Hugh Laurie

The Times Magazine, March 2011

Early on in what has been a seven-year run as the brilliant but flawed titular character within the globally-acclaimed TV medical drama, House, Hugh Laurie found himself introduced to someone who understood exactly why he might feel ambivalent about his new, dramatically-elevated industry status and who also appreciated the attendant pressures.

"I'd better not give the name, but she's an actress who'd been the lead in a very successful hour-long TV show. She was living somewhere up the coast from here and described to me how she'd drive home from set at night at 100 mph thinking to herself, 'I'll either get back really quickly or I'll crash and neither one is bad.' That's the state of mind you get into."

Not good for a visiting actor whose wife and three grown-up children were back at the family home in London and who himself has a history of depression. But therapy (he has down pat the joke about how it's compulsory for well-heeled in-comers to Los Angeles) helped and continues to do so. "I'd some very dark times when I first arrived here. Job-related.

"I was taking on this pretty overwhelming thing and it could all get a bit much. I felt the strain. So it was good to spend time with someone who wasn't going to Tweet my stuff all over the place. Is still good. Good too for that person not to be a friend, so that I don't have to feel guilty about boring them. You dont have to entertain a shrink. You're paying for the responsibility to entertain to be lifted and that's a great relief to me."

We meet at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, the privacy-conscious Laurie having agreed to a rare interview in support of a forthcoming album, Let Them Talk, of which more a little later. The silly thing is that despite uncertainty over the room number, Laurie had left a voicemail message at my own hotel the previous day in which he gave both his name and his cellphone number. 'Er, not sure this is wise of me but hey, people are generally nice. Aren't they?' it had concluded.

Luckily, he'd reached the right room. "Still, not clever, was it?" he frets, lighting the first of several cigarettes. "Normally I'm much more guarded, even paranoid. Pathetic really, but I operate in this horrible world of false names, dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats. The modern world, I believe it's called. I even had the windows of my car tinted because it just became so boring, trying not to get stuck at the front of the line at red llights."

Sorry? "Because pedestrians crossing might spot you and gawp. Everyone's got digital cameras and before you know it you've caused a hold-up and horns are hooting. You daren't look to the left or right either, in case you catch another driver's eye. It was pretty much straight ahead only for me, pre-tinting, which made route-planning very laborious."

He says that unless he is obliged to, he doesn't go out in L.A. other than to work. "You're only the 11th person I've met since I arrived here! But truthfully, I pretty much don't go out. Awful, I know. Your heart should bleed." Then how does he ..."Pick up groceries or collect dry-cleaning? I haven't done that stuff in years. Terrible of me. Terrible. But the last time I did try going to the supermarket I was photographed and I hated it. I hate people peering at what I've bought, taking photos of what's in my basket. I just hate it."

So fame on this scale has made him unhappy? Laurie gives a sharp little laugh. "No, I was that way already." He reaches for his coffee. "I am of course incredibly grateful for all I have. It's hugely satisfying to be part of something which you believe is good and which resonates with people. I feel amazingly lucky to be experiencing it. You can't be taken on a journey like this and then complain about the bumps in the road. I know how blessed I am, especially when so many other people are facing all kinds of adversity."

A 'but' is coming. "But you can't go out and lead a normal life. You can't just be yourself. Oh, I know? That's a very low-level form of adversity compared to being imprisoned and tortured by the Iraqi Secret Police, isn't it?'

Of course it is. Compared to that, none of us have a right to complain about anything, ever. But still we do. Is it fair to say then that he feels as if he's living in a gilded cage, effectively a prisoner of his own success? "Yes. I never thought that would happen to me and it's ... Well, it's interesting."

Laurie, now 51, is the youngest of four children born to a true-life doctor and 1948 Olympic gold medal-winning oarsman father ("Whatever I inherited from him, I didn't get enough of," he'll tell me later. "I could have done with more of it. I fall short in so many ways.") and his wife in Oxford. Despite the family's relatively-straightened circumstances, he had a privileged education: Eton then Cambridge, during which time he became president of the Footlights Club and went out for a time with fellow member Emma Thompson.

It was she who introduced him to Stephen Fry. who would become not only his lifelong friend but also his TV comic partner in A Bit of Fry and Laurie and, later, the P.G Wodehouse series of adaptations, Jeeves and Wooster, and also Blackadder. In each of them he was cast as, well, a bit of a twit and a certain level of on-going fame and typecasted-ness seemed assured. But then, somehow, he turned that expectation on its head and won himself employment as the sexy, American-accented anti-hero of what quickly became a hit show. I cant help but wonder how his peers and old Cambridge chums have reacted to him achieving such overwhelming popularity across the world at this point in their respective careers. Is he familiar with that old Morrissey track, We Hate it When Our Friends Become Successful?

"I haven't got any friends," he responds instantly and as expected, irony being his favourite default position. I remind him that he has used that same line to journalists before. "You're right. And actually its very rude to the friends I do have, isn't it? Terribly rude. And it's not true in the first place so why do I say it? I retract."

So? "So someone like Stephen (Fry, his old Footlights Revue buddy and the Jeeves to his Wooster in the early 1990s' P.G. Wodehouse adaptations on TV) is most phenomenally generous. He can be competitive in all kinds of ways, as you'd know if you were ever to play Boggle against him. No-one can get more heated over a word game. But in terms of career, he's the absolute most generous of friends and colleagues. I suppose it's possible that there are people who are resentful at some level but then they probably weren't very good friends in the first place. And incidentally I don't remember that Morrissey track but I do recall the Gore Vidal saying, 'It's not enough to succeed. One's friends must fail.'"

Were House to be discontinued and if he were not then to become involved with another hit show, it's possible that the door to his golden cage would gradually come open. What is his situation vis a vis the series? "We're now coming to the end of the seventh year and I've signed up for a further one. That's a long time, all in all. A stupidly long time."

Would he hope to continue with the role beyond that? "Erm, this is where I have to be enigmatic. It's a possibility, certainly. Beyond that, whatever I say is going to get me into trouble with someone or other. I certainly feel we could carry on, still making a good show, but whether or not people would want to watch it ...? There comes a time when the audience moves on."

Laurie has no illusions about Los Angeles as a working town. "This is a good place to live when things are going your way, so mine has been an unusual experience. From what I hear, it's not a good place when they're not. There's no community. You don't run into people just by chance. Here (he gestures at the Chateau's garden courtyard) is one of the very few places where you might. It's all planned in advance, all strategic, with people thinking of any meeting they've arranged, 'What am I going to get from this?'

"It's actually rather a lonely city. You could go quite mad and end up spending all day in your pyjamas, never washing, growing those super-long finger nails. There's no general rub of existence. No-one around to say, 'What on earth are you doing? Pull yourself together!' Just lots of isolated lives, some of quiet desparation, I imagine."

We are used to Laurie speaking of a lack of self-confidence, one that dogs him even now. Indeed, he mentions it again today. But, I ask, hasn't his success as irrascible, bloody-minded Dr. Gregory House helped even a little? Surely he must feel himself to be loved by his public? He responds with a look that is not so much shocked as appalled. "Loved? How do you mean, 'loved'? Oh no, no, no! This is dangerous territory. Really, it is."

Well, here we are in a city that more than any other revolves around, indeed worships, conspicuous success. And here he is at the top of the pile. Laurie shakes his head, as if to say I've missed some elemental truth. "If we do a bad show next week, the ship won't just coast on gently until it runs out of steam. Right away they'll say, 'That's it. No more'. It'll just stop dead. I am of course someone constantly expecting a plane to drop on my head, if not today then tomorrow. But that's how it woud be, I promise you."

Odd perhaps, but I get the feeling he is rather enjoying the opportunity to talk freely. He has texted me twice in the last 24 hours. The first message ended with, 'Looking forward to our doing battle', the second with, 'Incidentally, pistols or swords?' Imagery apart (a wordsmith's nice conceit or a belief that interviewing really is a blood sport?), is there no-one with whom he can relax, chat, share and compare when his wife Jo is back in England?

"In the age of Facebook, Twitter and all the rest, it's hard to confide in anyone. There's this malevolent delight in spreading stuff. I might say something on set and two hours later I'll read about it on the net. Really. It's happened. The result is that I can't be completely honest in any situation. I always have to think what will be a political or diplomatic way of dealing with it.

"Everyone can just run off to their computers now and buy themselves some feeling of importance. To have a secret is to have power, however briefly: 'Oh yeah. I was there. I saw it. I heard it all'." As in the case of whichever individual leaked Christian Bale's meltdown moment during the filming of Terminator: Salvation? "Exactly so!"

Another good reason to embrace psychotherapy then. "Well, you do find yourself needing someone who's professionally bound, if bound in no other way, to treat you with courtesy and in confidence, something that's almost impossible to find in other areas. The whole notion of privacy ... 20 years from now, I'm not sure people will even know what the word means. 'Privacy? What's that?' It's actually dying as a concept before our eyes. 'But you said ...' 'Yes, I know I said it, but that doesn't give you the right to record it and to take pictures and to post the whole damn lot up on the net!'"

Does he feel he must be on guard constantly when not alone? "A lot of the time, yes."

Which means that often he must have to contain ... "Rage?" Laurie supplies tellingly, before I can conclude as I had intended with, 'his true feelings'.

"We all have to watch how we act, don't we? Some people would argue that it's the fact that our behaviour might be made public is what keeps us in check. Isn't it the whole defence of that bloke (Julian) Assange, that disclosure keeps government honest? I'm not sure. Don't even government officials have a right to privacy and confidentiality, to exchanges that aren't open to all and sundry? If we don't protect that right, the end result will be no kind of meaningful communication whatsoever. No-one will feel able to say anything to anyone because if they do, it will be spread all round the world."

It's all begining to sound like a pact with the devil, I say. "Oh, I'm made of stern Scottish Presbyterian stuff. I like a bit of self-containment. I like having things decided for me. Every now and then some magazine will ask me what's my idea of the perfect day. It's certainly not one that I have to plan for myself. Having someone else wake me up at 8am and say, 'This is what we're doing', suits me fine. I don't even like menus because they involve choice. 'I'll just have the food, please. And the drink.'"

Unfortunately, the more successful you are, the more choices you have. His current status means that the options just pile in. In any downtime from House he could make a movie/ write a book/ record an album or whatever. Actually, he's already done all of them (in cinemas from April 1 is the animated feature Hop, in which his voice is heard alongside that of Russell Brand's Easter Bunny) but feels restraint is called for. "There's a lot of everything out there. There are a lot of songs. A lot of books being written. Probably there are enough Woody Allen films. There's a great raucous din of expression, what with newspapers, blogs, the sheer enormity of public discourse. It's a clamorous world." Meaning? "You have to ask yourself why you would want to add to it."

Yet he has done. The novel, a spy genre spoof called The Gun Seller, came out in 1996 and was well-reviewed. "It's now been published in 30 languages, including some I'd never heard of. It's even available in Hebrew, can you believe? And it sold especially well in France. The translator there really took the task seriously. He kept emailing: 'What does this mean? Why that? Why the other?' It was a pain in the arse at the time, frankly, but it must have made a difference."

Laurie submitted it under a pseudonym and only revealed his identity on the manuscript's acceptance. Hoping to have it published under that same pseudonym, a big wig explained why that wouldn't work. "This is no place for shrinking violets. In our world, you have to scream in order to whisper. Think you're being coy and modest? No-one gives a fuck. You've disappeared. You were never even there in the first place. But shout at the top of your voice and you might - just might - have a chance of appearing coy and modest, as you intended. Then you might be whispering.'"

The same holds true for other media, of course, which is why this long-term music fan and accomplished piano player's first album will be released under his own name and not that of Blind Dr. Hughie or whatever. Because yes (and how perfect), Laurie is absolutely passionate about the blues, indeed has gone to New Orleans to record a CD in which he interprets 15 of its greatest and his most beloved songs in the company of a stellar band of session musicians and with guest appearances by Dr. John, veteran diva Irma Thomas and our own Sir Tom Jones.

He says of Let Them Talk, "My wife is adamant I shouldn't offer this to the world in a mood of apology, 'because ultimately apology is tiring. For everybody. My natural inclination is to go, 'OK, I've done this thing but I really don't want to impose ...', to which she says, 'Will you please stop doing that?' Tiring, as I said."

But of course, and typically, he is apologetic. "Well, many people have died on this path so I'm keenly aware that it's like a scene from Indiana Jones, where you're pressing into the jungle and to either side are skulls on sticks, reminders of all those who've tried to go from acting to music before you."

Being Laurie, he anticipates criticism ("I'm in for a kicking. I know I am.") before ever it has been made and seeks to head it off at the pass. In a release made available to journalists he writes, "I was not born in Alabama in the 1890s. I've never eaten grits, cropped a share or ridden a boxcar. No gypsy woman said anything to my mother when I was born and there's no hellhound on my trail, as far as I can judge. Let the record show that I am a white, middle-class Englishman, openly trespassing on the music and myth of the American south.

"If that weren't bad enough, I'm also an actor, one of those pampered ninnies who hasn't bought a loaf of bread in a decade and can't find his way through an airport without a babysitter. I wouldn't be surprised to find that I've got some Chinese characters tattooed on my arse. Or my elbow. Same thing."

Clever and funny, especially the last three inspired sentences (the original text continues very entertainingly at some length), yet this genre of music really is his passion. "I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been assassinated but I do recall where I was when I heard Muddy Waters had died," he tells me. "I was driving down the A1 from Lincolnshire and had this awful, selfish reaction: 'Now I'll never get to see him play live.'"

Of course, the very obvious irony is that blues is the music of hardship and deprivation. You can't help but ask yourself, what original composition might Laurie now contribute to the genre? 'Woke up this morning ... to find I'm the highest-paid actor on American TV'? He knows only too well. "I'm a soft-handed boy who's grown up to be a soft-handed man. How exactly have I suffered? We've all had the experience of loving someone who doesn't love us back. Of losing a job or not succeeding in it as we might have hoped. Of wishing we were better at football. But that will never equate to facing famine in Somalia. How could it?"

What he hopes to get across is that his love of the music is sincere. Ideally, he wishes also to dispel the notion that he's permanently miserable in what's popularly held to be paradise. "I'm deliriously happy. I laugh from dawn 'til dusk - and beyond, some times. I might even stay up late because there's still so much laughing to be done. Or wake up in the night and have another laugh."

I can at least vouch for the fact that he is smiling when he gets up to leave.

Copyright © 2020 Alan Jackson

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