Rowan Atkinson

It's a bit disconcerting being treated like Madonna.

People think because I can make them laugh on the stage, I'll be able to make them laugh in person. That isn't the case at all. I am essentially a rather quiet, dull person who just happens to be a performer.

I mean I can do it when I'm very relaxed, and with good friends, then I think I can be amusing.

I'm very good at having time off. I tend to take whole years off - I had 1994 and 1997 off. I find it very easy; I just love pottering around doing normal things.

The older you get, the more you realise how happenstance... has helped to determine your path through life.

I feel as though the camera is almost a kind of voyeur in Mr. Bean's life, and you just watch this bizarre man going about his life in the way that he wants to.

Not so much in Canada, but certainly in the US, as I'm sure you know, money is all, and if they can get another 26 programs of the same thing even though it advances the culture or those actor's careers not at all it doesn't matter.

No, no, I was only funny on stage, really. I, I, think I was funny as a person toward my classmates when I was very young. You know, when I was a child, up to about the age of 12.

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.

I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple, that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I'm not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I'm certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.

Mr. Bean is essentially a child trapped in the body of a man. All cultures identify with children in a similar way, so he has this bizarre global outreach.

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something - this side of it, if you like, doing interviews - is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.