Watch Invisible Drum Kit I Watch The Piano Player

Rowan Atkinson wears a blue suit, blue shirt and hooped socks that are predominantly blue. When I ask him about his big watch, he says he bought it because he liked the shade of blue on the face. Is he, I wonder, chromophobic, fighting off a fear of, perhaps, red, by wearing too much blue? Probably not. He looks normal enough.

No, hang on, he doesn’t. In the flesh, his ears, nose, eyes and eyebrows are all even bigger than you expect. So big, in fact, that there doesn’t seem to be much else above the collar of his blue shirt, which, I now notice, has a fine red line running around the inside. And the eyes pop rather. When he looks up and the window is reflected in his pupils, he looks like one of those etiolated El Greco saints that make you think, “Nobody could possibly have eyes like that.” But he does.

Also, he’s not quite, as it were, there. He’s famously guarded — suppressing all talk of his personal life to the point where he barely acknowledges the existence of his wife and two children. But there’s more to it than that. In conversation, his guardedness manifests itself as languid nonchalance, a casual, barely interested manner, as if we were complete strangers making desultory conversation while waiting for a train. This is probably more revealing than he thinks — or I understand.

Anyway, here we are, His Blueness and me, in an office in Leicester Square, talking about the fact that he is to play Fagin in Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, in a production directed by the current wunderkind Rupert Goold that starts previewing next month. He was late, probably because he drove into town in a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a gigantic machine that should be driven only on empty 12-lane blacktops. He is famously crazy about cars.

“The Phantom is a total and utter delight, even though it sometimes attracts the wrong kind of attention,” he says. “I’ve always been determined not to be put off driving a car I like because of people’s preconceptions.”

“Er, what about Porsche?” I ask, knowing he has failed to buy this marque precisely because of preconceptions.

“Well, yes, I’ve yet to pluck up the courage to buy a 911. I know they’re fabulous cars, but I’ve never had the courage to actually own and drive one. I was thinking when Paul Newman died — he did motor racing, which is what I did, but there aren’t actually many of us.”

It helps to be rich. Atkinson has £70m, according to The Sunday Times Rich List 2008. Admittedly, there seem to be 1,117 richer people, but he’s up there. John Cleese, a rival British comedy grandee, isn’t even on the list. But the dice rolled kindly for Atkinson — production-company sales, film earnings, property and so on. In fact, life as a whole seems to have been pretty kind. By show-business standards, his CV has an amazingly easy-going look. Basically, it goes: Not the Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder and Mr Bean. There are lots of other bits and pieces — the stumbling priest in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and various roles in lesser films — but it all hangs neatly from those three biggies. He often takes whole years off.

“It’s because I can only keep one ball in the air at once. I like to have only one thing to think about. Films are very intensive, and once they’re over, it’s six or nine months before I can even think about doing anything else. I’ve always been curious to know how even the most remunerated and highly regarded Hollywood actors do four or five films a year. But Americans have a better work ethic than we do. Or it’s that thing about making hay while the sun shines. But that sort of implies a lack of confidence in your ability to do something interesting into the future.”

The one cloud on the Atkinson horizon is that he has felt the first pang of a loss of future confidence. He’s 53. Comic actors have problems in their fifties.

“You tend to lose your comic authority as you get older. It’s more difficult to play certain kinds of comedy parts. People find it easier to laugh at someone under 50, possibly under 40. Playing comedy roles as you get older becomes a very different thing, particularly if it’s a slightly satirical role. I think the field starts to narrow as you get older.”

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