Who is Paddington Bear anyway?

You have probably read the books by Michael Bond, in which Peggy Fortnum’s illustrations depict the bear grazing people’s waistlines. Maybe you have seen the live-action film adaptations, in which our three-foot-six hero traverses London. Perhaps, at the behest of a younger relative, you recently paid a visit to The Paddington Bear Experience, an immersive adventure where you make marmalade for Paddington (polite as ever, he thanks you). But I am still surprised whenever I walk past Marcus Cornish’s bronze recreation of the character at Paddington Station and remember that this bear, who looms so large in our nation’s psyche, is so small in stature. So scruffy. A little scrawny.

This story starts at Paddington Station, too. Mr and Mrs Brown are collecting their daughter when they catch sight of a lone bear, sitting atop a suitcase. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat and there’s a label around his neck that reads: “Please look after this bear. Thank you”. The bear — he can talk, though this does not prompt more than mild surprise — charms the woman and has tea with the man. He’s just arrived from Peru, sent by his aunt. What’s his name? It’s unpronounceable, so the couple christen him after the station and ferry him home. The bear, articulate and accident-prone, becomes entwined with the family and the local community.

Another story is just as important. A BBC cameraman is shopping late on Christmas Eve, when he decides to take refuge from the snow in Selfridges. In the department store’s toy section, he sees a single teddy on a shelf, which he brings home to his wife. They name it — because all teddies need a name — after a station near their flat. Inspired by the bear’s sorry expression and memories of child evacuees during World War II, the man, who served in that war and has ambitions of becoming an author, begins writing. Ten days later, he sends a manuscript to his agent. Two years after that, A Bear Called Paddington is published. Michael Bond would write 15 books in the series throughout his life.

Paddington's Impact on British Culture

I remember my parents reading that first book to me and then, when I was old enough, reading the stories myself. My baby nephew sleeps with a Paddington toy. When my mother was a schoolgirl, she met Bond at a book fair, bought More About Paddington and discussed the bear’s adventures. She still has that signed copy. Most people in this country, I suspect, have a story about this bear, and when I tell mine to Karen Jankel, who is Bond’s daughter and the person responsible for running his literary estate, she has the understanding look of someone who has indeed heard these anecdotes before.

“We were a family of three, plus Paddington,” Jankel says. “So really, a family of four.” The first book was published two months after she was born in 1958 and the teddy bear — the one Bond bought for his wife for Christmas — was part of the family. He joined them on holidays. Places were laid for him at restaurant tables. I wonder if that presence ever became too much — I avoid the word overbearing — but Jankel says it was all “pretty straightforward”. She grew up an only child, so there were no squabbles over Paddington. After their divorce, her parents maintained “joint custody” of the teddy.

Jankel calls Paddington an “amalgam” of her father’s traits: the bear’s moral streak, kindness and love of food are all Bond. One difference Jankel picks out is crucial, both to understanding the bear and Bond’s writing: “Paddington takes everything very literally, whereas my father obviously had a wonderful sense of humour.”

Paddington's World and Bond's Inspiration

The Brown family — father Henry, mother Mary, children Judy and Jonathan — live at 32 Windsor Gardens, a fictional Notting Hill address that may now evoke empty, marble-lined Russian boltholes but, in the books, is a haven of cosy nooks and domestic charm (in real life, Windsor Gardens would lead you to an unremarkable block of flats off the Harrow Road). The Browns are unglamorously, pleasingly English: Henry is an insurance broker, Mary is kind, the children are sweet and sometimes sarcastic. What, exactly, does Paddington do all day? He attempts to help housekeeper Mrs Bird and tucks into elevenses with Hungarian immigrant and antiques dealer Mr Gruber. He finds endearing — and, if we are being honest, irritating — ways to cause trouble along the Portobello Road.

When writing the first book, Bond lived nearby, in a tiny flat on Arundel Gardens. It’s not hard to find other parallels. Jankel recalls the time her father found a note on his windscreen — it inspired a story in which the bear happens across a letter on his shopping basket and ends up in a scheme selling faulty vacuum cleaners. There’s also the family legend about Bond’s father — chronically useless at DIY — who once wallpapered over a door and got stuck in a room. Read More About Paddington if you want to know how that one ends.

The Paddington Phenomenon: From Books to Movies and Beyond

What really works about Paddington is that he is weird. He is from Darkest Peru! (Not Africa, as Bond originally had it, until his agent informed him there were no bears on that continent.) He is addicted to marmalade! He wears a duffel coat! He does not, and this is unusual for a dramatic character, ever change. The world simply revolves around this steadfast bear, who is both old man and seven-year-old. As he tells Judy: “Things are always happening to me. I’m that sort of bear.”

In his final years, Bond wanted the bear close at all times. “He was so much a part of him,” Jankel says. “[Paddington] was like another person to him.” After the author’s death in 2017, the teddy lived with Bond’s first wife until she died. He now resides with Jankel.

It is fair to say that the films changed everything. These live-action adaptations, in which the CGI bear interacts with real-life city dwellers, proved irresistible. The 2014 film, simply titled Paddington, and its 2017 sequel Paddington 2, made over £350 million at the box office worldwide. And so Paddington reached a new kind of fame: higher-stakes and starrier. You could cite figures and awards to quantify the films’ success, but why not look to Paddington’s home town? In 2012, Jankel visited Peru for the first time and — bar a few toys at Lima airport — nobody had heard of Paddington. When she returned a couple of years later, after the first film had been released, it was “a totally different story”. Everyone knew about the bear: books lined the shops and duty-free presumably stocked up on plushies. “They had a statue,” she says. “In fact, I unveiled a statue.”

Paddington's Legacy: A Bear for All Seasons

Until that point, Paddington’s journey from bear to brand had been significant and a little strange. It may surprise you to learn that the very first Paddington soft toy was given to Jeremy Clarkson. His mother Shirley designed it as a Christmas present for him and his sister Joanna. It was popular, so she made more. And then, when her company was granted the licence to sell them in the UK in 1972, she made even more. It was Shirley who gave Paddington his first pair of Dunlop wellies, so that the toy could stand upright. An American toy company soon started selling Paddingtons overseas.

In 1976, an animated BBC show arrived, scripted by Bond, directed by Ivor Wood and narrated by Michael Hordern. Paddington blunders his way through a world of paper cut-outs in four-minute sketches. It’s good. Another one came along in the late 1980s, produced by Hanna-Barbera. That one is very American: they even added a Yank cousin for Jonathan and Judy. He’s called David and is relentlessly optimistic. And there was another show, a co-production from France and Canada, in the late 1990s, in which the bear is plump, primary-coloured and disconcertingly resembles an admiral.

“It was my first acquaintance with a fictional character that I could read about rather than having it read for me,” says Hugh Bonneville, who plays Mr Brown in the films. “So I was very nervous and proprietorial about Paddington being ruined by ghastly people from Hollywood.” The first image of movie-star Paddington — a solitary figure loitering outside Buckingham Palace — did little to assuage such fears. The Daily Mail compared him to Russian meerkat Aleksandr Orlov, the mascot for insurance-comparison website ComparetheMarket.com. Under the hashtag #creepyPaddington, people Photoshopped the bear into increasingly alarming situations: Paddington haunts the corridors of the Overlook Hotel; Paddington watches on as Joffrey is poisoned; Paddington peeks through Janet Leigh’s shower curtain.

“The auspices were not good,” recalls Rosie Alison, a producer at Heyday Films who has worked across the series. “People just thought, ‘What is this weird-looking, dead-eyed bear?’ But we knew the film was better than that.”

The film was better than that. Perhaps not a surprise, given Heyday’s history: the British film studio had already turned JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series into one of the most successful movie franchises of all time. Alison, who first approached Bond in 2002, attributes much of its success to Paul King, the first film’s director and writer. King had come from the theatre and directed surreal television comedy The Mighty Boosh, which Alison’s daughter had loved. “It was clear that he could take this character and build a world that was a celebration of cinema, too.”

Behind the Scenes: Bringing Paddington to Life

The universe of Paddington is familiar, nostalgic. In this London, everyone waves to one another. A band plays calypso music throughout the streets. The houses have a picture-book quality: the doors look like those you would open on an old-fashioned Advent calendar. “It’s quite distinct from anything else out there,” Alison says. “There is a handmade, imaginative playfulness that comes with it.” When I meet Alison at the offices of Framestore, the London-based animation studio behind the films, we leaf through some props: there’s a copy of “The Grrrdian” and a posh umbrella, the kind you might find at James Smith & Sons, which the inhabitants of Windsor Gardens gift Paddington.

And the films have jokes. King managed to translate Bond’s Fawlty Towers-esque humour — “my father loved funny road signs and would always jot them down,” Jankel notes — onto the big screen. “Dogs must be carried,” says the sign by the Underground escalators, and so Paddington picks up a Chihuahua and hops on.

The sequel, which King directed and co-wrote with Simon Farnaby, was even better. This time, Hugh Grant was the bad guy: a faded actor named Phoenix Buchanan who now appears in dog-food commercials. It might just be Grant’s career highlight. A show-stopping final scene, in which the newly imprisoned Buchanan sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Rain on the Roof” in front of a captive audience, is the rare post-credits sequence worth sticking around for. The film is rated 99 per cent on review-aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that, for a moment in time that delighted and appalled those who care about review-aggregator sites, it surpassed Citizen Kane.

“We’ve been surprised by his cultural impact around the world,” Alison says. “It is that really simple thing about him: his values are honest, his goodness is unassailable. And in our cynical world, he’s an antidote.”

Bond approved of the adaptations, by the way, and was aware of how big the first film had made his creation, according to Jankel. He died on the final day of reshoots for the second movie, “knowing [Paddington] was in very safe hands”.

Paddington in Peru: A New Adventure

The third film, Paddington in Peru (in cinemas from 8 November), brings the bear home. Or at least, his other home. Life in London is changing: Jonathan and Judy are grown up; Mrs Bird has empty-nest syndrome; Paddington is thinking about family. So the Notting Hill crew make the pilgrimage to Peru, to visit Aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton), but the Reverend Mother (played by Olivia Colman), who runs the Home for Retired Bears, informs them that Paddington’s beloved relative has gone missing. Where? Somewhere in the Amazon. You know! The biggest rainforest in the world.

So begins an adventure, which involves Antonio Banderas as a handsome steamboat captain, and revelations about Paddington’s past. The crew shot background footage in Colombia and Peru, but filming took place in UK studios, while a farm near Leavesden provided a convincing jungle backdrop. Also, a few changes to what has become a well-oiled machine: Emily Mortimer has replaced Sally Hawkins as Mrs Brown, while Mark Burton, Jon Foster and James Lamont are on screenplay duties. And there’s a new director: Dougal Wilson takes over for King, who was busy expanding the Dahl Cinematic Universe with Wonka.

“It’s an enormous mantle, and there’s so much anticipation and good feeling towards the films that I was very apprehensive about taking it on,” Wilson tells me. “But I couldn’t turn it down. I’ll just try my best. That’s probably what Paddington would do, too.”

This is Wilson’s first feature film, though he has worked in advertising for years and directed charming music videos for the likes of Coldplay and Basement Jaxx. He once animated a Shetland pony to moonwalk in an advert for a phone company. In the pages of his sketchbook for this film, some visual motifs: French painter Henri Rousseau’s post-impressionist masterpiece Tiger in a Tropical Storm; Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (“very appropriate for kids,” Wilson notes); Apocalypse Now. The 1949 British black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, starring Alec Guinness in multiple roles, provided context for Banderas’s storyline, which involves several of the character’s ancestors. Once again, Paddington is in safe and, more importantly, silly hands.

Wilson shows Alison and me what he calls a “crapomatic”, a storyboard for what a final sequence might look like (if you work in the industry, you may know this as an “animatic”). It’s to plan out a musical number in which Colman’s character prepares for Paddington’s visit. We watch a rough take on his laptop, in which Barbie choreographer Jennifer White stands in for Colman. She dances through a semi-complete set, while a recorded song performed by Colman plays (Wilson wrote that tune himself, with some help from The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon). Even in its unfinished form, it looks like good fun: The Sound of Music meets Jumanji meets an OK Go music video.

I ask Alison and Wilson — who, like everyone else I speak to for this article, talk about Paddington as though he were simply waiting in the next room — about their version of the character. What would and wouldn’t he do?

Wilson: “He would always see the best in people, remain positive in any situation and he would never hold a grudge against anyone.”

Alison, nodding: “He’d always be fair.”

Wilson, again: “He would be kind and polite. And he would always give someone the benefit of the doubt.”

Often, when we talk about Paddington, we say that he upholds very British values. Is that a fair comment?

Alison: “It’s how we like to think of ourselves, isn’t it? He represents tolerance and inclusiveness and compassion and kindness and generosity. That’s what we want to feel.”

The Voice of Paddington: Ben Whishaw

A little while after #creepyPaddington, while casting for the first film, another hitch. Colin Firth had been announced as the voice of Paddington. “But then, when we started animating bear, it just didn’t mesh,” Alison says. “Colin, graciously, could see that as well.” Firth dropped out; auditions resumed. Actors came into Goldcrest, a London post-production studio, to try out the voice. Paddington was on the screen, so they could see “who would fit the costume”, as Alison puts it.

“I was even reluctant to audition at first,” Ben Whishaw tells me. The actor had never thought of playing Paddington; he was not familiar with either Bond’s creation or voicing an animated character. “But when Paddington arrives in London, everything is unfamiliar to him as well. I could draw on that feeling and go with that, but it still wasn’t easy.”

“His voice is very much my own voice,” he says. “And I think it’s true for most actors, myself included, that when playing characters we need to relate to them personally. That just so happened to be my voice.”

Whishaw has certainly thought a lot about Paddington since he won the part. “His positivity and kindness is so endearing, as well as enduring,” the actor says. “He will only look for the best in others — even those that people may tend to overlook, or not even consider in the first place. Paddington draws this affection and feeling out of those he meets, and that’s true for the readers and watchers, too.” When I ask if it’s ever challenging to bring life to a character as immutable as Paddington, Whishaw’s perceptive answer reveals something about his (very fruitful) process. “His core values and personality will always be consistent — but I guess that it’s also in his personality to be adaptable, especially with the situations he gets into and the unique characters he meets,” he says. “I just approach bringing Paddington to life as he would — with open arms.”

I learn that Whishaw’s audition prompted both gleeful clapping and sighs of relief at Goldcrest. Even if the actor “isn’t exactly sure” what works so well about his voice, those around him have a few ideas. “In some ways, he himself is all the qualities [Paddington] has,” says Mortimer, who also acted alongside Whishaw in Mary Poppins Returns. “I mean, he’s not chaotic at all and he doesn’t overfill the bath, but he’s got such soul and depth of feeling, but also a playful spirit and a twinkle in his eye.” Alison attributes it to his “naive youthfulness”, a distinct vibe from Hordern’s sonorous narration. A youthful Paddington, deeply felt.

Paddington's Animation: A Complex Process

I wonder if it is ever odd for Whishaw — one of our most idiosyncratic actors, and one unafraid to make bold career choices — to be so closely associated with this bear.

“A little strange, as I only voice Paddington,” he admits. “But I’ve had almost 10 years to get used to it.”

None of this would have been possible without getting the bear exactly right. At a workshop with animation director Pablo Grillo and VFX-production supervisor Alexis Wajsbrot, I learn that this was not simple. Wajsbrot says that Grillo is responsible for “bringing life to Paddington”, though I already suspected this when Grillo assured me at our cover shoot that Paddington would be “a little perplexed but excited” to find himself on the front of Esquire.

There were three “anchor points” while designing Paddington for the big screen, says Grillo. Firstly, Peggy Fortnum’s line drawings from Bond’s books. Then, actual animals. Paddington is a spectacled bear, so they looked at the “sweetest examples” of those cubs. And finally, comedians like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, whose physical comedy was a reference point for Paddington’s movements.

It took about six months to find the right fit: simple, cute, expressive. Not too gnarly, thank you.

Filming a non-existent being is hard. “Physiologically, everyone is confused,” Grillo says. A short actor, Lauren Barrand, will rehearse with the actors so that they can get a grasp on general movements. Then, they will run through with an “eyeline stick” (which is what it sounds like: a stick), so that the actors know roughly where to look. There is also a Paddington lookalike made of beaver fur, which is called, rather horrifically, a “stuffie”. They use that to figure out lighting.

To work out how the bear might move on-screen, the team use real human beings: Javier Marzan, a theatre actor, provides the comedic movements. Whishaw will also act scenes out, and he brings in a “natural impulse as well as a physical response to an emotional situation”, says Grillo. They also use footage of Whishaw’s ADR (automated dialogue replacement) process to get a good lip-sync. The entire process requires around 120 animators.

After my workshop, I have a go at animating a bear myself with a very patient Framestore employee named Arslan, who tells me that the secret is to think English not American. Subtle movements. The bar is set low: let’s just try to make this thing nod. I have good intentions, and everything is set up for me to succeed, but my bear looks neither American nor English. He just spasms menacingly.

Easier and sweeter to take Bonneville’s view. When I ask him what it is like to act opposite a stick, or a stand-in, or nothing at all, he says: “For me, the bear is real, and I will not have anyone say anything otherwise.”

Paddington's British Citizenship: A Passport and a Symbol

Ahead of Paddington in Peru, the producers wrote to the Home Office and asked whether it would be possible to obtain a replica passport for filming. The Home Office came up trumps. This bear has a blue passport. It is kept under lock and key, but I have inspected it and can confirm that the bear is a British citizen. Paddington, like all our monarchs since King George II, has two birthdays: 25 June and 25 December. The passport lists his summer birthday. Under “official observations”, it simply says “bear”.

Some comfort at last for Paddington, whose immigration status has become a knotty topic. When the sequel was released in 2017, a year after the UK voted to leave the European Union, King and Farnaby’s script stressed the value of outsiders. It was not a manifesto, but it tapped into a national mood (for 48 per cent of the nation, anyway). “It’s very important to us that there’s a light touch to Paddington, and that he doesn’t get preachy or political with a big P,” Alison says. “Other people embrace him for different slogans, but we try to keep him above the fray.” Sure enough, in 2022, as a response to the Government’s Rwandan asylum policy, civil servants affixed posters on noticeboards at the Home Office with a photograph of the bear, claiming he had taken a “clandestine irregular route” into the country.

Paddington's Enduring Appeal: A Bear for All Times

Bond’s series, like the best children’s literature, always has an undercurrent of threat: nosy locals (Mr Curry, the Brown family’s nimbyist neighbour), petty criminals (a dodgy showman once tricked him into performing at a piano recital), and the more insidious feeling that Paddington, like many refugees before him, could be carted off at any point.

You find those anxieties in the movies. The film version of Mr Gruber (Jim Broadbent) is from Germany, not Hungary. “My body had travelled very fast,” he says, while discussing his escape via Kindertransport, “but my heart, she took a little longer to arrive.” Mr Curry (Peter Capaldi) refers to Paddington as “an undesirable”.

“My father always brought current-day situations into his writing, be it funny instances or the political situation,” says Jankel. “Of course, he was living very near where the books are set when he wrote the first one, which was close to the Portobello Road. That was the time of Windrush, so I think that he always had a great awareness of home and displacement.”

When Paddington leaves London in 1961’s Paddington Abroad, there is indeed a setback. In the third chapter, “Trouble at the Airport”, Paddington is whisked off to a side room after an officer believes he doesn’t have a passport. The Browns, too, are unsure of Paddington’s documentation. “You don’t think,” says Mrs Brown, “you don’t think they’d send him back to Peru, do you?” No time to worry! In the next scene, they’re on a plane headed to France, where Paddington charms an entire village and cooks escargots. He had a passport all along, but no one had asked him about it directly.

Bond clearly knew where to draw a line. In early discussions about the first film’s script, the producers considered adding a scene at an immigration office as part of the opening. Alison recalls how the author told them to nix it. But the sequence with Paddington and Mr Brown at the station’s tearoom? Absolutely vital.

You could claim (and many have) that the movies are an unrealistic portrayal of how refugees are treated in the UK. You could say the same thing about the chocolate-box depiction of London. You could be asking too much of a family film. “The point is, it’s the London that can exist,” Bonneville says. “We may read and we may bitch about how ghastly things are, and how divided we are, and how we don’t know our neighbours, but for all that, that sense of community does exist.” It is a fantasy that rings true.

In 2014, to mark the release of the first film, 50 Paddington statues were unveiled across London. Each had been designed by a celebrity: Liam Gallagher turned the blue duffel coat khaki, while Stephen Fry emblazoned it with a Union Jack (that one eventually made its way to Lima). In 2019, Taylor Swift posted a photo of herself wearing a duffel coat on Instagram with the caption: “Can’t stop won’t stop twinning with Paddington.” That year, an animated series launched with Whishaw on voice duties; there are now a staggering 115 episodes. In 2022, Bond’s creation had tea with the Queen in a two-minute sketch broadcast for the monarch’s Platinum Jubilee. He thanks her, in his own elliptical way, “for everything”; they tap the opening notes to “We Will Rock You” on their teacups. When the Queen died a few months later, so many Paddington soft toys and marmalade sandwiches were laid as tributes that the Royal Parks (politely) asked mourners to stop. Next year, a Paddington musical is set to open in the West End.

Paddington's Continued Enduring Appeal

Paddington is, now more than ever, a four-quadrant bear: cute to the young, comforting to the old; poster boy for immigration, pals with royalty.

“What’s so brilliant is the minute you start trying to talk about Paddington earnestly, you get it all wrong,” Mortimer says, in a comment that resonates but also prompts a little alarm in someone who has been attempting to do exactly that. “It’s almost like the character and the books defy you to take it too seriously.”

So we don’t go earnest; we go — by Mortimer’s own admission — pretentious. There’s a line from Coleridge she came across at university that, she believes, applies to Bond’s work. It goes something like this: “Genius is the imagination of the child carried on into the man.” (The actual quotation, when I find it hours later, buried in an essay by Coleridge, is a little longer and a lot wordier, so let’s go with Mortimer’s streamlined version.) “The child’s imagination,” she continues, “if you can keep hold of it, can be very inspiring as you get older. There’s something of that in these books. It’s like he’s using a child’s imagination when he writes.”

I think about those words the next time I’m at Paddington Station. Children clamber over the bronze statue as their parents take photos. After that, they will probably head to the nearby shop dedicated entirely to Paddington. The poster for the new film fills the window. Inside, you can buy T-shirts and lunchboxes and backpacks.

I head over the canal, walk under the Westway, to a patch of grass at the edge of St Mary’s Terrace. It is not obvious at first, but three figures are standing by a bench. Steel statues to commemorate local people of note: codebreaker Alan Turing, Crimean War nurse Mary Seacole and Michael Bond. On a September morning, crisp autumn light shines through these metal commemorations, sketches rendered into sculpture. Bond is cradling his creation, complete with suitcase and label. The pair are rusting, but you can make out the author’s gentle smile and Paddington’s upturned expression: serious, sympathetic, still curious for the world.