Rowan Atkinson, the legendary actor behind “Mr. Bean”, told BBC Radio 2 Breakfast with Scott Mills how the name of the iconic character was conceived.
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“Mr. Bean” was created in the 1980s after Rowan Atkinson first performed at a comedy festival in Quebec in 1987. He chose an audience that did not speak English to test whether the character would work without dialogue.
Atkinson also said that the character was developed alongside Richard Curtis, director and screenwriter of “Love Actually”. The actor met Curtis in Oxford around the age of 20, when they began working together.
“It was a character, but it never had a name, the one [Curtis and I] developed on stage,” he commented.
“So we decided to put it on television, and that’s how we got a TV show… we thought we should name the show after the character, but we didn’t have a name.”
Rowan Atkinson says that for a while the character was called Mr. White, but they found it dull. For some reason, the duo then started thinking about vegetables.
“There was Mr. Cauliflower, Mr. Courgette, we certainly went through a few, until Bean occurred to us as something short, direct, one syllable, with a B,” he recalled.
The actor stated that words that begin with B are “a little funnier than those that don’t”.
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