Bean was developed while Atkinson was studying for his master's degree in Electrical Engineering at Oxford University. A sketch featuring the character was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in the early 1980s.

One of Bean's earliest appearances occurred at the "Just For Laughs" comedy festival in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1987. When programme co-ordinators were scheduling Atkinson into the festival programme, Atkinson insisted that he perform on the French-speaking bill rather than the English-speaking programme. Having no French dialogue in his act at all, programme co-ordinators could not understand why Atkinson wanted to perform on the French bill. As it turned out, Atkinson's act at the festival was a test platform for the Mr. Bean character and Atkinson wanted to see how the silent character's physical comedy would fare on an international stage with a non-English speaking audience.

The name of the character was not decided until after the first programme had been produced, with a number of other vegetable-influenced names, such as "Mr. Cauliflower", being explored.Atkinson cited the earlier comedy character Monsieur Hulot, created by French comedian and director Jacques Tati, as an influence on the character. Stylistically, Mr. Bean is also very similar to early silent films, relying purely upon physical comedy, with Mr. Bean speaking very little dialogue (although like other live-action TV series of the time, it features a laugh track). This has allowed the series to be sold worldwide without any significant changes to dialogue. In November 2012, Atkinson told newspaper The Daily Telegraph he was looking at retiring the character, as "someone in their 50s being childlike becomes a little sad".