Is Hugh Laurie the new George Clooney? The actor on how he's set pulses racing as TV's moodiest medic

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Another typically sunny morning on the set of House and, in the roomy reception area of the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro teaching hospital, lounges Hugh Laurie.

The character he plays, Dr Gregory House, has just been voted the second sexiest TV doctor ever - with George Clooney in top spot.

'Of course,' murmurs Sexy Doctor Number Two reverently as he turns to an imaginary shrine and bows. 'George Clooney. The governor. Naturally, I myself spend all of my time thinking about being a sex symbol...'

Then he pauses and starts fidgeting with the buttons of his soft grey suit. It seems Laurie is actually contemplating the idea that women might fancy him, and is genuinely embarrassed by the idea.

'Seriously? Oh, I can't think about things like that at all. I can agree that the character of House is sort of a sexy one, that there's even something of the Lord Byron about him, the wounded genius and all, yes, I can see that, but as for myself...'

Sex symbol: Hugh Laurie's role in hospital drama House has made him a household name in Amercia and he's been voted TV's second sexiest doctor just behind George Clooney

Sex symbol: Hugh Laurie's role in hospital drama House has made him a household name in Amercia and he's been voted TV's second sexiest doctor just behind George Clooney

In some ways he's right. The very idea of comparing Laurie with Clooney is still strange. Comical, even. But, as Laurie has proved so brilliantly in House, when he's not hiding behind the mask of a posh twit (think Bertie Wooster in the PG Wodehouse TV adaptations or the aristocratic roles he played in Blackadder) he is actually surprisingly dishy.

He has brought an unexpected, brooding darkness to the role, which female viewers seem to find magnetic. Not to mention the three-day-old stubble.

'Oh, look, I'm covered with blushes now, and I don't know how to respond to that. House is an unhappy, tortured soul; he's rude, and he doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks. If someone behaved like House in real life, he would quite quickly be punched or put in jail.

''I'm very fond of the guy, actually. I love the mixture of light and dark in him, the fact that, at times, he is an eight-year-old child and at others an avenging angel ready to slay the dragons.

'I don't have much sense of the show being on television anyway. I'm working so hard on making it that I don't get to go out in the world and do normal things and meet people who will say, "I saw the show and hated it," or whatever, so, for all I know, it could just be shown in a dustbin somewhere.'

Of course, it's anything but. Now into its fourth series, House has 18 million viewers in the US, as well as a healthy following over here, and has gained Laurie, now 49, three Emmy nominations, two Golden Globe awards and a reputed £100,000 per episode.

Playing the role of a smouldering anti-hero has also forced Laurie to stop hiding behind his comic alter egos - professionally at least. But he still deploys the hapless routine in real life to disguise an underlying pessimism and crippling self-doubt that date back to his teenage years.

When he took on the role, he says he was convinced that House 'would only last a month'.

'The rest of the cast were signing leases on houses and I was in a hotel and didn't even unpack,' shrugs the actor.

Hit show: Hugh Laurie in House for which he is reputed to earn £100,000 an episode

Hit show: Hugh Laurie in House for which he is reputed to earn £100,000 an episode

This gloomy prognosis of his big Los Angeles break perhaps helps to explain his initial decision to leave behind his wife, Jo Green, a former theatre administrator, and their children, Charlie, 19, Bill, 17, and Rebecca, 14.

Four years on, though, and with three more series to go, he hints that the family might now move to California.

'It's taken us a long time to adjust to the permanence of it,' admits Laurie. 'We all travel a lot in both directions to see each other. The situation is what it is and we make the best of it.

'One of the principal goals in my life has been to avoid embarrassing my children by doing the job I do. I hope I've managed to do that, and I hope that, with the job I'm in now, they are, if not proud, at least unembarrassed by it. I must say, my three are most agreeable children, who do nothing but delight me.'

Much has been made of paparazzi pictures of Laurie looking glum in LA. One particularly haunting photo of him, seemingly lonely and forlorn aboard a dinghy, was taken last year in a break from filming.

More recently, he was dubbed 'uneasy rider' when he was pictured with usual downcast expression as he took his wife on a spin round town on the back of his motorbike.

This was during a trip she made to see him in LA  -  Laurie's filming commitments means he returns to England only every few months  -  and led some to conclude that the couple are struggling to juggle a transatlantic marriage with the demands of his role.

Or could it be that this melancholic side to Laurie's personality had, until he became Sexy Doctor Number Two and shot into the list of top five favourite US TV personalities, remained hidden behind closed doors?

Trans-Atlantic relationship: Hugh Laurie pictured with his wife Jo in January

Trans-Atlantic relationship: Hugh Laurie pictured with his wife Jo in January

As former co-star and friend Joely Richardson puts it, just as he can play the hapless and the handsome, there are two sides to Laurie's personality. 'There's the Hugh who dances around and cracks jokes, tangos all over the place. And there's the other side: tortured, dark.'

The sight of Laurie skulking and brooding on set is now so commonplace that nobody bats an eyelid.

Laurie's friends credit Jo, whom he met in the 1980s, with keeping him on an even keel. (Laurie jokes that he had to curb his sulking when they were together long ago because Jo is an 'even bigger sulker' than he is.)

The couple have certainly been through worse times and emerged, still together. In 1997, they survived revelations of Laurie's affair with film director Audrey Cooke on the set of children's adventure film The Place Of Lions  -  an episode that Laurie is no longer prepared to discuss, but which friends say left Cooke devastated and Jo defiant. Indeed, so determined was Mrs Laurie to save her marriage, she is said to have written an emotional letter to Cooke, begging her to stop seeing her husband.

As for Laurie, witnessing the pain he caused finally spurred him on to seek therapy for the depression that has haunted him since his teens. 'I was a pain to have around,' he has said of that time.

'I was miserable and self-absorbed. It is selfish to be depressed and not try to do anything about it.'

Laurie is, by his own admission, a complex chap, which is why he is so perfectly cast in House. When he first read the script, he was attracted by its mix of dry, often black, humour, and real-life drama.

'I was intrigued by the quality of the dialogue, and the fact that the story kept on surprising me  -  House is such an unusual character for an American TV show that, when I first read it, I assumed that Robert Sean Leonard's character, Dr Wilson, was the central character and that House would just come on and have a couple of scenes occasionally. Well, it didn't turn out that way, and here I am.'

Laurie knows a bit about doctors, he says, because his father, Ranold - who was called Ran by his family - was one.

Laurie describes his late father as 'the sweetest man in the world', and the irony doesn't escape him that, while his father juggled his work as a GP in Blackbird Leys, the council estate near Oxford, with his love of rowing (he won an Olympic gold medal), Laurie now mooches around in LA, getting paid 'five times more' for pretending to be a medic.

Award-winning: Hugh Laurie accepts his award for Best Actor in a Drama Series at the 13th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2007

Award-winning: Hugh Laurie accepts his award for Best Actor in a Drama Series at the 13th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2007

'My father was about as far from the character of House as is possible to imagine,' he says. 'He was far more like Dr Finlay  -  do you remember Dr Finlay's Casebook? A solid citizen who wore tweed suits and was overflowing with good sense and kindness. That was the sort of doctor my father was and I have grown up with terrific reverence for the profession.

'I am not one of those people who believe that Western medicine is a terrible thing, that we should all be sucking on willow bark to cure ourselves of what ails us - that's all nonsense to me. Out of all the people in this room today, had antibiotics not been invented, there might only be two or three left alive now.'

Laurie's relationship with his mother, Patricia, was much more complicated. The youngest of four children and the only boy, his siblings say he was the apple of his mother's eye - though Patricia struggled to show her son any affection.

'She would spend days, weeks, even months, nursing some grievance. I don't know if she was clinically depressed, but she certainly had mood swings. She used to get very angry with me. Actually, I think she found me a disappointment in many ways. She was contemptuous of the goal of happiness, of contentment, ease, comfort. She disliked even the word comfort. She had a hostility to softness. She'd say, "Don't be so wet".'

Laurie was 29 when his mother died of motor neurone disease, and has said that they never reached any kind of resolution. All this has presumably provided fertile ground for Laurie's therapist and helps to explain his need to make self-deprecating remarks - as well as his failsafe fall-back position of playing the fool.

Old friends: Hugh Laurie plays the hapless Jeeves alongside old Cambridge University pal Stephen Fry

Old friends: Hugh Laurie plays the hapless Jeeves alongside old Cambridge University pal Stephen Fry

A pupil at the Dragon School in Oxford and then at Eton, Laurie says he did, at one point, consider following his father into the medical profession.

'When I was 15 or 16, I thought maybe I should be taking up medicine like my father. I had an interview at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, which is where my father had studied, and in fact, I came very close to going there. I forget now why I didn't do so - probably I was too stupid, or too lazy, to commit to the necessary eight years of study.'

Instead, Laurie went to Cambridge to study anthropology and archaeology, and, while he was there, joined Footlights, the university's dramatic society.

There he met fellow student (and briefly girlfriend) Emma Thompson, who introduced him to Stephen Fry, another student. And so a two-headed comedy giant was born, ranging from sketches written and performed by Fry and Laurie, to both starring in Blackadder and the Jeeves & Wooster television series, with Laurie generally cast as a humorously hapless everyman.

'There's something in the British character that is not interested in being a hero,' says Laurie. 'We're always sort of ready to be disappointed, aren't we? The train's late - oh, well, it's not going to come at all, and when it does come, then there'll only be two coaches and we'll end up standing. That's very much part of the national character.

'Most British writers write out of revenge for insults suffered on the playground or somebody who somehow did them wrong. But that can be very funny, actually.'

Laurie is still close friends with Thompson and she is not at all surprised by his rebirth as a sex symbol. She says, 'I met him in his first term and he was a rowing blue. He looked a bit like Indiana Jones, wearing a lot of khaki. We were auditioning for parts in Aladdin and when I saw him, I jabbed my friend in the ribs and said, "Star. Star. Star." I knew at once.'

Laurie glances at a clock on the wall and rises to his feet. It's time to get back to work.

He fidgets with his buttons again (he's wearing a blue shirt that enhances those tragicomic blue eyes) and holds out his arm for a handshake, saying, 'I read a very good thing this morning that Colin Firth said. He said that, after 40, he's grateful to be considered a sexy anything, let alone a sexy symbol.'

He stops again. 'No, he didn't say that, actually, I messed it up. He said he was grateful to be a sex anything. Humph: one joke, and I messed it up - and it's not even my own joke.'

  • House, every weekday on Five at 12.45pm.

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