When Netflix‘s holiday special Man vs. Baby began streaming, one question was on many viewers’ minds: was that baby real? The show, which brings back Rowan Atkinson as the bumbling Trevor Bingley, features a six-month-old infant as a central character. Online discussions were filled with viewer suspicions about artificial intelligence (AI) being used to create the infant’s scenes. Director David Kerr has now explained exactly how the baby was brought to life, confirming a mix of real twin babies, classic filmmaking tricks, and cutting-edge visual effects technology.
The four-episode series, which arrived on Netflix on December 11, 2025, is a follow-up to 2022’s Man vs. Bee. In this new chapter, Trevor, now a school caretaker, thinks he has landed an easy £10,000 job house-sitting a luxury London penthouse over Christmas. His plans fall apart when he is unexpectedly left in charge of a baby who was brought to the school nativity play and never collected.
How the Baby Scenes Were Actually Filmed
David Kerr confirmed that the production used several techniques to film the baby, starting with a very traditional Hollywood solution: identical twins. The team cast one pair of twins to be the “hero babies.” To handle the complex filming schedule and the babies’ very limited allowed time on set, they cast a second, slightly older pair of twins who could crawl. This allowed the filmmakers to shoot scenes requiring crawling using the older babies and then use visual effects to replace their faces with those of the hero babies in post-production.
David Kerr explained the challenge: “A six-month-old isn’t going to take direction. Baby is going to do whatever baby wants to do at any given moment. For very humane reasons, a baby isn’t allowed to be on set for more than two hours a day. But that’s not ideal when the baby appears in almost every scene.”
Rowan Atkinson also addressed the practical realities of filming with infants, noting the industry standard of using twins. “You always choose twins so if one gets grizzly you can bring the other one in,” he said. He highlighted how the strict rules shaped the filming day: “You can only have a baby on set for 45 minutes… so there are so many hours that you can’t actually continue filming that scene. You have got to film a different scene, or a different shot, just looking the other way.”
The Role of Machine Learning and AI
While the use of twin babies is a long-established practice, Kerr revealed that the team also used modern technology to solve problems a baby simply cannot. This is where the online rumors about AI find their truth. The director stated they used machine learning, a type of AI, to help create the infant’s performance.
The process began with a performance capture session. Cameras recorded the hero babies for hours to capture a wide library of their natural expressions and movements—crying, yawning, sleeping, and smiling. The visual effects team at Framestore then used machine learning on this footage. The technology helped build a digital database of the baby’s face and expressions. This “databank” could then be used to adjust the baby’s look in a scene or even generate new, realistic expressions that the babies did not naturally perform during filming.
Kerr emphasized that the goal was not to create a fully digital baby from scratch, but to have a tool that could help when the real babies could not provide what a specific scene needed. “We wanted to have a full CGI baby that looked totally indistinguishable from the hero baby, but would have exactly the action or expression any specific scene demanded,” he said. The result was a careful blend of real footage and digital enhancement, with the team working hard to avoid the “uncanny valley” effect where digital faces look almost real but feel unsettling.
Rowan Atkinson on Working with Babies and the Show’s Future
For star Rowan Atkinson, the experience of filming Man vs. Baby was less about physical comedy and more about logistical patience. The 70-year-old comedian, famous for his expressive face, noted that the main challenge was “keeping the story and the logic of it in your head when you are dealing with a co-star who… there’s not much chat between takes”.
In a candid moment after a screening, Atkinson was asked about his favorite scene to film. His response was characteristically self-critical. “I have none, I can’t think of anything that I enjoyed filming. But that’s just me when I’m filming,” he stated, adding that he often sees “holes” in his own work. He expressed a preference for the scriptwriting and post-production phases over the actual filming process.
Despite his typical intensity, Atkinson has praised his character in this series, Trevor Bingley, as a departure from his more famous roles. “I just quite like playing a nice guy for a change,” he said, contrasting Bingley with the “selfish” Mr. Bean or the “sarcastic” Edmund Blackadder.
As for whether audiences will see more of Trevor Bingley, Atkinson was hesitant. When asked about future plans, he replied, “Well there’s nothing in the cupboard at the moment, the cupboard is bare. Literally no plans”. Co-writer Will Davies offered a more hopeful note, joking that Atkinson’s reluctance is where they always begin before a new project eventually takes shape.
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