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To Criticize A Person For Their Race Is Manifestly Irrational And Ridiculous, But To Criticize Their Religion, That Is A Right. That Is A Freedom. The Freedom To Criticize Ideas, Any Ideas - Even If They Are Sincerely Held Beliefs - Is One Of The Fundamental Freedoms Of Society. A Law Which Attempts To Say You Can Criticize And Ridicule Ideas As Long As They Are Not Religious Ideas Is A Very Peculiar Law Indeed.

-Rowan Atkinson

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To Criticize A Person

Rowan Atkinson

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To Criticize A Person For Their Race Is Manifestly Irrational And Ridiculous, But To Criticize Their Religion, That Is A Right. That Is A Freedom. The Freedom To Criticize Ideas, Any Ideas - Even If They Are Sincerely Held Beliefs - Is One Of The Fundamental Freedoms Of Society. A Law Which Attempts To Say You Can Criticize And Ridicule Ideas As Long As They Are Not Religious Ideas Is A Very Peculiar Law Indeed.

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The Good Thing About Those Original Credit Card Commercials Was That They Were Very "filmic", They Were Like Little Movies, So It Wasn't A Big Step To Think Well Maybe We Could Make A Big Movie Using This Character, Which We Eventually Did.

For Telling A Good And Incisive Religious Joke, You Should Be Praised. For Telling A Bad One, You Should Be Ridiculed And Reviled. The Idea That You Could Be Prosecuted For The Telling Of Either Is Quite Fantastic.

I Have A Problem With Porsches. They're Wonderful Cars, But I Know I Could Never Live With One. Somehow, The Typical Porsche People-and I Wish Them No Ill-are Not, I Feel, My Kind Of People. I Don't Go Around Saying That Porsches Are A Pile Of Dung, But I Do Know That Psychologically I Couldn't Handle Owning One.

The Arts Community Still Has A Long Lasting Cynicism Of The Importance, Or The Artistic Value, Of Comedy. Comedy Is Just Farting About For Money.

The Problem With Maigret Is He Hasn't Got A Limp, And He Hasn't Got A Lisp, And He Hasn't Got A French Accent, Or A Particular Love Of Opera... Or All Those Other Things That People Tend To Attach To Many Fictional Detectives. He's Just An Ordinary Guy Doing An Extraordinary Job, In A Very Interesting Time.

A Law Which Attempts To Say You Can Criticise And Ridicule Ideas As Long As They Are Not Religious Ideas Is A Very Peculiar Law Indeed.

The First Couple Of Weeks Of Filming Were Quite Tricky For Me To Find My Feet With The Character [maigret], Which Wasn't Helped By The Story That We Were Telling.

In The Modern Media Age We Are Rarely Surprised By What We See. Whether It's On Television Or Film Or In The Theatre, Everything Is So Advertised, So Trailed, That Most Entertainment Is Merely What You Thought It Was Going To Be Like.

It's The Difficulty We Had With Mr. Bean, Actually, When It Went From Tv To Film. You Certainly Discover That You Need To Explain More About A Character.

It's The Demand In Many Ways Of Modern Television Drama - It's Very Low Key And Naturalistic, And, Generally Speaking, The Characters That I've Played Have Not Been Low Key And Naturalistic.

We Haven't Made Any Particular Decision [on Maigret], I Haven't Been Asked If I Want To Carry On With It. All These Things Are A Matter Of Whether You Feel As Though The Idea Is Developing And Whether It's Still Interesting To Play.

I Consider Myself More Of A Visual Comedian Than A Physical One.

I'm As Poor As A Church Mouse, That's Just Had An Enormous Tax Bill On The Very Day His Wife Ran Off With Another Mouse, Taking All The Cheese.

What Is Wrong With Inciting Intense Dislike Of A Religion If The Activities Or Teachings Of That Religion Are So Outrageous, Irrational Or Abusive Of Human Rights That They Deserve To Be Intensely Disliked?

At The Moment, I'm Certainly Not Thinking 'never Again', But Neither Am I Thinking 'i Can't Wait To Play That Part Again'. I'm Somewhere In Between.

But I Always Feel That Whatever I Do, I Could Do Better. I Suppose It Is Perfectionism.

Your Services Might Be As Useful As A Barbershop On The Steps Of A Guillotine.

I Love Both [johnny English And James Bond] Actually. The Action Sequences Are Really Exciting Because You're Getting To Work With Some Brilliant Crew And Do Some Great Stuff But You Always Get Some Magic When You're Working With Actors.

Certainly In The Second Film [maigret's Dead Man], Which Is Quite A More Unpleasant And Darker Story, It's Quite Different In Tone And Feel.

Johnny English Is Someone Who Really Means Well It's Just That He's Not As Good As He Thinks He Is, And I Think That Maybe That's The British Male In A Nutshell.

I Would Never Wish To Say That I've Finally Waved Goodbye To Any Character, It's Just That The Emphasis Tends To Shift.

People Think Because I Can Make Them Laugh On The Stage, I'll Be Able To Make Them Laugh In Person. That Isn't The Case At All. I Am Essentially A Rather Quiet, Dull Person Who Just Happens To Be A Performer.

I Have Always Regarded Mr. Bean As A Timeless, Ageless Character, And I Would Rather He Be Remembered As A Character Mostly In His 30s And 40s.

I Would Never Be A Television Presenter. It's Not Something I Could Ever Do.

I Suddenly Think The Job Of Acting Is A Difficult One. It's Not As Flip, Irrelevant And Shallow A Calling As I Thought It Was In The Eighties.

To Criticize A Person For Their Race Is Manifestly Irrational And Ridiculous, But To Criticize Their Religion, That Is A Right. That Is A Freedom. The Freedom To Criticize Ideas, Any Ideas - Even If They Are Sincerely Held Beliefs - Is One Of The Fundamental Freedoms Of Society. A Law Which Attempts To Say You Can Criticize And Ridicule Ideas As Long As They Are Not Religious Ideas Is A Very Peculiar Law Indeed.

When You Play A Serious Role, As Far As I'm Concerned, I Feel I'm Using Exactly The Same Skills, Whatever They Are, To Play The Role As You Do With Something More Obviously Comic. It's Slightly Different Muscles, But The Same Skill Set.

Look, If I'd Wanted A Lecture On The Rights Of Man, I'd Have Gone To Bed With Martin Luther.

Nope, I Don't Enjoy Work Generally. Not Because I'm Lazy; It's Just All So Stressful And Worrying.

In Tv, And In Particular In Commercials, You Don't Really Need To Explain Very Much At All - You Just Say He's A Spy And He's A Little Bit Theatrical And Overblown And Smug And He's Not Very Good At His Job.

I Mean I Can Do It When I'm Very Relaxed, And With Good Friends, Then I Think I Can Be Amusing.

The Job Is Interesting, And The Task Is Difficult, But The Man [maigret] Is Just A Decent Man Doing A Very Ordinary Job.

To Criticise A Person For Their Race Is A Manifestly Irrational And Ridiculous. But To Criticise Their Religion - That Is A Right. That Is A Freedom.

Irrational Fear

Funny Things Tend Not To Happen To Me. I Am Not A Natural Comic. I Need To Think About Things A Lot Before I Can Be Even Remotely Amusing.

I'm Sure That A French Production Of This [maigret Series] Would Be Different. For Better Or Worse, Who's To Say, But Probably Not Very Good For 8 O'clock On Itv.

I Think I Have An Inner Confidence That My Tastes Are Pretty Simple, That What I Find Funny Finds A Wide Audience. I'm Not Particularly Intellectual Or Clever Or Minority-focused In My Creative Instincts. And I'm Certainly Not Aware Of Suppressing More Sophisticated Ambitions.

[georges] Simenon Could Be Very Brave Like That. You Never Quite Know What You're Going To Get Or How The Story's Going To Be Told.

I Don't Really Have Plans Like That [move Towards More Dramatic Acting].

I Can Be Reasonably Funny And Light-hearted When I'm In The Company Of Good Friends, But I'm Not A Jokesmith. I Tend To Be Quite Serious.

I Find His Films About As Funny As Getting An Arrow Through The Neck And Discovering There's A Gas Bill Tied To It.

You're About As Useful As A One-legged Man At An Arse Kicking Contest.

Itv And The Production Company Contacted Me And Asked If I Fancied Playing The Role [of Maigret]. It Took Me A Long Time To Decide To Do It. In Fact, I Decided Not To. I Thought About It For Some Weeks, And Thought 'perhaps Not' And It Went Away For A While, And Then It Sort Of Came Back. They Said 'are You Sure You Don't Want To Play Him?', So I Thought About It For A Lot Longer Again, And Eventually Decided That I Would.

Paris In The Mid-'50s Was A Very Interesting Place. It Was Only Ten Years After The Third Reich Had Left, And The City Was Awash With Guns, And Crime, And Racketeering, And All Sorts Of Hangovers From A Very Difficult Time In French History. So It's An Interesting Time To Be A Policeman.

It's A Bit Disconcerting Being Treated Like Madonna.

Apart From The Fact That Your Physical Ability Starts To Decline, I Also Think Someone In Their Fifties Being Childlike Becomes A Little Sad. You've Got To Be Careful.

I'm More Critical Of The Films I Make Than Anyone Else.

I Have To Say That I've Always Believed Perfectionism Is More Of A Disease Than A Quality. I Do Try To Go With The Flow But I Can't Let Go.

I Like To Juggle With One Ball At A Time. Then I Put The Ball Down And Do Nothing For Extended Periods Of Time.

Get That Right, Then- If You Get The Quality Right, Then The Marketability Or Whatever; Your Ability To Sell Videos Or Your Ability To Earn Money Or Whatever, Will Follow Naturally. But Try To Be Creatively Lead Rather Than Market Lead. And That's Important To Me.

I'm Not A Naturally Funny Man. I Find That I Can Only Be Funny, If I Become Someone Else.

Loved The Show As A Child And Felt I Could Not Do It Justice. [on Turning Down The Role Of The New Doctor Who

[maigret] Is More Internal. I Think If We Made More Of These I Might Let Him Out A Bit.

The Right To Ridicule Is Far More Important To Society Than Any Right Not To Be Ridiculed Because One In My View Represents Openness - And The Other Represents Oppression.

Without Wanting To Claim That I'm Really Like James Bond I Would Certainly Prefer To Be Thought Of As Closer To James Bond Than Mr. Bean Most Definitely.

Monty Python Crowd; Half Of Them Came From Cambridge, And Half Of Them Came From Oxford. But, There Seems To Be This Jewel, This Sort Of Two Headed Tradition Of Doing Comedy, Of Doing Sketches, And That Kind Of Thing.

The Older You Get, The More You Realise How Happenstance... Has Helped To Determine Your Path Through Life.

Mr. Bean Is At His Best When He Is Not Using Words, But I Am Equally At Home In Both Verbal And Nonverbal Expression.

Art Is Something That Nobody Laughs At And Nobody Makes Any Money Out Of Is The Attitude, Which I Would Dispute.

When I Was Doing Bean More Than I’ve Done Him In The Last Few Years, I Did Strange Things - Like Appearing On Chat Shows In Character As Mr. Bean.

Marketing Is What Gets You Noticed, And That Side Of It Something - This Side Of It, If You Like, Doing Interviews - Is The Side Of It That I Least Enjoy, And Yet Is 50% Of The Project.

[maigret] Is Terribly Self-contained, Not That I Would Ever Wish Him To Be Any More Comic, Particularly, But In The Second Film We've Made You See He's A Little More Ironic From Time To Time. But As I Say, That's Just Work In Progress.

It Is Very Linear Storytelling, And I Think That's Not So Much The Fashion. I Was Watching A New Drama The Other Night Which Was Extremely Non-linear, Where You Flash Back And Flash Forward In Ways That Certainly Keeps You On Your Toes As The Audience. There's Not Much Of That Courage With The Storytelling In Our Maigret Film.

To Be Successful You Don't Need Beautiful Face And Heroic Body, What You Need Is Skillful Mind And Ability To Perform

The Scarlet Pimpernel Is The Most Over-rated Human Being Since Judas Iscariot Won The A.d.31 'best Disciple' Competition.

We Still Have A Tradition Certainly In English Television; It's Faded A Bit In The Last Five Years, But We Still Have A Tradition Where The Important Thing Is The Quality And The Challenging Nature Of The Programming.

I'm Not A Collector. I Don't Like The Toy Cupboard Syndrome That Causes So Many Good Cars To Evaporate.

Marketing Is What Gets You Noticed.

I Think In Many Ways Johnny English Is A More Believable Character.

Having Spent A Substantial Part Of My Career Parodying Religious Figures From My Own Christian Background, I Am Aghast At The Notion That It Could, In Effect, Be Made Illegal To Imply Ridicule Of A Religion Or To Lampoon Religious Figures.

Although The Great Frustration About This [role] Is The Fact That There's One Thing Maigret Never Does, And That's Drive. He's Always Driven, Or He Takes The Train, Or He Gets The Bus. I Was Saying 'well, Why Don't We Ring The Changes For The 21st Century, And Stick Him In The Car?'. [executive Producer And Son Of The Author, John Simenon] Said, 'well, You Can If You Want, But There'll Be Lots Of People Who Won't Like It'. So He's A Non-driver ... But No, Top Gear Was Never A Consideration For Me; And Neither Was I Asked

One Of The Conventions That I Always Liked Was Doctor Zhivago, Where Everything That's Written On The Screen Is In Russian But Everyone Speaks English. That Seemed To Me To Be Quite A Good Convention To Follow.

It Certainly Helps, I Think, With Some Actors To Understand The Process Of Acting. You See What Extraordinary Pressure They're Under, There's A Huge Circus Dedicated To A Particular Moment And They're Got To Deliver And It Can Help That You, Even If Empathetically Alone, Understand What They're Doing.

If You're A Serious Actor, It's When You Know You're Going To Die Tomorrow That You Really Start To Feel It.

It Was The Challenge Of That That I Found Daunting, But Also Engaging And Interesting [to Play Maigret].

The One Thing I Would Never Wish It To Be Thought Is That You Play Serious Roles In Order To Achieve Some Sort Of Respectability Which You Can't If You're Playing Comedic Roles.

My Personal Problem Is That I Take The Business Of Film-making So Seriously That I Find It Very Difficult To Relax.

[maigret Sets A Trap] Was Always Going To Be The First Film, And It Seemed To Be Quite A Nice Story. But Of Course It Meant That Here I Was Playing This New Character For The First Time, In A Place Where He Had Been A Relative Failure, As All These People Had Been Murdered And The Pressure Was On. Rather Than Starting Optimistically With His Pipe In Front Of The Fireplace, He Was In Quite A Difficult Place.

The Clear Problem Of The Outlawing Of Insult Is That Too Many Things Can Be Interpreted As Such. Criticism, Ridicule, Sarcasm, Merely Stating An Alternative Point Of View To The Orthodoxy, Can Be Interpreted As Insult.

No, No, I Was Only Funny On Stage, Really. I Think I Was Funny As A Person Toward My Classmates When I Was Very Young. You Know, When I Was A Child, Up To About The Age Of 12.

Of Course, Some Would Say If You Have A Performing Inclination, Then You Should Become A Lawyer. That's A Platform We Use, Or A Priest. You Know, Anywhere You Lecture And Pontificate To People.

Lord, Thy One-liners Are As Good As Thy Tricks. Thou Art Indeed An All-round Family Entertainer.

The Path Of My Life Is Strewn With Cow Pats From The Devil's Own Satanic Herd!

I Have Always Believed That There Should Be No Subject About Which One Cannot Make Jokes, Religion Included. Clearly, One Is Always Constricted By Contemporary Mores And Trends Because, After All, What One Seeks Above All Is An Appreciative Audience.

What Directors Of Television Drama Constantly Tell You Is 'don't Act It. Don't Try. Don't Emphasise That Word'. Whereas With Someone Like Blackadder, Even Though He's A Relatively Low Key Character In A Way, He Did Relish The Lines That He Had And The Words That He Was Given, With A Lot Of Inflection.

The Maigret Stories Are All Very Different In Terms Of The Content And The Way That The Stories Are Told. They're Not What I Would Call Formulaic.

This Is Sort Of Inflection-free Acting [playing Maigret], And I Really Wasn't Sure If I Could Do It - You Make Your Mind Up On Whether I've Succeeded Or Not. But Yes, I Found It Difficult When We Were Shooting; It Was A Couple Of Weeks Before I Settled Into Not Worrying - To Finding A Way Of Delivering Those Lines - So My Worries Of Many Months Before I Think Had Been Justified. I Found It A Difficult Way Of Being.

It's Not Easy To Take A Sit-com And Turn It Into A Feature.

The Character [maigret] Is Bound To Change And Develop, And I Wouldn't Like To Claim That We Are Perfectly Formed Straight Out Of The Box. I Think It's What I'd Call An 'optimistic Start'. As You Know, For Me, No Glass Is Anything Other Than Half Empty, So I Apologise For My Reticence In Terms Of Promoting This Programme.

I Enjoy Racing Historic Motorcars From The '50s And '60s. The Seed Of My Interest Was Planted When I Was About 12 Years Old And Took Over My Mother's Morris Minor. I Drove It Around My Father's Farm. But My Favorite Car Is Still A Mclaren F1, Which I Have Had For 10 Years.

I Have Always Worried About Things More Than I Should.

The Decision To Do It [play Maigret] Was Related To The Fact That The Character Is A Very Ordinary Man, And Generally Speaking I Haven't Played Very Many Ordinary Men.

But Generally Speaking, I Tend To Be Quiet And Introspective.

I Want To Express Myself In A Different Way. I Have A Performing Inclination.

I Don't Think You Should Be Too Absolutist About What You Play And What You Don't Play.

And, We Put A Lot More Value, Or At Least I Personally Put A Lot More Value, On The Creative Values And Creative Challenges Of Something Than The Commercial Necessities.

I Tend To Play Rather Odd Men. People That Are Slightly Odd Or Eccentric, Or Have A More Particular Attitude To Life.

I Think You're Bound To Get A Sense Of Any Character That You Play. It's Not Something You Often Do In Comedy.

I Like To Relish Words And Sentences, And Phraseology, And There's Not Much Facility For That [playing Maigret].

But, Actually, So Many Of The Clerics That I've Met, Particularly The Church Of England Clerics, Are People Of Such Extraordinary Smugness And Arrogance And Conceitedness Who Are Extraordinarily Presumptuous About The Significance Of Their Position In Society.

I've Read About Eight Or Ten Of The Original Novels, And One Of Them Is Where Maigret's In Bed For The Entire Story! His Wife Is Running Around And Solving The Case!

I've No Desire To Hang Around With A Bunch Of Upper-class Delinquents, Do Twenty Minutes' Work And Then Spend The Rest Of The Day Loafing About In Paris Drinking Gallons Of Champagne And Having Dozens Of Moist, Pink, Highly Experienced French Peasant Girls Galloping Up And Down My - Hang On.

I'm Not Looking For Anything Other Than An Interesting Role To Play.

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