Shadowing Practice: Rowan Atkinson Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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This series is called Iconic Characters.
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This series is called Iconic Characters.
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Oh, I see.
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No, I don't do idents or introductions.
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Man vs. Bee.
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Trevor Bingley, who's our hero in Man vs. Bee,
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is just a very, very nice man, actually.
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Kind of nicer than most of the characters that I play,
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who tend to be very selfish or self-centered or self-obsessed in some way, particularly Mr. Bean.
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So actually we decided to create a character who is in many ways more real, more three-dimensional.
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He's a decent sort of family man who's just gone through a divorce.
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He's very short of money,
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but he gets this job house-sitting for this very,
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very wealthy couple who are going on holiday for a week.
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And he has a lot of trouble with a bee.
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On all 14 counts of dangerous driving,
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the destruction of priceless artwork, arson.
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That's basically the story.
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One vs. Me was very difficult to shoot actually
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because we couldn't find a real house to shoot in
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because it was during Covid and no one who owned an extremely nice house wanted a film crew in it.
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So we had to create a house of our own in the studio,
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which of course means you don't have a garden and we need a garden.
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And so we had four different locations for the garden,
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two or three different locations for the interior and one big interior set.
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Get out!
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Get out!
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Die!
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And to be honest, I preferred the simplicity and the cheapness,
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if you like, of some of the early Mr. Bean stuff,
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which, as you say, we start wide.
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You know, there's a lot of wide shooting,
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and I like wide shooting.
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I'm a great believer in what Charlie Chaplin said,
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is that a life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long shot.
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If you sit back visually on a situation, it automatically becomes funnier.
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I mention which is a French comedian called Jack Tatti who said that comedy begins in the legs.
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Making a character more real and more sympathetic and more identifiable doesn't necessarily make him funny.
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Because in many ways what's funny about Mr. Bean for example is his complete sort of selfishness.
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And he's a natural born anarchist.
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So he's a child trapped in a man's body.
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Whereas Trevor is an adult.
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So it's not necessarily funny to make him more three-dimensional but he becomes very obsessed and very self-centered.
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So in other words, he leaves his niceness behind.
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And that is when he becomes funny.
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In reality, we didn't have a bee,
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you'll be unsurprised to hear.
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We had a plastic bee on the end of a rod.
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If we wanted a bee to crawl across a worktop,
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then we had some professional puppeteers.
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And quite a lot of it,
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when I was just acting like that in a room,
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we didn't have anything at all.
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It was just down to me to imagine a bee and to be able to mime the situation,
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if you like, well enough,
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to make it look convincing.
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It was nice to look at a bee because your eyes,
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of course, always look different.
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If a bee's close, you look like that,
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and if the bee's further away, you look like that.
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And I think the bee,
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I mean the CGI of the bee is amazing.
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I think it's one of the finest CGI animals ever to be seen on screen.
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Mr. Bean.
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I probably enjoyed playing Mr. Bean the most because he's a character who's furthest away from my own character.
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As a person, I don't like him at all.
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I think he's very odd and pretty weird and not very nice.
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What's fun about it is it's an escape.
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You know, when you play the character,
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you don't care what you do.
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It's a weird kind of release.
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The first time we did the character,
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I'm fairly certain, was 1979 on stage.
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And that was when we had developed, I think, two sketches.
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One was the beach sketch in
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which he's trying to change into his swimming trunks on the beach
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and then there's the one in the church in
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which he's sitting in the church and he misbehaves while someone's spouting a sermon.
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The character didn't have a name.
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He didn't have to have a name because there were no words spoken in the sketches in which he featured.
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They were silent sketches.
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But then when we thought,
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actually, these sketches are quite funny,
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it's quite an interesting idea to develop a comedy character who doesn't use words.
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comedy had developed from radio comedy,
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which was a very wordy, you know, tradition.
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And we had to give him a name in order to give the television show a name.
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So we came up with the name of Mr. Bean.
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We were thinking Mr. White for a while.
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That was an idea, but that sounded a bit dull.
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We thought of, you know,
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vegetables and Mr. Bean seemed to be short,
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sharp and to the point.
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Bane.
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Bane.
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The one I remember shattering me the most,
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making me the most tired
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and exhausted I have ever been was a movie we did called Mr. Bean's Holiday in
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which he travels down through France to the south of France to the Cannes Film Festival.
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We did a sequence in Provence
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which was where he gets caught up with a peloton of cyclists and he overtakes them with great ease.
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I didn't overtake them with great ease.
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I had to put in a tremendous amount of effort
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and once we'd done a couple of takes of that I was absolutely dead because I'm not a cyclist.
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I'm not fit.
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I'm not an athlete.
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They cycled very slowly to make sure that I overtook them very very hard.
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I remember thinking that I'd nearly killed myself with the exhaustion.
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In those days we tended to do things for real
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because it was cheaper and CGI didn't really exist with the sophistication that it now has.
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I mean certainly the wider shots If you can see the wheels of the car on the road,
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then we were doing it for real.
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If it's a tighter shot,
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then we may have been on a trailer being pulled along.
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Just to make it easy,
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I tended to just, you know, do it.
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I remember, you know, we wanted this shot of the car coming straight towards camera.
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You know, the cameraman was here and I just drove straight at him, you know.
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And you would never do that in this day and age.
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I mean, I stopped, you know,
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before I hit him, but I might not have done.
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Or the brakes might have failed because of that.
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You're not allowed to do that kind of thing anymore.
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But in those days we did.
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The Blackadder.
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The Blackadder is a recurring character in history.
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We wrote a sitcom in which,
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before series, you see him in four different eras of British history.
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The essence of the Blackadder, it's about hierarchy either it's the royal court or it's the army,
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which has a very definable levels of status.
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Effectively, in every subsequent series,
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I play the ancestor, the descendant of the person in the previous series.
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In the first series, he's a prince.
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Precisely.
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In the second series, he's a lord.
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That barrow bloke you executed today, you sure he's dead?
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Well, chopped his head off,
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that usually does the trick.
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Third series, he's a butler.
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Lead on, MacDurl.
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I shall.
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And in the fourth series,
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he's a captain in the British Army in the First World War.
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I must be pretty impressed having Squadron Commander,
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the Lord Flashheart, drop in on your squally bit of line.
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Actually, no. I was more impressed by the contents of my handkerchief the last time I blew my nose.
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In the first series, he was a bit more of an idiot of an idiot.
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In the second, third and fourth series,
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he's a cleverer man, sort of stuck in the middle of a hierarchy.
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He'd love to move up,
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but he finds it very,
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very difficult to do so,
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and he certainly doesn't want to move down towards his sidekick, Baldrick.
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Yes, and your definition of dog is?
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Not a cat.
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Excellent.
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And he's always the middle guy,
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he's the sort of middle management guy who resents those above him and he resents those below him.
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But he had a wonderful sort of weary
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cynicism about the world and that I think is what made him surprisingly identifiable and also made him funny.
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The big change between the first series
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and the second series was we went from a very extravagant location-based semi-film-like texture to something,
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well, we just had to make something much more effective and much more funny and much more cheaply.
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So we ended up with a sort of three-set sitcom.
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So there were only three sets and the action just moves between the three sets.
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And then the third series,
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yeah, we were in the Regency period with George III on the throne and the Prince Regent in charge,
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is that right?
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Sorry, history was never my strong point.
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You know, Richard and Ben Elton,
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Richard Curtis and Ben Elton,
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who really made the Blackadder what it was.
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It was just whatever they thought was going to work best.
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Whenever I've been invited to do one of his films,
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I think I've always said yes,
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so if I'm not in one of his films,
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then he hasn't invited me,
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which he's perfectly entitled not to do.
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Well, Like Love Actually, you know,
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is a case in point,
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which was when he asked me to do the small part of the salesman in the shop.
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Could we be quite quick?
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Prontissimo It was just a sweet funny little part it took one all-night shoot in Selfridges on Oxford Street and
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And it was a very nice thing to have done Johnny English
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Johnny English is a British spy who's not as good as he thinks he is.
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He always overreaches himself.
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His ambition is always greater than his skill.
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The joke is in that discrepancy between reality and ambition.
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The master criminal sees not a room but a series of opportunities.
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Should I come in through the window?
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Possibly.
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Should I drop down from the ceiling?
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Perhaps.
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Actually, sir...
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There's one thing I think we can be fairly confident about.
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That is that they didn't come up through the...
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Whoa, whoa, whoa!
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I've got you, sir!
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He's a curious thing, actually.
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A relatively rare character, because he used to be called Richard Latham,
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and he was a character in some commercials that we made for Barclaycar in the 90s.
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No ordinary biro.
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Two clicks of a cap,
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and it will render any assailant immobile.
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Very dangerous in the wrong hands.
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Take over for a boff, would you a moment?
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We made the commercials to look like feature films.
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We'll never make that prank, sir.
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Nonsense.
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Our carriage awaits.
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It was a bit of a no-brainer to say,
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well, actually, why don't we just make a feature film?
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When we try and think of a name for the movies,
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I like sort of, you know,
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the name of the character in there, like Mr. Bean.
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And so in trying to think of a name,
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we thought Richard Latham was a bit dull,
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bit dull but Johnny English had a certain...
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Johnny English, I'm here to see Pegasus.
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Still, no sense rushing things.
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I did most of the driving stuff I did.
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I did what I was allowed to do.
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They are very, very reluctant to allow the star actors to do them.
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But I remember doing those things here in the first Johnny English
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when I fly down on the rope and grab the crown from John Malkovich's head.
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I hated every single one of them.
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I must have done it 25 times,
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swinging on a big rope.
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So I did some and I didn't do others.
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Context & Background
In the enlightening video titled "Rowan Atkinson Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters," legendary British comedian Rowan Atkinson reflects on the creation of memorable characters such as Trevor Bingley from his latest series, "Man vs. Bee." Atkinson discusses the unique traits of Trevor compared to his more infamous role as Mr. Bean. He highlights Trevor's relatability as a decent family man facing challenges, such as financial struggles and a recent divorce. This complex background sets the stage for humor derived from everyday situations, which Atkinson expertly dissects throughout the video.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
To enhance your English speaking practice, focus on these useful phrases that exemplify common conversational patterns from Atkinson’s dialogue:
- “Actually” - A versatile word used to clarify or emphasize a point.
- “Kind of” - This phrase softens statements, making them more conversational.
- “In many ways” - A useful expression for explaining nuances or perspectives.
- “To be honest” - A phrase that introduces your sincere opinion.
- “A lot of trouble” - Great for expressing difficulties in a light-hearted manner.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
Using the principles of shadow speech, here’s how to effectively practice your speaking skills with this video:
- Watch the Video: Start by watching "Rowan Atkinson Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters" with the subtitles on. Pay attention to Atkinson’s tone, pace, and pronunciation.
- Listen to Short Segments: Break down the video into smaller sections. For instance, focus on one of Atkinson's highlighted character traits or anecdotes at a time.
- Repeat Aloud: After listening to each segment, pause and repeat what he said. Emphasize his tone and inflection as you practice learn english with youtube techniques.
- Record Yourself: After shadowing, record your voice while repeating the phrases. This will help you identify areas to improve in pronunciation and delivery.
- Compare: Play back your recording alongside the original. Listen for differences in pronunciation and intonation, refining your speech.
Engaging in this structured approach on a shadowing site or similar platform allows you to gain confidence and fluency. You can effectively learn to internalize expressions and speech patterns, ultimately enriching your English speaking practice.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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