Mr Bean makes fun of Craig's Spy

[Dr. No]

What happened to pierce I though he was supposed to be Ambrose?

It’s comedy before career for Rowan Atkinson
Universal
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/10/20 ... -atkinson/
Universal

Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English Reborn

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Postmedia News Oct 20, 2011 – 9:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 19, 2011 5:58 PM ET

By Bob Thompson

Getting enough comedy from Rowan Atkinson is almost impossible. The English performer has a habit of making himself scarce in the world of laughs.

Take, for instance, his portrayal of secret agent Johnny English, first featured in the 2003 spy-movie parody of the same name. Eight years later, the acclaimed funnyman, also known as the inept Mr. Bean, is back with Johnny English Reborn, which opens across Canada on Friday.

That’s a long wait between Atkinson’s stammers and slip-ups as the spy who is way too confident for his own good. But he just can’t help himself.

“I do seem to care more about the comedy than my career,” said the 56-year-old in the middle of promoting his new movie in Los Angeles. “I always seem to find time to do other things.”
In the Oliver Parker-directed film, Atkinson’s Johnny English is initially seen doing penance at an isolated Tibetan martial-arts facility run by the British secret service. The object of the exercise is to isolate the agent after he messes up on a mission.

However, the nincompoop is returned to active duty when a former CIA operative (Richard Schiff) says he will talk only to English about an international assassins’ plot to murder the Chinese premier, which would send the globe into chaos.

Naturally, English finds himself in the middle of a double cross, as he tries to figure out the good guys from the bad on his farcical journey of foul-ups, misfires and mistaken identities.

Rounding out the cast is Gillian Anderson, once Scully on TV’s The X-Files, and now playing the head of M17, Pamela “Pegasus” Thornton. Dominic West, best known as Det. James McNulty on the U.S. crime show The Wire, is debonair agent Simon Ambrose.

Shooting in Hong Kong, Macau, and famous historical landmarks in London helped set the film’s thriller tone. Additional comedy bits were set up by the re-launch of the Daniel Craig Bond films, which had rebooted the franchise since the last Johnny English effort.

Especially notable is a chase-and-fight sequence with English that sends up Craig-as-Bond’s Casino Royale parkour trackdown. That’s accomplished in scenes showing Johnny English walking around objects and taking elevators, instead of flipping, jumping and climbing over barriers.

“Johnny English is, after all, the sort of fellow who enjoys making life easier for himself, and he does have to allow for the advancing of middle age,” said Atkinson.

It’s a phase he understands, predicting that he may take it even slower in the future, as he continues to insist that a new Mr. Bean project isn’t likely.

His lack of ambition, and his reluctance to embrace the limelight, might have something to do with the fact that he never intended to have a showbiz life in the first place.

A graduate of Oxford University with an electrical engineering degree, Atkinson continues to try living “a normal life,” mostly under the radar in the English countryside with his wife, a former BBC makeup artist. He also has two grown-up children, but won’t talk about them, either.

He does confess that his real passion is for his exotic collection of automobiles, including a maroon McLaren F1, which he crashed last August, suffering a minor shoulder injury in the process and making headlines, however briefly, across the U.K.

Still, he considers himself more of a country-gentleman recluse than a famous international movie star.

“Most of the time, I’d rather go on a drive or visit somebody in Europe, or just not get into it [acting] all,” said Atkinson of his anti-career attitude. “It’s not because I am lazy. It’s just so stressful worrying about it all the time.”

[Blowfeld]

[BBvideo 425,350]http://www.ontheredcarpet.com/video?id=8292097[/BBvideo]

Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean, tributes James Bond in 'Johnny English Reborn'
Get More: Movies
10/22/2011 by Olivia Allin
Rowan Atkinson, the British actor who is best known for his portrayal of the hapless Mr. Bean, takes on a more debonair character in his new film, "Johnny English Reborn."

"James Bond is a genre that I love. Like everyone else, I've watched it from a very young age and always loved the combination of the glamour and the action and the wit," Atkinson said in an interview provided by Universal Pictures. "I think what we've really done with 'Johnny English,' as opposed to 'Austin Powers' and all those more obviously parodist comedy spy movies, I think all we've done with Johnny English is try to have more comedy and wit and slightly less glamour and action. Although, in this film, we've tried to push all three or four qualities."

In the follow-up to Atkinson's 2003 film "Johnny English," the actor reprises his role as the accidental secret agent, this time taxed with the duty of hunting down international assassins who are out to kill the Chinese premier.

"At the beginning of the film, Johnny English has clearly been fired from British Intelligence, some years previously, and we discover him in the hills of Tibet, finding himself... again," Atkinson explained of the plot. "And he is persuaded to come out of retirement, by British Intelligence, to perform a very particular function on a very particular job, which he alone can fulfill."

"I always thought that the first 'Johnny English' is not much more than a Roger Moore James Bond film with a slightly more ludicrous main character and more jokes... that's what we've tried to do with 'Johnny English Reborn,' we've just tried to make a film where comedy is emphasized but the action is still there and the story is still there and I hope to a greater extent than the first one, the story is more interesting, more enjoyable and more engaging."

The film, which opened in theaters on October 21, also stars Rosamund Pike, Dominic West, Roger Barclay and "The X Files" star Gillian Anderson, who plays the head of Johnny English's spy agency MI-7.

"We wanted to make the casting of the film as like to a proper spy movie as possible," Atkinson continued. "We wanted the casting to easily be casting that you would find in a James Bond movie. So people like Jillian Anderson, who plays the head of MI-7 - it's slightly redolent of the Judi Dench casting in the James Bond film - the fact that a woman is now running MI-7, but I think we might make even more of it than the James Bond movies do, in terms of the political structure of the place. There's a hardness and a credibility and a bite, really. You really believe that this woman isn't going to take any prisoners and isn't going to tolerate any silliness from Johnny English."

Though Johnny English comes off as an eccentric, the actor insisted that he has the best of intentions, not unlike Atkinson's Mr. Bean character.

"Johnny is, in the end... a decent bloke," Atkinson said of his character. "He overreaches himself, he's overambitious, he's vain, he's far too full of self-regard, which gets him into trouble, but in the end, he means well, he tries hard, he's honest, he's decent. And there are lots of other characters in our story who are none of those things."

The only regret Atkinson had with his new film is that he didn't take on the physical challenges with the first "Johnny English," when the actor was a bit younger.

"It is definitely a bigger film than the first one -- not bigger in scale, but in ambition," Atkinson said. "We wanted something more complex, more of a comedy thriller rather than just a comedy parody. We've tried to give it some foundation and some more credibility. The only challenge, from a personal point of view is that because there was a lot more action than there was in the first film, that all these fights and hanging off cable cars in the Swiss Alps, which is something that I personally didn't do in the first film, was more physically challenging than I found the first film, eight years later... it should have been the other way around."

Atkinson made headlines in August after crashing his McLaren F1 sports car. The $1 million vehicle reportedly spun several times before hitting a tree and a road sign and "bursting into flames" in the village of Haddon, which is about 85 miles north of London.

Authorities told the Associated Press that alcohol was not a factor in the accident and the actor was able to walk away from the vehicle with only a fractured shoulder blade.

The McLaren F1 is one of the world's fastest cars, with a maximum speed of 230 mph, but police did not suggest Atkinson had been speeding.

Atkinson is known for his work in the "Mr. Bean" series and the historical comedy series "Blackadder." He has also appeared in films like "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Love Actually."

Watch the trailer for "Johnny English Reborn" below.

There is a still of Johnny with long hair and a beard I couldn't stop laughing about after this Daniel-Beard story.

[Kristatos]

I'm going to see it tonight.

[Kristatos]

My verdict: not as funny as the first film, though I did LOL at the parkour chase spoof, but with a stronger story (as Atkinson hinted in the news story in the OP, when he said that it was more of a comedy thriller). It was actually closer in spirit to classic Bond than the last couple of EON films, and the supporting character of Agent Tucker made a far more likeable "rookie Bond" than the sullen thug played by Daniel Craig. I'm also rather glad that Pierce didn't play Simon Ambrose in the end, as him playing a Bond-like character who turned out to be evil would have felt wrong, somehow.