At the UK premiere of Johnny English I got some time to talk with Tim McInnery who plays the wheelchair-bound technologist and armourer Patch Quartermain, but is perhaps better known from the TV series Blackadder although you may also remember him from legendary movie Notting Hill.
HeyUGuys: Patch Quartermain is a brilliant character and while everybody probably asks you about whether Blackadder is going to reform how about taking Johnny English to TV, particularly now that Spooks is finishing.
TM: [Laughs] Oh god. Yes, I’ve only just heard about the Blackadder thing. Nobody’s been in touch with me about it.
HeyUGuys: I saw you on the Blackadder retrospective thing where you said you were all a bit old for it now.
TM: It’s kind of difficult. We did the half hour film for sky and it was sort of weird. It felt a bit odd.
HeyUGuys: But Johnny English TV. How about it?
TM: I don’t know. It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t Rowan so you’d have to talk to Rowan but that’s a good idea. That’s a good idea.
HeyUGuys: How was it being Patch? You spent most of your time in a chair. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
TM: It’s a really good thing The last thing you want to do is stand up on a film set all day so everybody wanted to be in my wheelchair but they couldn’t be. Also it was souped up so it was really good fun, really did zoom around the set
HeyUGuys: And gadgets. Did you get to play with many gadgets?
TM: No not really, you’re kind of pretending.
HeyUGuysDid they have any really good ones lying around the set?
TM: No. Although we were visited by Blue Peter and I got a Blue Peter badge. That was really thrilling. That was the best day actually! [laughs]
HeyUGuys: Which do you prefer playing. Villains or good guys?
TM: Villains are usually more fun to play actually. They’ve got the better lines.
HeyUGuys: You had a really tense scene in the film with Rowan in the church where you have to confront him. I thought that was fabulous and how did you work that?
TM: Well that kind of worked itself. It’s very well written and you have to play it for the theatre of it. You can’t play it for any comedy on something like that so that’s the choice you make of it not being funny so that all the funny stuff works around it. It’s such a fulcrum of the plot that scene it’s really important that it’s ‘proper’ acting
HeyUGuys: And it really was. It was very good.
TM: Good. Good I’m glad [laughs]
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Johnny English Reborn is released in UK cinemas on October 7th.
Photo above by Madison Hart
