R.I.P. Mr Bean but Maybe not Blackadder

A major media celebrity has been laid to rest this week: Pay your respects to Mr. Bean. He is history, according to the actor who played him, Rowan Atkinson.

“I’ve always regarded Mr Bean as an ageless, timeless figure,” Atkinson is quoted as saying on Digital Spy. “I don’t want him to particularly grow old, and if I carry on playing him then he’s going to get older, whether we like it or not. I would like to remember Mr Bean how he was five or ten years ago.”

British comic actor Atkinson, 56, is best known for his appearances on the BBC’s Not The Nine O’Clock News in the late 70s and early 80s and his roles as Mr Bean, Blackadder and Johnny English. Johnny English Reborn, a spy spoof  sequel to the last of those, is released in the UK today.

Atkinson’s other big screen roles have included a voice part in Disney’s The Lion King, which was re-released on Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D this week (see here), and appearances in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Scooby-Doo, Love Actually and the Mr. Bean movies Bean and Mr. Bean’s Holiday. On television he played the largely voiceless Bean— “a child in a grown man’s body”—in 14 half-hour episodes and an animated series.

Although Mr. Bean may not return, Atkinson hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a fifth series of the historical sitcom Blackadder, although not necessarily with him in it.

“We’re all just getting a bit old for that kind of thing,” he told the British show Daybreak recently. “I mean it could be reprised in some form or other, but generally speaking The Blackadder seemed to work best when there was a sort of claustrophobic world and a hierarchy. So if you can think of any situations in which they are dominant then I think there is a possibility of a fifth series.”

Johnny English Reborn is scheduled for release in Canada and the US later this month. In addition to Atkinson, it stars Dominic West of HBO’s The Wire, The X-Files‘ Gillian Anderson and Primeval‘s marvelous Ben Miller. You can see the trailer below.