He’s helped write movies that are widely adored and have collectively earned more than $1 billion. He’s co-created a sitcom that has become one of the BBC’s most successful exports, with a U.S. adaptation now onto its sixth season.
And yet, Simon Farnaby is perhaps most recognizable for mugging his rather expressive and jovial face, usually beneath a crop of untamed curly hair, across a series of scene-stealing comic cameos. And in almost every one of them — including all three “Paddington” movies and his latest feature, the all-star “The Magic Faraway Tree” — his character is called Barry.
“I just thought it was a funny name,” Farnaby says with a smirk. “But I have a cousin Barry, and he’s a funny guy. So I feel like I’m allowed.”
In “Paddington,” Farnaby was Barry the smug, inept and tea-slurping security guard at the Geographers’ Guild who shamelessly flirts with a Scottish cleaning lady (actually Hugh Bonneville’s Henry Brown undercover in makeup and a pink apron).
Barry the smug security guard returned in “Paddington 2,” again with a cup of tea in his hand but this time on the night shift at St. Paul’s Cathedral and chasing an “unusually attractive nun” (Hugh Grant’s devilish thespian Phoenix Buchanan in one of many disguises).
