I'm killing off Mr Bean

Rowan Atkinson is sort of funny and odd all at the same time. He half walks and half shuffles into the room where I am sitting and then turns around, sees me and jumps back in surprise as if bitten by a rattlesnake. "Ah," he says, looking very much like his most famous comic creation, Mr Bean. "You are here. Good. Good. And your name is, um, let me see, um ... Lucy!" He then sits down and plays with his cup of tea and looks very uncomfortable and embarrassed.

He hates being in the spotlight, yet, at 50, he is our most successful comedian, reputed to have made more than £60 million. And it's not just the British who love him. Atkinson, in the form of Mr Bean, is popular the world over. The first, and so far only, Mr Bean movie took £165 million at box offices around the world.

Why does everyone love him so? "Because he's a child in a grown man's body," says Atkinson. "He can't stop himself from doing stuff, so he fiddles and meddles just like a child does. That's why children identify with him. He lacks social grace."

In real life, Atkinson is gentle and courteous. However, he does engage in a touch of Bean's gurning. As a child, he was a quiet boy with a stutter and it hasn't entirely left him. When he thinks he's said something that hasn't come out the right way, he pulls the most extraordinary faces.

We are here to discuss Keeping Mum, the new comic film he has made with Kristen Scott Thomas and Maggie Smith. "It's a sweet film but it's not ground-breaking," he says. "Kristen is really surprisingly good." Then he stops almost in horror at the implication of what he's just said. "Not that she isn't good in all her films. Oh dear," he says, his face almost turning itself inside out with embarrassment. "I mean she is particularly good in this film; real, vulnerable and warm."

In it he plays a vicar. "My son said, 'Oh no, not another one,'" says Atkinson. He has two children, Ben, 12, and Lily, 10, with his wife of 15 years, former make-up artist Sunetra Sastry. The couple met on the set of Blackadder and married very quietly in the Russian Tea Rooms in New York with Stephen Fry as best man. Now they live in a village near Oxford.

"My son is right about me playing so many vicars," he continues. But this vicar is slightly different from the characters he usually plays. "He's a good, decent man, married to Kristen's character, and they are like any couple with teenage children who have been together for a long time. Their relationship has got a bit tired and it needs a bit of help." This help arrives in the form of Maggie Smith as a housekeeper with a surprising past.

"I have no great desire to play straight characters so I was quite surprised to be approached for the part," he says. "There is a risk that I'll attract too much attention to a role. We actually had to cut some scenes from the film because they were too funny." It's true, people just have to look at his face and they start laughing.

Does he not see that he is funny? "Not really," he says. "I like to be in control of things, you see, so I can always see how it could've been better. I'm never satisfied really."

He is constantly pushing himself to do things he doesn't like. "I always think it is a good idea to make yourself do something that makes you feel uncomfortable," he says. When he first started out, all those years ago, he and Richard Curtis used to do revues together. "The first time I stood on a stage, I felt so very nervous. In a way, it's a good thing. I think sometimes you have to go and do something dangerous like that."