[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
butler
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
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]
[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 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
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
he's a curious thing actually a
relatively rare
character because he used to be called richard
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
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
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
still
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
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
others [Music]
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