Hugh Laurie: Playboy Interview

Not often does someone become a star by playing an unlikable curmudgeon week after miserable week. But that’s what happened to Hugh Laurie with House, the phenomenally popular medical drama on which he has turned the limping, pill-popping misanthrope Dr. Gregory House into one of the most memorable and oddly appealing characters on TV.

With shades of Sherlock Holmes by way of Hawkeye Pierce on a crabby day, House isn’t out to heal the world or make patients happy. He doesn’t have a soft spot for kids and old ladies, and he would rather watch monster-truck jams than read a stupid CT scan. No matter how antisocial he is, no matter how bitter (his favorite diagnosis is “The patient is lying”), House inevitably saves the day—even when it kills him to.

But those are mere character tics. What really separates House is Laurie’s star quality. Unlike almost every other hit drama series now—Lost, E.R., Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Heroes, the CSI trilogy—this one isn’t about the ensemble cast. House is about House the way Kojak was about Kojak and All in the Family was about Archie. Okay, yes, there’s Kiefer Sutherland on 24 but nobody holds together a top drama quite the way Laurie does.

Watching him rattle off American medical speak week after week, it’s easy to forget Laurie is British. Born in Oxford, England in 1959, he is the youngest of four children. His mother died following a lengthy illness shortly before Laurie turned 30, and his father, a physician who won an Olympic gold medal for rowing, died just before Laurie landed House.

A national youth rowing champion himself, Laurie contemplated an athletic career but let those dreams go after being sidelined by a nasty case of mononucleosis while at Cambridge University. He took up acting instead and was soon part of a talented circle that included Emma Thompson, whom he briefly dated, and Stephen Fry, who became his comedy partner. No highlight reel of U.K. comedy from the 1980s or 1990s would be complete without a clip of Fry and Laurie in twit or fop mode on sketch programs like Blackadder or their own A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

Those antics made Laurie a household name among BBC viewers, but he never quite broke through in the States. There were one-off guest roles on Friends and Family Guy, and he played the dad in Stuart Little. But the audition tape he recorded in a hotel bathroom in Namibia, where he was filming Flight of the Phoenix, was what got Laurie the role of his career. Since 2004 House has earned him a pair of Golden Globes, three Emmy nominations and the distinction of being one of the most-watched scripted TV programs, even though the actor has never quite let go of England. His wife of 20 years, Jo Green, and their three children still live in north London. It’s anyone’s guess how the California house Laurie bought last summer will change things.

Playboy dispatched Contributing Editor David Hochman to meet with Laurie over the course of several weeks as House’s fifth season got under way. They met at various hotels and on the show’s set at 20th Century Fox Studios in Los Angeles. Hochman’s report: “For all House’s crankiness and sarcasm, you would expect him to be played by an actor with at least a trace of mean-spiritedness. But Laurie is as gentle and self-effacing as House is a grouch. Each time the issue of his success came up, he looked as if he wanted to hide under a pillow. It embarrasses him to celebrate his achievements, even though he has done so much. It’s almost as though he’s afraid if he believes in his success, he’ll lose the jones for all the long hours House demands. Every actor should take a cue from the way Laurie handles his fame.”