An Interview with Rowan Atkinson
Rowan Atkinson attended a special Q&A at Curzon Bloomsbury, ahead of the launch of his new festive Netflix comedy, Man vs Baby. Joined on stage by co-creator and writer Will Davies and director David Kerr, and hosted by journalist Emma Cox, Atkinson reflected on slapstick, Christmas chaos and why his hapless hero Trevor Bingley just cannot catch a break.
What was the genesis for the idea of Man Versus Baby?
When we first came up with the idea, the baby was actually a smaller part of it. The working title was ‘Man Versus Christmas’, not Man Versus Baby. The nativity play in the first episode was our starting point. Then we came up with the idea that the primary school decides to have a real baby in the manger instead of a doll. We liked the idea of this baby appearing from nowhere, and nobody seems to know who it belongs to, and nobody comes to pick it up. It’s a mystery, and Trevor ends up stuck with the baby. Trevor has to look after the baby despite having this other pressure, which is that he desperately needs money to help his daughter go to a college in France. He gets this well-paid job house-sitting an oligarch’s penthouse, which is made complicated by the fact he’s got to do it while secretly looking after the baby because he can’t, obviously, just leave the baby on the street. From there it’s a push-you pull-you dynamic of his job at the penthouse against the need to care for the baby, which is the essential tension of the narrative.
Your performance is, of course, excellent, but the baby is a total scene-stealer!
They are great looking, aren’t they? I say ‘they’ because when you’re trying to use babies in film, you go for twins, and our twins were great. We also had another scene-stealer with the dog. We had a dog in Man Versus Bee and we do like dogs. We like them as animals, and we like to have them in shows. But, yes, you’re right – the babies are scene-stealers, that’s their very nature. It’s that strange thing when you’re watching a baby, because you know that they’re not acting, they’re just being themselves and reacting to the situation surrounding them. As such, they’re completely unpredictable, but also completely engaging, because you know they’re giving an inherent truth that you’re not getting from an adult performer.
They say “never work with children or animals” for good reason, and yet you did both – was it challenging to shoot?
Yes, it was tricky at times because one baby might suddenly get grumpy and you’d have to swap him for their twin brother. One was calmer than the other. Not that I want either of the boys to read this in fifteen years’ time and think I’m doing them down! They were great, but that’s just what babies do. They’re only allowed to be on set for something like forty-five minutes at a time, which is not a long time for shooting. At the end of that forty-five minutes you have to let them have a rest and shoot another scene, which is difficult. Normally on a film set you’re only focussing on one or two scenes all day. So the logistics of this were challenging. In the end, you rely on their parents and carers and all the support staff who are there to ensure that they’re looked after, and all of those people were great. You may think we whittled a rod for our own back, and we certainly did, but because of all the tremendous support on the production with the parents and carers of the baby, I think we pulled it off.
Man Versus Baby is four half-hour episodes compared to Man Versus Bee, which was ten ten-minute episodes. Are there any other major differences?
I think it’s a more accessible show than Man Versus Bee. My character is definitely softer and nicer in this. In Man Versus Bee, he’s quite psychopathic, because the irritation of the bee drives him into that state. Whereas in Man Versus Baby, we see a much nicer side to him.
Can you tell us a bit more about Trevor?
Trevor Bingley is one of the nicest characters I’ve ever played. Blackadder is a pretty relentlessly cynical, negative man. Mr Bean is a very selfish, self-centred, childish man. They’re not very nice people. Nice people tend not to be funny. It’s easier to make a slightly unpleasant person, funny. People with fault lines a mile wide are more fun. Trevor is relentlessly well-meaning. Trevor perhaps represents the nicer side of me, while the other characters are perhaps the darker side of me. I’m just pleased we have a character that works, because inventing a brand new character is not easy. Trevor is a worthy addition to the canon, definitely.
“Facing struggles”
Did you want to play a nice character for a change: is that why you wrote him?
No, I think my natural inclination would be to avoid that. I really enjoy playing people who are unpleasant, sarcastic, cynical, or self-centred. I just enjoy inhabiting characters, and the fact that this one is nicer than most doesn’t give me any enhanced satisfaction. It certainly wasn’t a deliberate or contrived thing; that’s just the character that suited our story. I’ve never contrived to produce or write family entertainment. Nearly everything I’ve done has only become family entertainment by happy accident. Johnny English and Mr Bean became popular with children, and Blackadder was popular with teenagers, but that wasn’t what I set out to do with any of them. To make a family show like this for Netflix has been lovely. I think parents and children could watch Man Versus Bee together very happily, but Man Versus Baby has even more cross-generational appeal, which, I hope, is appropriate for Christmas programming.
Are you a fan of Christmas?
I certainly like Christmas, like most people. I was quite drawn to the idea of, without wishing to spoil the plot of Man Versus Baby, a lonely Christmas. Other than having the baby for company, Trevor’s alone because his daughter has booked a last-minute holiday to Barbados. He’s flat-sitting at Christmas without any of his family around him, and that can be hard. When we first see him, he’s got all these presents wrapped by a tiny tree decorated with Heroes wrappers, and he’s looking forward to it, and then he gets abandoned by his family, which is quite sad. As I say, I don’t want to give too much away, but we have a set of supporting characters in this who are all quite lonely or facing struggles in their own different ways: a set of waifs and strays, if you like. I think a lot of us have waifs and strays at Christmas – people who haven’t got anywhere else to go, or friends who are having a bad time, but they manage to find a community of some kind to have a meal with at Christmas time. That’s definitely a nice feeling about our story. We have a kind of redemption at the end, which I really like. It turns out Trevor’s not alone after all.
You look very comfortable holding the baby. Does it come naturally to you: are you good with babies in real life?
Well, experience helps! It’s a bit like when I played Maigret for ITV a few years ago, the French detective. An important aspect of Maigret was that he smokes a pipe all the time which is an incredibly unfashionable thing to do in this day and age. But it wasn’t unfashionable or uncommon in the 1950s which is when the drama was set and also when I was a student – that’s a terrible admission! Anyway, I occasionally used to smoke a pipe when I was in my early twenties, which meant that when I played Maigret, people were surprised at my dexterity and how at home I looked with a pipe. And it’s the same thing with holding a baby. If you’ve done it in real life, you look realistic doing it on screen. I’m pretty comfortable holding a baby.
Trevor is very sweet with the baby. Was that important to you when writing the script?
That was very important to us, because we did think about writing jokes where he’s completely hopeless with a baby. There was that film years ago, Three Men And A Baby, which is a lovely film about three men who were incredibly inept at looking after a baby, although they did end up being ultimately loving and successful with the child. There are lots of avenues you can go down like that but we thought, actually, Trevor has clearly been a good father to his daughter Maddie. He perhaps wasn’t a good husband, but he was a good father. We see in this, as we saw in Man Versus Bee, that Trevor’s relationship with Maddie is the most important thing in his life, so we didn’t want to make him too hopeless with the baby. He’s not annoyed or angry when Maddie says she’s going to Barbados and abandoning him at Christmas, he wants her to have a lovely time, he’s just disappointed. So we wanted to show that he’s pretty competent as a father figure. The jokes are more about eccentric ways of dealing with certain challenges.
“The sign of success”
Can you expand on that: where does the humour come from?
The humour comes from the inappropriateness and inventiveness of how Trevor cares for the baby: using Hermes scarves for a nappy, or a Fortnum and Mason hamper for a crib, because obviously he doesn’t have any baby paraphernalia. I’ll let you into a secret: Trevor uses a champagne cork to pacify the baby in lieu of a dummy, but that’s the magic of television because obviously we could not put a cork in the baby’s mouth – not just because they might swallow it, but because there might be some remnant of alcohol going into the baby’s mouth! But that’s an example of where the jokes come in. One of my favourite lines in the show is when Trevor offers a drink to a policeman and he says, “Can I offer you a drink? I’m afraid we’ve only got vintage champagne.” The family that owns the flat only drink vintage champagne, which is a lifestyle that is in stark contrast to lots of our characters, in particular a young couple who are squatting in the basement of the apartment block, who befriend Trevor and vice versa. Trevor has been placed in this absurd world where he’s sent shopping for the oligarchs and they don’t just want one bottle of £200 champagne, they want twenty four bottles. Trevor deals with it all as decently and honestly as he can. There’s a scene in which he has to grapple with a Christmas tree the size of a semi-detached house, and he has to find something to put the tree in, and he has these eccentric solutions which are quite redolent of Mr Bean.
Talking of Mr Bean – how does Man Versus Baby compare to your previous programmes: did you enjoy making it?
I like it when things work. I like it when things are popular. I haven’t read a review or critique of anything I’ve done since the 20th century so I don’t know what reviewers, pundits and critics think of what I do, because the only thing that interests me is how many people watch this, and would they like to watch more? That’s the litmus test, and the sign of success, to me. Do producers and streamers and film companies want me to make more? If so, then what I’m doing is working. That’s where I derive my satisfaction. As long as people enjoy what I’ve put a lot of effort into producing, I’m happy. I’ve worked on this show every day of my life for the last year and a quarter, at the very least. I definitely put in the hours. I’m someone who does that. I don’t just turn up to act the role: I’m part of the writing and very much part of the post-production, so I’m in every sound mix and visual effects meeting. I’m there from the bitter beginning to the bitter end and so it’s a big commitment. If all of that effort ends up in something good that people like, that’s all you can hope for.
What are you doing for Christmas: will you be watching Man Versus Baby, or Love, Actually?
Oh yes, that’s another Christmas film I’m in, isn’t it? Well I would like to get some distance between myself and Man Versus Baby because currently I’m a bit too close to it and can only watch it as a bit of a perfectionist, but when it’s all edited and graded I hope I can watch it like anybody else and just enjoy it. After that I plan to take some time off. This has been a lot of work and so I don’t have any plans for the foreseeable future.
All episodes of Man Versus Baby premiere on Netflix globally 11th December
images courtesy of Netflix
