Mr Bean star Rowan Atkinson as you have never seen him before.
Why did a jittery Rowan Atkinson initially say ‘non’ to Maigret, but then change his mind? Jim Maloney reports.
Playing it straight made Rowan Atkinson nervous when he acted as legendary French fictional detective Jules Maigret. In fact, at first he turned down the role. Best known for comic roles in Mr
Bean and Blackadder, Atkinson stars in two new TV adaptations of the 75 Maigret novels written by Georges Simenon between 1930 and 1972.
The first, Maigret Sets A Trap, is set in Paris in 1955 with the city gripped by fear as four women are murdered on the streets of Montmartre in a spree of seemingly unconnected attacks.
Chief Inspector Maigret is under huge public and professional pressure to find the killer before he (or she) strikes again.
“After I was approached to play the role it took me a long time to decide to do it,” Atkinson says.
“I decided not to at first and then they came back to me and asked if I was sure and I thought about it for a lot longer and finally accepted.
“My concern was that you can’t play the leading role in a mainstream TV drama without being reasonably certain that you can do it well.
“I don’t think you can have a half-hearted attempt at it and think, ‘Let’s give it a go and see what happens’. So, rightly or wrongly, I thought that I could do more than have a go at it. So I had a go.”
He obviously did a good job because two further films have since been commissioned.
But Atkinson, 61, who is far more serious and introspective in real life than his comic characters would suggest, still didn’t think he had quite nailed the character in the first film.
“Maigret is a very ordinary man and, generally speaking, I haven’t played many ordinary men,” he says.
“I tend to play rather odd men or people who are more characterised. And the problem with Maigret is that he hasn’t got a limp or a lisp or a love of opera or those other things that people tend to attach to many fictional detectives. He is just an ordinary guy doing an extraordinary job in a very interesting time.
“Paris in the mid-50s was a very interesting place. Only 10 years after the Third Reich
“As you know, with me, no glass is anything other than half empty.” – Rowan Atkinson
had left, it was a city awash with guns and crime and racketeering and all sorts of hangovers from a very difficult time in French history.
“So it was interesting to be a policeman at that time but Maigret is just a decent man doing a difficult job. And it was the challenge of that, that I found a bit daunting.
“I think I played him a bit self-contained. In the second film he is a little bit more ironic from time to time. But that’s just a work in progress. The character will change and develop.
“I wouldn’t like to claim that he was perfectly formed right out of the box, but I thought it was an optimistic start. As you know, with me, no glass is anything other than half empty.
“Prior to 2008 I had always said that I would never play a part that had been played before. Nobody had played Mr Bean before or Blackadder or Johnny English. I created those roles.
“And then I got offered the role of Fagin in a revival of the musical
Oliver! and I thought it would be fun and it seemed to work.
“But one thing that I would never wish to be thought is that you play serious roles in order to achieve some kind of respectability which is more difficult to get from playing a comedy role.
“I think it is quite weird where the arts community (for want of a better word) still have a long-lasting cynicism of the importance or the artistic value of comedy. They think it’s just farting about for money and it’s only when you take a serious role that you are considered an actor.
“I’m not looking for anything other than an interesting role to play and I feel as though I am using exactly the same skills for a serious role as a comic one. It’s slightly different muscles but the same skill set.” The second instalment, Maigret’s
Dead Man, screens on TVNZ 1 on Monday. Both were filmed in Budapest because parts of the city are more like Paris of the 1950s than the French capital is now.
One ‘prop’ that did come in useful for Atkinson when playing Maigret was the trademark pipe.
“Pipe smoking is definitely a very important part of Maigret and his world and his attitude and his time,” says Atkinson. “He is a very thoughtful, ruminative person and the pipe helped me as an actor.
“He may not have a lisp or a limp but at least he’s got a pipe.”