Rowan Atkinson on Man Vs Baby

Rowan Atkinson says he likes playing Trevor Bingley in Netflix’s Man Vs Baby – because he’s the only one of his characters who’s actually a nice guy.

‘I just quite like playing a nice guy for a change, which I haven't done very often,’ the comedian said at an event at the Curzon Bloomsbury in London to launch the show last night.

And while praising Bingley’s niceness, he did have to concede that in the original series, Man Vs Bee, he was so driven to distraction by the insect that he came ‘quite psychopathic… he became quite a violent, and you could say slightly unappealing character by the end.

‘Whereas with this series, he remains really quite a pleasant man. And I quite like that.  Trevor Bingley, in his basic form, when he's not being psychopathic, is arguably one of the nicest people I've ever played. Because I think most people I've played have been deeply unpleasant.

‘Mr Bean is a selfish, self-serving, anarchic child. And Blackadder is a sort of sarcastic and sardonic and basically negative force. Even Johnny English is a vain, charmless sort of person. So I think actually Trevor Bingley has turned out to be one of my more pleasant and amenable creations.’

‘I dislike Mr. Bean as a person, I certainly would never like to have dinner with him. But at the same time I like him as a character,  because he is possibly a bit like I was at age ten –  that sort of childish sort of selfishness and working things out in a slightly eccentric way. But at the same time,   wouldn't want him in my house.’

Asked if he’d have dinner with Blackadder, Atkinson replied: ‘He wouldn't like anything that I was cooking. He would have a sarcastic remark for everything. How sad, really, not wanting to dine with any of the characters you’ve created…’

In the new show, out tomorrow, Bingley is a school caretaker housesitting a luxury London penthouse. But on the last day of term, when no one comes to collect the Baby Jesus from the school nativity, he finds himself looking after the tiny child.

But Atkinson said he and co-writer Will Davies originally had other plans for Bingley.

‘There was one time when he was housesitting a country house belonging to a Russian oligarch, whose 11-year-old son came to stay for Christmas because he couldn't go back to Moscow. Atkinson explained.  At that point it was called Man Vs Boy. 

‘Sometimes we called it Man Vs Christmas. But then we thought [that plot] means there has to be a definite dialogue – more engagement between Trevor and the person he's spending Christmas with. It suddenly seemed more interesting in many ways to refer back to Man Versus Bee, where his companion was someone who didn't speak and didn't communicate, but he still had responsibility for.

‘So you know, via this circuitous route, we ended up with Man V Baby.’

Co-writer Will Davies added: ‘We  thought that the baby, initially, would be more of an antagonist  in the way that the bee was,  but the baby was just so sweet and lovely that every time Trevor picked it up, you began to fall in love with the relationship between the two of them. So although the baby creates problems for Trevor initially, they became partners in crime, rather than one against the other. 

‘And that's why the vibe is so different. Because with the bee, Trevor began to go out of his mind – it was a very different sort of energy.’

However, as director David Kerr pointed out, there were flaws with that idea of working with an infant as ‘a six-month-old baby is not easy to direct. Baby's going to do what baby wants to do.

’At the script stage, we could talk about, well, ideally, the baby would be crying, or the baby would be yawning, or something specific, but you really are a hostage to fortune. You turn up on the set, the baby's not crying, the baby's not yawning, what are you going to do? So we did have a lot of patience. 

‘A lot of it came from Rowan. He was incredible. He built a great rapport with the hero babies. I say hero babies because we had backup babies and other babies that were brought in to crawl for their crawling skills. 

’In many ways, it's a time-honoured, old-fashioned sort of storytelling that we're doing here, but we did deploy some very modern techniques, particularly visual effects. We did video capture several cameras for hours on end, pointed at our hero babies to try to capture almost all of their reactions, waking, sleeping, yawning, crying, and that got fed into a massive data bank that became a resource and a reference for us if we were trying to adjust shots.

‘We were mindful always that we wanted anything we did to pass the reality test so it wouldn't feel too uncanny, and that did take quite a lot of back and forth.’

Atkinson added: ‘We should emphasise that the baby is, of course, twins. You always choose twins, so if one gets grizzly, you can bring the other one in – but even so, you can only have a baby on set for 45 minutes. So you suddenly realise that you can't actually continue filming that scene. You've got to film a different scene or a different shot just looking the other way. The scheduling is tricky with babies. 

‘We had the hero babies, identical twins. Then we had twin crawling babies, identical twins, because the hero babies couldn't crawl. So that's when the CGI comes in, when you implant the face of the hero baby into the crawling baby.’

Although 70-year-old Atkinson is known for his physical humour, he said he ‘didn't feel particularly physically challenged’ during the making of Man Vs Baby, ‘which  is kind of good news as you get older’. 

Instead, he said: ‘I think the main challenge was just keeping the story in your head when you're dealing with a co-star where there’s not much chat between takes! 

‘I was okay with the babies, I think, keeping them happy.  But we chose them because they were calm, but if you go with calm babies, then when you want them to be joyful or silly or laughing or something, they sort of just sit there and stare at you.’

Kerr revealed there were ‘hilarious outtakes’ of Atkinson deploying all his talents as a world-leading rubber-faced comedian to get the baby to laugh – but to no avail.

On the other hand, when Davis was asked about working with Atkinson, he joked: ’I wouldn't advise it!’ – as the process of putting together a project can be arduous.

He explained: ‘Basically where we always begin is that Rowan always feels at the end of doing anything that he never really wants to ever do anything, ever yet.

‘So it sets the bar quite high for the next idea. Generally, what happens is that I pepper him with ideas at opportune moments, and eventually, in a moment of weakness, he'll begin to get interested in one or other of them, and then we begin to develop it.

Atkinson is notoriously intense when working, and asked about his favourite scene in Man Vs Baby he said: ‘None. I can't think of anything I enjoyed filming. But that's just me when I'm filming, so I apologise for that.’

‘I think the show is very good, but, I can also see holes in it. I keep looking at it and thinking, "hmmmm".’

And asked if there were plans for any more Man Vs instalments, Atkinson replied: ‘Well, there's nothing in the cupboard at the moment. The cupboard is bare. There are literally, no plans…

But then Davies chipped in by repeating his comment that after every project Atkinson ‘never wants to do anything ever again, that's where we always begin’.

• Man Vs Baby launches on Netflix tomorrow, running as four half-hour episodes.

Published: 10 Dec 2025