When Hugh Laurie pitches up for our interview carrying a motorcycle helmet, I ask, stupidly, if he has come on his bike. “Well, if I hadn’t,” he replies, “that would be an absurd affectation. Although, in this town, it’s probably not unknown.”
This town being Los Angeles, of course, where Laurie, sometimes uneasily, has been living for the best part of six years. During that time, the Oxford-born, Cambridge-educated actor, once known for playing upper-class English twits, has become, as much to his astonishment as anyone else’s, the biggest television star not just in America, but in the world. Now in its sixth season, House, the medical mystery in which Laurie plays the caustic, misanthropic, witty, cane-brandishing, Vicodin-addicted, Sherlock Holmes-modelled Dr Gregory House, is the most watched drama series on the planet.
Yet, as I look at him, slumped in a wicker chair on the patio of the Chateau Marmont hotel, on Sunset Boulevard, it does seem hard to fathom. Of all the people here this afternoon, including Tom Cruise’s wife, Katie Holmes, who is in the lobby, you would immediately tag Laurie as quite the least at home in such a quintessentially Hollywood setting. More famous than all of them put together, he could hardly look less chic, wearing what I’m sure is the same outfit he has favoured for years: a dark-blue, yellow-tipped polo shirt, black jeans and blue Nikes, his hair tousled, a rough beard, a handsome, appealing face that is starting to show the cares and creases of his 50 years. Through it all peer his sharp, quizzical blue eyes.
To the amusement of some of his friends, Laurie is not just a global superstar now, mobbed and needing protection from bodyguards when he ventures even to places such as Spain; he has been transformed into an international heart-throb and sex symbol. As is soon apparent.
A young, blonde English actress trots over and introduces herself, arching her back and thrusting her breasts forward to impressive effect. She claims she’s from Belsize Park, in northwest London, where Laurie also lives, and tries to draw up a chair to sit with us before we politely discourage her. She is on her first visit to LA, she tells Laurie, and would very much like his advice. Actually, I think what she really wants is for Dr House to give her a damn good cock up the arse. Which I am sure he would happily do. Laurie, however, is a trifle embarrassed, in a touchingly British kind of way, muttering pleasantries — “I don’t mean to give you the cold shoulder” — but clearly no longer surprised at the weird awkwardness of such encounters.
It’s not the only one. An American moron comes over and says he met Laurie a while ago when they were both on their motorbikes in Beverly Hills. “We were supposed to go riding, but you never called,” the man says, possibly joking, probably not. “I’m very insulted you didn’t call me.”
Laurie’s eyebrows arch as the man walks away. “No idea who that was. Not a clue.” After a pause, he adds, no doubt not wishing to appear the stuck-up star: “Having said that, it is flattering that people take an interest of any kind.” Indeed.
As he sips a cappuccino, he tells me that he lived in the Chateau Marmont for the first eight months after he came to LA to play House. “I was so convinced the whole thing was going to fail, I couldn’t contemplate committing to any long-term arrangement. I thought a hotel was a safe bet.” He was also hedging because he was understandably anxious about what it would all mean for him, and his family, if the show did take off. He is married to Jo Green, a theatre administrator; they have three children, who were all at school in England when House started. Having become close friends with Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and other British acting stalwarts through the Cambridge Footlights — people he continued to work with through the years — Laurie had a successful career and a comfortable life in England. Some of his roles, such as the lovable aristocratic buffoon Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster, with Stephen Fry playing Jeeves, are British television classics. He had also written a novel, which became a bestseller in France.
So he must have been shocked when House became a hit, and he realised he was going to be out in LA for more than one season. “I still am. There are a lot of days when I feel as if I have been woken from a coma and told six years have gone by, and I have no awareness of it. Is Queen Elizabeth still on the throne? Do we still drive on the left? Do we still have pounds?”
Does he know how many episodes he has done? “Er, no, I don’t. It’s more than 100, because we’re coming to the end of our sixth season. Maybe 120? It’s ridiculous. I have almost been playing House long enough to have qualified to become a doctor.” In fact, 124 episodes of House have been broadcast up to now in America, and Laurie is signed up for two more seasons. He directed his first one a few weeks ago, and has become an executive producer on the show. Now believed to be earning in the region of $400,000 an episode, Laurie has been made wealthy beyond his or anyone’s wildest dreams.
All that money can obscure how numbing and relentless the day-to-day working life of an actor in an American television series can be. Especially for someone such as Laurie, who is in almost every scene, and on whom every episode depends. British television is a doddle by comparison — Blackadder, for example, in which Laurie appeared as various idiots over the years, stretched to just 24 episodes, half an hour each, over four seasons. Most seasons of House have had between 22 and 24 hour-long episodes, each taking nine or 10 days to shoot, in five-day weeks. That’s getting on for 45 or more weeks of the year, with 5am call times and 16-hour days not at all uncommon, especially in the early seasons.
“Those first years, that was tough going,” Laurie admits. “It was hard to keep morale up and keep concentrating, keep forging ahead.” It didn’t help that for the longest time, British newspapers seemed full of reports of Laurie’s misery and his anguish at being separated so much from his family. Grumpy, gloomy Hugh Laurie became a tired newspaper cliché. Has it got easier, I wonder?
“It’s a way of living that, had you described it to me 10 years ago, I would have just found absurd beyond belief, inconceivable. But here we are. Yes, there were plenty of times when it was pretty overwhelming, I think for everybody. Like anybody completely absorbed in a single thing, it’s rather unhealthy. It’s the sort of thing you can do for a certain period of time — in a sort of emergency state — but you can’t live like that indefinitely because you start popping rivets.
“Look, it sounds like I’m moaning,” he adds. “I am constantly aware of my good fortune. But the thing is, almost nothing in this life is as easy as it looks. I did work very, very hard — I do still — but it has been very rewarding, very enjoyable, and I work with a terrific bunch of people. So I feel blessed.”
It has also got easier as his children, who are now 21, 19 and 16, have grown up. After six years, Laurie and his family seem to have settled into a comfortable rhythm. In years past, he says, he would have flown home for four days for the Presidents’ Day holiday, during which we are meeting. “But now my children are scattered to the four winds, I can’t go and see them all anyway.” His wife Jo spends much of her time in LA with him already.
With an unaccustomed day off, Laurie spent the morning boxing. How else do you pass your downtime out here? “Oh, I play the piano. And I play in a band” — the so-called Band from TV, which includes stars from a number of top American television series and does charity gigs. Laurie plays keyboard and sings.
I’m sure he can get glum, and his mind naturally tends towards the philosophical, but Laurie’s default demeanour seems to be a refreshing wry amusement, often about himself. However heavy the burdens may have felt to him in the past, there seems even a breeziness about him now. That is partly because, as House has sustained its success and creative energy — it has won just about every possible award, including four Emmys, while Laurie has scooped two Golden Globes — he says he has become less obsessive. “I used to worry much more about the prospect of failure,” he admits. “That 200 people were going to be out of a job. That shame and disgrace would attach, and I would have my acting uniform stripped from me.”
He says he would have chucked it all in a few seasons ago if he didn’t continue to find Gregory House such an enthralling character, surely one of the most consistently fascinating to have emerged from television. “Yes, I still like him very, very much. I know he has problems, and he is not necessarily a good man. But I realised long ago that one doesn’t only like good people. Sometimes one doesn’t even like good people.”
As hard as it may have been at times, Laurie is going to find it even harder to say goodbye to Gregory House when the time comes. I presume he plans to move back to England then. To my surprise, he says he is thinking about staying in LA.
“I can certainly imagine it, in a way I couldn’t have done before,” he says. “It held no appeal for me before, but I do have an affection for the place now. Maybe once the show finishes, I will see it in a different way. For now, I’m in a gilded cage.”
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