Whether in his performance as the brilliant doctor in House or in his own ruthless self-criticism, Hugh Laurie has turned angst into an art form. Robert Crampton meets
a worried man...
It may surprise some readers to learn that Hugh Laurie was “papped” – photographed without permission – on his way to this interview. We still tend to think of him as Bertie Wooster, or the less celebrated half of Fry and Laurie, or an upper-class twit in
Blackadder. That view is, to say the least, out of date. What he is these days is the biggest British star on American television, hence the market for a snap of Hugh Laurie walking from a car to a photographic studio in North London. The presence of a paparazzo certainly surprised Laurie. Irritated him a little, too. “It used to be the case that the only people who paid any attention to me were those who liked what I did,” he says, drawing on the first of many cigarettes. “Now I get noticed by people who don’t care whether I live or die – probably want me to die. That takes a bit of getting used to.” But he gets a reasonable press, doesn’t he, by and large? “I don’t know. I try to avoid it. I hope you won’t be offended, but I won’t read this.”
He is, however, as he is throughout our conversation, keen not to moan. “I’ve had it a lot better than many people. I went to a pub with Kenneth Branagh once and a man shouted, ‘Oi, Branagh! You’re a cunt!’” A recent poll put Laurie in the top five favourite television personalities in the US, up there with Oprah and Jay Leno. This popularity is due to his role as Dr Gregory House, which has also won him critical acclaim (two Emmys) and financial security (he supposedly gets $200,000 per episode). “That’s an exaggeration. I am being very handsomely paid, though. My ship has come in and I’ll be forever grateful.” He has made three series of House to date, is halfway through the fourth and is signed up for three more. Will he then be able never to work again? “That would depend on how long I live,” he replies (he is 48), with impeccable logic. “If I step under a bus in a week’s time, the answer is yes.”
The holy grail of American television is to make 100 episodes (House is up to 82). “Then you sell it to syndication and it’s on for ever and it will haunt you in a Hong Kong hotel bedroom.” Will he get a slice of that? “I don’t know, I think they have to pay something to the cast.” Er, shouldn’t he find out? “That was all on page 65 of the contract. At the time [when the pilot episode was made] I blindly signed up thinking it wouldn’t go anywhere. I don’t know what the odds are [of a pilot becoming a long-running hit] – one in 100? One in 200? Not that I regret it. It’s just at the time I didn’t realise what I was getting myself into.”
What he was getting himself into was nine months a year in a rented flat in Los Angeles, away from his wife and three children in London, 15 hours of filming a day, sometimes six days a week. For obvious reasons, he is reluctant to complain, yet, “It is a bit of a gilded cage, I suppose. But what are the choices? Everything in life is an exchange of sorts. The one thing that bedevils actors, lack of security, I have gained at the expense of freedom.” Besides, there are compensations. “Southern California is beautiful. There is a real sensuous pleasure in riding to work [on his Triumph motorbike] at half past five in the morning.” Laurie is also “a huge admirer of the openness, energy, optimism and dynamism of Americans… and this idea that Americans have no sense of irony – I mean, Americans hardly do anything unironically these days. If you want a drink of water, you have to say, ‘I really don’t want a drink of water.’”
His sons are 19 and 17, his daughter 14. With another three-and-a-half series to go, his family might now move to California. “It’s taken us a long time to adjust to the permanence of it. The first year I was in a hotel. Everyone else in the show was signing leases on houses and I said, ‘You’re mad. We’re only going to last a month.’ I literally didn’t unpack. I suppose it’s a form of pessimism: if a thing is going well, it’s only a matter of time, tick tock, before someone’s going to take it away.” He says he would struggle to settle permanently in America. “I do feel very foreign there, as if I’m on safari, looking at the exotic animals and the way they behave. Then again,” he adds, “America is made up of people who don’t feel American until they do, so I’m not alone in that.”
Many interviews with Laurie focus on this pessimism, tipping over into depression. I wonder if his success in America has made him any less miserable? “Oh, I hope nothing would ever do that. I won’t let go of my roots.” As with a lot of his (near constant) irony, there’s a measure of truth in the remark. When I ask him if he has friends in LA, and he replies, “I don’t have any friends anywhere”, I’m sure that isn’t true (he and Stephen Fry are still very close), but I’m equally sure he is a hard man to get close to, something of a loner, self-sufficient. He likes to be in control, he admits. Not so much of others, but of himself – all the time. He barely drinks for that reason. “I don’t think I’ve ever been completely out of control.”
He admits he can’t shake the idea “that there is virtue in suffering, that there is a sort of psychic economy, whereby if you embrace success, happiness and comfort, these things have to be paid for”. One newspaper has taken to printing pictures of a glum-looking Laurie and asking why he doesn’t look happier, but his upbringing was Scottish Presbyterian, and Scottish Presbyterians are not supposed to look happy. “The religious aspects didn’t mean a great deal,” he says. “I admire the music, buildings and ethics of religion, but I come unstuck on the God thing.” Some of the cultural aspects of Presbyterianism, however – “the denial of pleasure, the virtues of thrift and hard work” – have stayed with him. “I had a wonderful if uneventful upbringing. My parents were very loving, but there’s no question they were suspicious of ease and comfort. My mother was the first person I can think of who was into the idea of recycling. In about 1970, she was collecting newspapers from the whole village, baling them up and taking them to a paper mill. She’d get a shilling a half ton or something.”
Does he feel guilty that he is so well paid? “Yes.” Does he feel guilty about being celebrated? “Yes. It’s absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it’s all punctuation.” The people he admires are “those blokes in Fair Isle sweaters with pencils behind their ears who knew how to design mechanical things better than anybody else in the world”. Concorde, he thinks, “is the most beautiful thing. The absolute pinnacle of form and function. I cried when I saw the last flight on television. What an old codger I am!”
He saw a Vincent Black Shadow not long ago – “just breath-taking”. Motorbikes are a passion. He’s got a Yamaha in London and the Triumph in LA, which he rides “with a weird chauvinistic pride… I was watching Biker Build-Off and there was this Japanese custom bike designer called Shinya Kimura. You could tell within seconds he was a genius.” Laurie thought about buying one of Kimura’s bikes. “It was $26,000. I thought, ‘I can’t possibly justify that’, and then I thought, ‘Well, why am I doing this job?’” Did he buy it? “No. Something in me says you shouldn’t have toys.” He has, however, bought a ping pong table. “That’s a real luxury.” Is he better than his children? “Er… I’m not bad actually,” he admits shyly. I say I thought he was supposed to be Mr Self-Deprecation. “Yes, I spoke to my shrink yesterday on the phone in LA – you have to have one before they let you in – and I mentioned I was doing this [interview]. I said, ‘I can’t bear going through the same fucking dance of despair. I’m just going to say what I feel.’ And he encouraged that. So yes, I’m quite good at ping pong.” But is he better than his children? “Er… that’s a parenting issue. If I announce publicly… Er… I’d better skip over that one.” His children, he says, are “an unending delight”.
So, do I gather he doesn’t like doing interviews? “No, but who would? Obviously, you’re in a very vulnerable position. You are putting your testicles out on a chopping board. Well, not a chopping board, that’s not a good image… I get anxious about a lot of things, that’s the trouble. I get anxious about everything. I just can’t stop thinking about things all the time. And here’s the really destructive part: it’s always retrospective. I waste time thinking of what I should have said or done. I go through an experience like this and think, ‘Next time I’m not going to mention the shrink’, but I don’t learn anything.”
Given that he has mentioned the shrink, how often does he see him? “Once a week for an hour. I’d been doing this job over there for a while, and I hate to use the word stressful – it’s not stressful like being in Baghdad – but it got to me, and continues to do so from time to time in a big way. But things are only stressful if you care about them. Marcus Aurelius, I think it was who said, ‘If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.’” And what is it he is caring about? His performance? “Everything, actually. I’m a pain in the arse. I meddle. I have ideas about how a thing ought to be played, the psychological details, the truth. Work is almost like a piece of music, and I’m a pain in the arse about music, too.” Indeed, he has been using his three-month hiatus in London (filming of House was suspended due to the Hollywood writers’ strike) to practise the piano. “I’ve been playing a couple of hours a day. Cracked a couple of pieces I couldn’t do before. If I could, I’d do ten hours. I just love it, but I have a neck problem and it gets blindingly painful.” Is it true he’s very accomplished? “Oh that’s nonsense, complete nonsense.”
One of Laurie’s most attractive traits is that, while he may play Rachmaninov and quote philosophy, he has the self-confidence to judge more popular culture on its merits. It’s rare to meet someone who isn’t some type of snob, traditional or inverted, but Laurie, like Gregory House, is his own man. He cites Stephen King with approval, for instance, and Friends and Michael Caine. Indeed, he gets quite cross with himself at one point for misquoting Get Carter. In House, I ask, how much acting is he doing? “Oh, a lot. I’m working quite hard. I’m conscious of the artifice with every gesture.” Why has the public taken this not very likeable character to its heart? “Oh, he is likeable, he’s just not good. But we don’t only like people because they’re good. He’s funny, honest, very good at what he does. I would like him if I met him, and I also feel absurd talking about a fictional character, so I’d better stop.”
Laurie finds it ironic that his father was a doctor and “now I’m being paid, I don’t know, five times more [an underestimate, surely] to pretend to be a doctor”. William “Ran” Laurie was a GP in Blackbird Leys, the council estate built to house the workers at British Leyland’s Cowley plant near Oxford. Laurie, the youngest of Ran and Patricia Laurie’s four children, was born in Oxford in 1959. Although he says “every man feels himself to be an imperfect version of his own father”, his father was not the problem, such as there was one. “Yes, my mum was the problem,” he says, but declines to elaborate. She died when he was 29, his father ten years ago. Like his father, Laurie attended public school, in his case, Eton. “I had a happy time. I understand institutions quite well.” He does admit to “a crazy period at 16 when I thought Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades were strivers after social justice”. The memory of this misjudgment now embarrasses him so much that he can “hardly speak”. He remains a man of the (albeit less bloodthirsty) left. “I was in my car listening to a report on how foreign workers in Abu Dhabi are paid so little and housed so poorly, and I was pounding my leather-clad steering wheel in frustration and thinking of the fatuity of my own neuroses and self-indulgence.”
Despite the comfortable background, his parents made financial sacrifices for him to attend Eton. “I went to a very posh school with some very posh people, but I’m not especially posh myself.” He followed his father to Selwyn College, Cambridge, where, again like his father, he rowed for the university, earning a Blue in the Boat Race of 1980, a thriller that Cambridge lost by five feet. With such a narrow margin, had he ever considered it was his fault his crew lost? “No, but that’s a good point. Thanks for that.”
Laurie’s current sport is boxing. He took one of his sons to the Hatton-Mayweather fight in Las Vegas and has been sparring at a gym in North London. “I don’t know if I’m looking to affirm masculinity, but there is something going on there, a feeling of men testing themselves, and when the test is over a weirdly gentle atmosphere and a feeling of comradeship.” I tell him that the writer Tony Parsons, whom I recently interviewed, boxes at the same gym. Parsons’ dad got a DSM in 1944. Laurie’s old man won a gold medal for rowing at the 1948 Olympics. “He was in a coxless pair with a man called Jack Wilson. I’ve got a fantastic picture on my desk of the two of them getting their medals on a pontoon at Henley. I imagine they were playing the national anthem and my dad is very rigid, ‘this is the way to behave’, and Jack Wilson is loose and groovy and looks like he should be mixing a martini. I sometimes wished my father could take that pleasure in himself.”
And why can’t Laurie take pleasure in himself? What exactly is the problem? “Maybe there isn’t one,” he sighs. “Maybe I have an appetite for problems and if I can’t find one, I make things up. I did a documentary once about Victorian funerals, and to illustrate the scene these carthorses were pulling a hearse. I was chatting to the horse wrangler and he said, ‘You know, they don’t like this. It’s not heavy enough.’ This was the unbearable lightness of being from the carthorses’ point of view. They are miserable if they don’t have work to do. They want 15 tons of beer to pull to get a sweat going.”
But earlier on he’d been saying how much he had enjoyed his enforced three months of leisure, which would seem to contradict the carthorse analogy. “It would, wouldn’t it? How fascinating. How do you reconcile that? Well, I am fantastically lazy.” That’s obvious nonsense, I say. Winning a place in the Cambridge boat, becoming president of Footlights, right up to sending in his audition tape for House, there is evidence of considerable striving. He concedes he has been known to exert himself.
He says he has to act a lot to play Gregory House, not least because he assumes an American accent, but they “share certain characteristics”. The most salient one, I think, what makes both Laurie and House attractive, is intelligence, the conventional type, and emotional intelligence, self-possession, self-knowledge. I think all that therapy is paying off. “Be content to seem what you really are,” Marcus Aurelius said, and I think Laurie (almost) is.
When I ask Laurie why he got a third at Cambridge, he says, typically: “Because I am very, very stupid.” But what strikes me most forcibly, having spoken to him for a couple of hours, is the strength of his intellect. He seems to be a man who thinks about life with a clear mind and has developed the capacity, and the curse, of being able to identify both sides of an issue. As his favourite Stoic wrote: “To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.”
I’m sure he does not need me to direct him towards another piece of wisdom from Marcus Aurelius: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” Or more pertinently: “Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.”
House has returned to Five, on Thursdays at 9pm
