The James Bond performance Rowan Atkinson regretted
Despite evolving into a global phenomenon and cultural behemoth over the decades, the James Bond franchise has always been viewed as a distinctly British enterprise, with some of the country’s most notable performers having lent their distinguished talents to the espionage adventures.
Outside of the title role, such esteemed thespians as Bernard Lee, John Cleese, Sean Bean, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Christopher Lee, and Jonathan Pryce have all swung by at one stage or another, but it’s perfectly fine to completely forget that Rowan Atkinson is among them.
To be fair, there is an asterisk next to his involvement after his contributions to the world of 007 came in 1983’s Never Say Never Again, the unofficial movie that saw Sean Connery ending a 12-year exile to return as the suave secret agent in a film that wasn’t endorsed by Eon Productions and isn’t treated as an official part of Bondian canon.
Atkinson was already a known quantity in the United Kingdom at the time thanks to The Secret Policeman’s Ball and Not the Nine O’Clock News, but Never Say Never Again marked the first time he’d ever appeared in a feature film, where it ended up premiering in cinemas just months after his own career had been kicked up a notch following the debut of Blackadder.
He plays the role of Nigel Small-Fawcett, a representative of the Foreign Office stationed in the Bahamas, but as the tenth-billed name in the credits, it’s not as if he was afforded the opportunity to display his best work. Still, although he looks back fondly on the experience, he wasn’t best pleased with what he brought to the table.
Atkinson described Never Say Never Again as “an extraordinary thing” professionally because “it was the first film that I had ever made, and there I was in first class in a British Airways flight on my to shoot a Bond movie in the Bahamas,” which is completely fair. However, the end product was hardly reflective of the joy he felt, and he was happy to admit it.
He first branded the film “fine,” before getting more specific. “Actually, it wasn’t very fine, in my opinion, because of my performance in it.” As a relatively untested big screen actor, Atkinson called it “one of those things that you do when you’re very young, and this is the way to do it,” but reflecting on it as a seasoned performer across multiple mediums, he wished he’d “done something a little different instead.”
That may have been the Mr. Bean star’s only dalliance with 007, but he was more than happy to lampoon the globetrotting spy stories two decades later when he poked fun at the history of secret agents in cinema with the Johnny English trilogy.
