Rowan Atkinson has said that his relationship with his sidekick Bough in the new Johnny English movie has echoes of Blackadder’s strained master and servant dynamic with Baldrick.
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Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, Atkinson said, "I think that’s a very good description but they are very different characters.
"Bough is a lot more intelligent I would say than Baldrick and Johnny is a much more arrogant and smug individual than the Blackadder but my chemistry with Ben Miller playing the role of Bough is very similar to the chemistry I felt with Tony Robinson as Baldrick."
In Johnny English Strikes Again, which is released on Friday, October 5, Atkinson returns as the bungling 00 - 7 to take on a mastermind hacker when a cyber attack on Britain exposes the identities of the country’s undercover agents, leaving English as the Secret Service's last hope.
The Johnny English films have lampooned every James Bond cliche over the years but Atkinson says that he’s never heard what any of the actors who’ve played Bond made of the accident prone spy.
"No. Not directly or indirectly, they haven’t actually," he said. "I remember once sharing a dressing room during a charity show rather bizarrely with Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan, a strange little trio we were, all stuck one room, but I can’t remember Pierce making any particular comment.
"But certainly I’m not aware of anything in the James Bond franchise that is antagonistic towards the world of Johnny English."
Considering the frosty relations between London and Moscow over the Skripal poisoning case and mounting questions about the trustworthiness of big tech, Atkinson’s return as Johnny English for a third film seems to be well-timed.
"Well, yes," says Atkinson. "We’ve got a Russian spy in the shape of Olga Kurylenko in our film, which is purely accidental but it’s an appropriate time I think for Johnny to be back on the stage of international espionage and there’s something pretty old school about the real-life Russian spy case we’ve been dealing with.
"It’s a relatively low tech form of attack and that’s what our movie is about - the low tech versus the high tech, the analogue versus digital war that our story represents."
Alan Corr @corralan
