Approach With Caution

You know that cliche about funny men who turn out to be morose or profoundly serious in real life, when they’re not performing?

Well, British comic Rowan Atkinson is the living embodiment of the type.

Americans know Atkinson best as Mr. Bean, the bewildered, manic and virtually mute man with a face that contorts like rubber. Mr. Bean may have neat, short hair and wear a conservative sports jacket and tie, but he creates havoc wherever he goes; he has been described as the planet’s most embarrassing man. Atkinson himself calls Bean “a 9-year-old boy in a grown man’s body.”

But if you meet Atkinson in the flesh, don’t expect him to start indulging in Mr. Bean’s brand of anarchic physical comedy. Like two other British funny men before him, John Cleese and Benny Hill, Atkinson can be somber, even gloomy when off duty.

True, he looks somewhat like Mr. Bean; he has the same wide, hooded eyes that hint at malevolence; the same large, comically protruding nose; the same thick lips that seem to operate independently of their owner.

Yet Atkinson’s manner is the polar opposite of Bean’s. We meet in the penthouse suite of an exclusive club in London’s St. James district. Atkinson makes an entrance dressed in an expensive navy suit, crisp light blue shirt and a maroon silk tie. He could be a diplomat on his way to an embassy reception.

The impression is confirmed when Atkinson opens his mouth to speak in complete, exquisitely constructed sentences. Yet his manner is diffident; he tends not to make eye contact and his demeanor, while far from hostile, is tentative. Seated on a sofa, he clasps his hands together anxiously, and stonewalls questions that might lead to discussion of his personal life: “So Rowan, are your two children old enough to be Mr. Bean fans?” “Er . . . no.”

Atkinson, 41, has at best an ambivalent attitude to publicity--which is too bad, because he’s about to get plenty of it. Mr. Bean, whose award-winning British TV series broke ratings records and was shown in America on HBO in 1993 and 1994, is now a favorite with television audiences in 82 countries. And he’s about to be launched as a movie star.

In the PolyGram film plainly titled “Bean” (which is scheduled to open in October), Mr. Bean is an inept janitor at London’s Royal National Gallery whom all the other employees want to see fired. When a Los Angeles gallery acquires a classic work of art, popularly known as “Whistler’s Mother,” and asks the London gallery to send an eminent art scholar to speak at the unveiling ceremony, his vengeful colleagues send Bean instead--and chaos ensues.

When in Los Angeles, Bean stays at the home of David, the gallery’s curator (Peter MacNicol) and destroys his family life within days. Bean is left alone in a room with the painting and succeeds in defacing it within minutes.

Creating a feature film around Bean seems a logical response to the extraordinary success of his TV show in recent years. But as Atkinson tells it, the film is just another stage in a long process of developing Bean’s character, which now spans almost two decades.

In 1979, he and his creative partner, writer Richard Curtis, were working on Atkinson’s one-man theater show at the Edinburgh Festival fringe. “I think Richard was bored with the idea of writing words,” recalled Atkinson, “so he decided to work on an entirely wordless routine. He came up with a one-sentence idea--a man who couldn’t stay awake. So I sat on a chair in a rehearsal room and started to improvise. We kicked some ideas around and Richard scribbled them down. It was the first time we had tried anything of that ilk.”

Since then, Atkinson added, Bean has been “a Frankenstein monster, because of the relatively piecemeal manner in which his character was pieced together.

“His character grew from jokes rather than the other way round. We would think up visual jokes and try to see what character could make those jokes work best. The odd thing was, the character of Mr. Bean was simply the persona I acquired when called upon to present comedy visually. As soon as words were denied me, I became Mr. Bean.”

Ironically, Atkinson built up a huge following in Britain throughout the 1980s with comedy that was decidedly verbal. He was a founding member of the BBC sketch show “Not the Nine O’Clock News,” with Curtis as one of the main writers; it was hugely successful, ran to four series, won an International Emmy and saw Atkinson named BBC personality of the year. (The show was adapted in America by HBO as “Not Necessarily the News.”)

He then starred in four series of “Blackadder,” written by Curtis (with Ben Elton in latter episodes) for the BBC. The show, which the pair called “a situation tragedy,” also relied on verbal wit; it was set in four different eras of British history, with Atkinson in the title role as an imperious aristocrat. (It aired in the United States on A&E.;)

In addition, Atkinson appeared in two feature films with scripts by Curtis. In “The Tall Guy” (1989), with Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson, he played a comedian with a monstrous ego. In “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” he was the well-meaning, nervous vicar (“ . . . Father, Son and Holy Goat . . . sorry, Ghost”).

But Mr. Bean is by far Atkinson’s biggest international success. He looks weary when it is suggested to him that the character, being almost nonverbal, effortlessly cuts through language barriers.

“Removing the spoken word from comedy doesn’t guarantee acceptability,” he said, a little impatiently. “It must be something about the essential childishness of Bean, the identity people have with the character, that’s been the impetus.

“There’s something about his arrogance. He’s a child in a man’s body, which is what most visual comedians are about--Stan Laurel, Chaplin, Benny Hill. That’s the common factor. That’s what seems to ensure that, say, the Brazilians have time for him.”

In fact, Atkinson and Curtis have worked carefully at developing Mr. Bean. “At first he operated in a sort of vacuum,” said Atkinson. “It wasn’t until the fifth TV show that we gave him somewhere to live. Then we gave him a girlfriend, though that’s a grand term. She was actually some librarian he befriended who agreed to go to the cinema with him.

“Now in the film he has a job for the first time, a place in society. But the big change has been getting him to speak a little. That was a plot-driven idea, the only way we could get him to express his relationship with David [the curator] and for him to accept responsibility for his own actions.”

That may sound heavy and theoretical, but Atkinson sees Bean as a malevolent figure: “Usually he causes grief and pain and walks away, never thinks twice about it. He’s a villain, even if he’s a lovable one.”

That suits Atkinson fine. He even portrays a smug, arrogant character in a series of TV commercials for a credit card company, which are arguably the most popular and immediately recognizable commercials in Britain.

“It’s more fun to play a villain,” he says. “Recently I’ve been in a sitcom, ‘The Thin Blue Line,’ playing a policeman. And for the first time ever I play a genuinely decent man. Which is fine, except that,” he pauses and chooses his words with care, “it lacks enchantment in many ways.”

But then Atkinson finds little enchantment in work, whatever the role. “I dislike the actual job before a camera or on a stage,” he confesses. “The prospect of doing it is fun. Looking back on having done it is fine. But the reality of rehearsals and performance!” He shudders visibly.

That’s part of the reason why, after “Bean” opens, Atkinson will take an entire year off: “I did it for the whole of 1994 and I can do it again,” he says matter-of-factly. And what will he do? “Nothing, really.”

When pressed, he opens up about his hobby. He owns several expensive classic cars and sports cars, and plans to race them during his 12-month hiatus, when no one can tell him not to for insurance reasons. He has also written regularly for an auto magazine.

“I find cars a tremendous release and great fun,” he muses. “I used to have a thing about Aston-Martins. But I’m an inveterate buyer and seller of cars, so I’m reluctant to divulge the stable. It’s usually out of date by the time it’s printed.” This did not prevent British tabloids reporting last summer that he had walked into a London showroom and bought a black Ferrari 456 for about $260,000.

Details of his private life are sketchy. He grew up in Durham, in the north of England, where his father owned a farm. He gained his Oxford degree in electrical engineering. Now a millionaire, Atkinson has a townhouse in London’s chic Chelsea district and a large house in Oxfordshire. His wife, Sunetra (they wed in 1990), was a BBC makeup artist.

He seems likely to maintain this degree of privacy--for at the very time when the spotlight of international attention is fully trained on him, he is starting to back away from it. “I’m at an age of feeling that I’d like to do less work than I have been doing,” he says.

“After this year off, if we do something of a Bean-like nature, I hope we do it for the right reasons, because we’re creatively inspired to do it. I need variety in my life. I need variety to be bothered to do anything.”

It is clear he won’t be doing any more “Mr. Bean” TV shows: “We’re not planning any more for the foreseeable future. I think we ran out of inspiration in that contained English suburban context.” There may be more Bean movies--it all depends on how this first one is received.

Atkinson finally meets your gaze. “I have no intention,” he says diffidently, “of doing Mr. Bean for the rest of my life.”