Who is the real Rowan Atkinson?

There’s a moment in Netflix’s Man vs Bee when Rowan Atkinson – playing an accident-prone beta-male called Trevor Bingley – is on a video call with his ex-wife. “Are you doing that thing again,” she asks, “when you don’t move your face and pretend the line’s frozen?” If there’s one thing you can say about Rowan Atkinson, it’s that he moves his face. Moving his face is what he does, and he’s doing it all over again in Man vs Bee.

In the comedy series, Trevor has been hired to house-sit a tech-enabled super-home while its disgustingly wealthy owners go on holiday. Placed in his care are such valuables as an original E-Type Jag, a mobile by Kandinsky and a priceless illuminated manuscript. Plus a dog with a nut allergy. It goes without saying that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, thanks to the titular insect which buzzes onto the premises at the same time as Trevor.

The show goes out on Netflix in bite-size segments of 10 minutes, which marks a change of rhythm for Atkinson. But the bigger difference is that, unlike Mr Bean or Edmund Blackadder, or Johnny English or that copper he played in The Thin Blue Line, Trevor is quite likeable. Audiences will even root for him. That famous face, so fitted to portray low cunning and absurd smugness, here softens into sincerity, even decency. At the age of 67, Atkinson is playing someone you could tolerate meeting in real life. When was the last time that happened? Zazu in The Lion King? The tongue-tied vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral?

This was all part of the plan, according to Man vs Bee scriptwriter Will Davies. “We didn’t want you not to care. What we were trying to get right was that, when he arrives at this rich couple’s house, there was no hint of envy. He genuinely thinks it’s an amazing place and he wants to do a good job of protecting it. That was important for the comedy.”

So no more Mr Not Very Nice Guy. In another unforeseen switcheroo, Atkinson has lately taken up cudgels against cancel culture, arguing in a rare interview to promote Man vs Bee that it is “comedy’s job to offend”, that “every joke has a victim. That’s the definition of a joke.”

It’s good, if profoundly odd, to find Atkinson on the barricades. No comedian has been less in danger of causing offence. The last time there was anything approaching venom in his comedy was probably in Not the Nine O’Clock News in the early 1980s. In the sketch show created by John Lloyd, he played seething vicars, angry judges, raging superintendents and a furious gorilla. “When I caught Gerald in ’68 he was completely wild,” says his captor. “Wild?” Gerald butts in. “I was absolutely livid.”

The real Atkinson has always seemed to be hiding behind that gurning mask. It’s come to be thought that, though a lord of misrule on screen, he’s no barrel of laughs off it. Many comics are a version of this but in Atkinson the discrepancy seems unusually extreme. He allowed this idea of him to be parodied in the 1989 film The Tall Guy. Atkinson played a gifted comedian called Ron Anderson who is both draconian taskmaster and sour-faced tightwad. The script by his old Oxford mucker Richard Curtis was based on his own experiences of playing Atkinson’s stooge on stage. “I like to think obviously it was a gross exaggeration,” Atkinson once told me. “But maybe it wasn’t. It would be foolish, certainly, for me to claim that it’s nothing to do with me.”

Davies, who has worked with Atkinson for 20 years as writer of the three Johnny English films, insists that “he’s an incredibly nice person. It’s a boring thing to say but in reality he’s very sensitive and polite.” That niceness helps oil the wheels of collaboration in which Atkinson, seemingly collegiate, always gets his way.

“He is open to your idea but in the end the choice is most definitely Rowan’s. The movie or TV show Rowan wants to make is in his head already. One’s job is to help him tease it out. He knows ultimately what his instinct is. Really he is kind of the showrunner. He is looking at everything while he’s acting: lighting, the wardrobe, hair and make-up, and the performances of other people.”

Atkinson’s status as first among equals in any company was established early on. Recently on Facebook I came across a photograph of the Oxford Revue company which went to the Edinburgh festival in 1976. Standing in jaunty white bell-bottoms is a troupe including Curtis, the director Philip Franks and future star of Thought for the Day, Anne Atkins. Lying nonchalantly in front of them in white tie and tails is Atkinson. “Rowan Atkinson was our secret weapon,” remembers Martin Tyrrell, who directed the show. “Queues up the Royal Mile wanted tickets to see him.”

Atkinson went to Oxford ostensibly to do a DPhil in electrical engineering while actually seeking opportunities for mummery. It wouldn’t take long for him to make it. In July 1978 he and Victoria Wood both happened to catch the eye in revues opening on the London fringe the same week.

“If the Bush Theatre certainly has a potential revue star in Victoria Wood,” wrote Francis King in the Sunday Telegraph, “the Hampstead Theatre may have one in young Rowan Atkinson… Looking like a garden gnome made out of rubber, he pops up in almost every sketch in Beyond a Joke… he has the born comic’s gift of getting laughs out of even such mundane activities as shaving, taking off a woman’s coat in a restaurant or reading out a roll-call.”

The facial tics – emphatic blinking, lizard flicks of the tongue – are visible remnants of a conquered stammer. They have served him well. By 1981, he had his own show on Shaftesbury Avenue and an Aston Martin V8. With Curtis he soon created “The Blackadder”, as Atkinson calls the character, though the show found its true voice only after Ben Elton brought a scabrous jollity to the second series. This was Atkinson’s peak as a vocal comedian. “I thank God I wore my corset because I think my sides have split,” deadpans Lord Blackadder to his Virgin Queen.

Blackadder went over the top to his death in 1989. In 1990 came Mr Bean. The TV show was sold to 245 territories, inspiring a cartoon spin-off and two multiplex-conquering films. It made Atkinson the most globally recognisable clown since Chaplin. When Mr Bean joined the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle at the opening ceremony of the London’s Olympics in 2012, the sight of him plinking a synth triggered perhaps the largest simultaneous earth-girdling laugh in the history of comedy.

Bean means Atkinson doesn’t have to work. Between commitments he has contentedly collected classic cars and, when not driving them, reading about them in car magazines. This routine must have changed in 2013 when, starring in Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms, he met the actress Louise Ford, who became his second wife after he divorced from his first, Sunetra Sastry. He now has a third child, born in 2017. His devotion to the quiet life was slightly belied by the complaints made in May of this year at the noise generated by the party he threw for Ford’s 40th birthday. Allegedly it could be heard four miles off.

It is “incredibly difficult” to get him to say yes to any project, says Davies. “Basically for a long time he says he is never going to do anything again. Then never becomes no. Then there’s a crack of light which Rowan will always regret having let in. Then there’s the process he genuinely enjoys up to immediately before shooting. But the moment shooting starts for him it’s just really difficult. It’s because he’s such a perfectionist that he just hates it. And he remembers why he said never.”

Another outing for Bean is in the pipeline, while Davies hopes for more Man vs Bee and Johnny English. “We’ll just have to see if Rowan can bear it.”

Man vs Bee is on Netflix now