Face to Face With Hugh Laurie

ENLARGE

TUNNEL VISION | English actor Hugh Laurie, who starred in ‘House’ for eight seasons, takes on two new TV roles this year in AMC’s ‘The Night Manager’ and Hulu’s ‘Chance.’ Photo: Graeme Mitchell for WSJ. Magazine

THE FIRST ATYPICAL thing about Hugh Laurie is his height. Unlike most Hollywood actors, he’s actually taller than he appears on screen. Officially, he stands 6-foot-2; unofficially, he seems even taller.

When we first meet, on a quiet patio in downtown Los Angeles, he’s wearing a slightly faraway expression—a look that would not be unfamiliar to fans of House, the popular Fox medical drama in which Laurie spent eight seasons playing a misanthropic diagnostician.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” Laurie says, “but I could really use a cigarette right now.”

He moves along, patting his pockets for a wayward pack of cigarettes, and seems a little out of sorts until he has one in hand. Hovering near an open doorway, hunched against the wind, he lights the smoke, takes a couple of drags and exhales. “Right, then,” he says. “You were saying?”

He smiles and seeks out the one chair that’s shielded from the sun. “I have, from time to time, stopped smoking cigarettes,” he says a bit later. “And there’s a thing about de-smoking, or whatever the term is that therapists use, that people get anxious about: ‘Well, if I’m not a smoker, have I lost something? If I take that thing away, then surely—just in terms of Newtonian physics—there must be a gap now.’ ”

In today’s Hollywood, the only thing rarer than a star who smokes in public is one who does so while referencing Newtonian physics. Perhaps the most uncommon thing about Laurie is that, despite his accomplished and enduring career, he readily admits to being a head case of the highest order and a prisoner of self-doubt.

Not that he finds these qualities particularly special. “I bore myself,” he says at one point. “I’ve actually fallen asleep mid-sentence on a therapist’s couch, I’ve bored myself so much.”

Given all that, and also considering his well-publicized burnout at the end of his run on House, it might seem counterintuitive that Laurie’s forthcoming TV show, Chance, has him starring as a shrink; in the noirish Hulu original series, which debuts this fall, he plays Dr. Eldon Chance, a San Francisco–based forensic neuropsychiatrist renowned for evaluating criminal defendants. “I opened this thing, and by the first page, I went, ‘Oh, that’s a shame, because I obviously can’t do this,’ ” says Laurie, who was initially opposed to another doctor role. “And then, within about three pages, I actually completely forgot about that. And I thought, This is just a totally different creation and approach. There’s no wisecracking in this. This is about real suffering.”

In this area, Laurie knows whereof he speaks. Since the late ’90s, the actor has acknowledged his battle with depression. The affliction, he said in a 2002 Evening Standard interview, “affected everything—my family and friends. I was a pain in the arse to have around. I was miserable and self-absorbed.”

The first time I bring up his low period, however, Laurie shrugs, says, “Wish I’d never mentioned it” and tilts the conversation elsewhere.

At this point, he’d much rather discuss his role in AMC’s The Night Manager, a six-part miniseries based on the best-selling thriller by John le Carré that premieres in April. The story’s protagonist, a hotel clerk named Jonathan Pine, finds himself recruited to work undercover on behalf of the British intelligence service MI6, in order to catch an international arms dealer.

ENLARGE

THE DOCTOR IS IN | From left: Hugh Laurie with best friend Stephen Fry, in 1991 Photo: Alamy Stock Photo

Laurie, who is a bit of a polymath, has long been obsessed with Le Carré and the spy genre; in 1996, he published a well-received satiric novel called The Gun Seller. In Britain, he attained hero status as half of A Bit of Fry & Laurie, a sketch-comedy act he created with his best friend, the estimable Stephen Fry. Laurie also had long runs on two classic British TV series: Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster. Not least, he’s released two blues albums and toured the world with his band.

“I’ve loved Le Carré from the very first moment,” Laurie says. “But this book was a sort of sacred text for me. It was his first post–Cold War novel. And I was so thrilled and relieved to see that he had found material that would allow this vision to not only continue but to actually excel. I was about three chapters in. I remember picking up the phone—the only time I’ve ever done this—and I tried to option the film rights.” He winces. “I didn’t even really know what option meant, but I’d heard it used as a phrase.”

ENLARGE

Laurie’s 1996 novel, ‘The Gun Seller’

Although his bid failed, Laurie kept tabs on the project. Two decades later, when it emerged from the Hollywood oblivion known as “development hell,” Laurie was all over it.

There was just one hitch: He’d always seen himself playing Pine, the story’s dashing young protagonist. By this point, though, Laurie was well north of 50. (He’s 56 today.) “I had to just assimilate the fact that I was not going to be the night manager,” Laurie says. “I’m no longer qualified, if I ever was—and, by the way, I wasn’t. I never was sufficiently virile and dashing to be the night manager. So I had to stand aside and watch Tom Hiddleston be that.”

Right now the 35-year-old Hiddleston is best known for playing a bad guy in The Avengers. But soon he’ll be linked to his sly turn as Pine. Laurie plays Pine’s target, Richard Onslow Roper, an arms dealer with the mind of a jackal and the means of Croesus.

Laurie was so close to the material and Pine that he felt compelled to impress his vision on Susanne Bier, who directed The Night Manager, and Hiddleston, sometimes to the point of conflict. He even tried to rewrite certain scenes, but his colleagues pushed back. “He said, ‘Let’s just agree about not agreeing,’ ” Bier recalls, “which was very liberating. There was such a desire to get it right.”

Although famous for playing an anti-hero in House, Laurie is new to supervillainy. When addressing purely craft-related questions, Laurie speaks with a cool erudition that bespeaks his schooling at Eton and Cambridge. “Every antagonist must feel themselves to be a protagonist,” he says. “Every human being is the star of their own movie. We have to occupy the central role of our own drama, and certainly Roper is the central role of his.”

After a digression about playing protagonists, Laurie mentions that Tom Hanks, whom he particularly admires, sent him a letter praising Laurie’s recent guest-starring role in the HBO comedy Veep. “Absolutely startling,” Laurie says of the gesture.

ENLARGE

Laurie in an episode of the long-running series ‘House’ Photo: NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

But when I casually mention that Hanks’s production company has a deal at HBO, things take a turn. “Oh,” Laurie says. He looks stricken, saucer-eyed. “You think they told him to write it?”

“No,” I say. “Not at all.”

“You think they sent it?”

And there’s that self-doubt again. “For some reason, there’s a side of him that can’t actually embrace that he’s a genius,” Bier says. “And he always has to sort of tease himself or belittle himself. It’s actually kind of endearing. But there are times when you think, ‘Can’t he just enjoy himself?’ ”

While filming the miniseries, Laurie periodically worked himself into a state. “Hesitations and anxieties bedeviled every line,” he recalls. “I always have hesitations. And I always spend the entire shoot running through the list of people they should have gotten to play the role.”

During this particular shoot, his list of preferred actors included one who has since died. “I feel I shouldn’t even say his name, because it feels disrespectful now,” Laurie says. “But I was always such an enormous admirer of Alan Rickman’s. I thought that he has, or had, such a powerful presence, a sort of silky malice that he was able to summon.” He sighs at the heavens. “I really shouldn’t say that.”

The refrain is a common one from Laurie, for whom the experience of being interviewed—of being asked to publicly expound, reveal, share—can be excruciating. He’s among the very few celebrities who don’t read press clippings. “Not anymore,” he clarifies.

“Why did you stop?” I ask. “Was it just tedious?”

“No! Not at all. It was sort of the reverse of tedious,” he says. “I had the pathology that everybody talks about of fixating on the negative.”

ENLARGE

RENAISSANCE MAN | Laurie’s 2013 album, ‘Didn’t It Rain’

Toward the end of his run on House, during which he earned a reported $700,000 per episode, certain publications cited that he’d grown weary of both the show and the Hollywood lifestyle. (By then, he was spending long months apart from his family back in England, where he lives with his wife of 26 years, Jo Green. They have three adult children, Charlie, Bill and Rebecca.)

“Oh, no, no, no,” Laurie says. “Well, this serves me right for not reading the stuff, because that’s not accurate. I did use the phrase ‘gilded cage.’ That was a mistake. But that was to do with the experience of playing the eponymous character in a television show, and therefore being confined to a black box for 100 hours a week. But for that I was incredibly well paid. No, there was no feeling of retreat.”

Ultimately, Laurie says, “I realized I was never going to get the better of it, so I should just stop. Also, my Presbyterian side won’t allow me to delight in positive things. So I don’t even try.”

He adds: “But even if every word that came out of my mouth was accurately reported, even if such a thing were possible, I would still hate it, because I don’t want to be accurately represented.”

Wait, what?

“Because I bore myself. Because I’m dull—no, really, I am.”

Like Laurie, Stephen Fry attributes that attitude to his friend’s chronic Presbyterianism. Laurie was raised in Oxford, England, by what Fry describes as “parents who believed in the virtues of modesty to the point of self-abnegation. Cockiness, self-satisfaction and pride were the three deadly sins in the Laurie household, I think. And while there is something to be said for that, perhaps it can be taken too far.”

That Laurie happens to be an expansive interview subject is a byproduct of his discomfort. He spews forth a profusion of qualifiers, apologies and olive branches, because he doesn’t want to come off the wrong way—i.e., pompous, boring or rude.

“I sometimes see Hugh through strangers’ eyes,” Fry says. “Media people’s especially. And he might seem a little moody and distant. But he isn’t. He’s a rare figure in that he actually considers things.”

ENLARGE

A live performance in Graz, Austria, in 2014 Photo: Redferns via Getty Images

BUT BY THE TIME House’s run finally ended, in 2012, Laurie gave absolutely zero consideration to playing an eponymous doctor on an American TV drama series again. Chance, however, had a couple of things going for it. First, it’s really nothing like House. The new show is aggressively dark. Laurie’s character gets sucked into a vortex of multiple identities, sexual intrigue and madness. In many ways, Chance is the anti-House.

Second, the show piqued his interest in the subject of human psychology. Recently, he devoured a six-part PBS series, The Brain, hosted by the neuroscientist David Eagleman. And just last week, he says, he spent five hours with Richard Taylor, a forensic psychiatrist known for evaluating some of Britain’s most notorious killers and pyromaniacs. “The aberrations of the human brain have always been interesting to me,” Laurie says. “That’s partly why I’m doing the show. And I’m looking for as many sort of perspectives on the tunnel.”

That “the tunnel” happens to be the central metaphor in a memoir I’d written about my own adventures in depression and madness is not lost on Laurie, who joked that he’d bought 10 copies of my book so he could have one in every room. Throughout our conversation, and despite Laurie’s earlier protestations about discussing the subject, he repeatedly makes oblique (and not so oblique) references to his psychological hardships; at one point, unbidden, he leans close to me and asks, “Do you still kind of hear the tunnel every now and then?” But when I turn the question back at Laurie, he demurs, saying he bought the book merely for research purposes. “I’m about to embark on a role playing a neuropsychiatrist,” he says.

Finally, after dancing around the subject, I asked him why he now avoids discussing the D-word.

“I can understand how it might be perceived as an indulgence on many levels, because, first of all, I am quite preposterously lucky to be where I am, doing what I’m doing, and to have lived the life that I live. I give thanks for it every single day,” he says. “And to actually spend any time trying to enlist sympathy—‘Oh, you don’t realize how I suffer’—is sort of indecent, in a way.”

“Well,” I say, “if you frame it that way—”

ENLARGE

Laurie opposite Tom Hiddleston in ‘The Night Manager’ Photo: Des Willie/The Ink Factory/AMC

“And I also think that, to a degree, it sort of feeds upon itself. If you acknowledge it and confront it, you might be able to get the better of it. But you might also just be giving oxygen to the whole thing.”

“Is there a fear also that people will just constantly identify you as That Guy?”

“Yeah. And depressed people cling to depression because it is, to some degree, familiar. It’s known. It’s part of who one is—that maybe, if I surrender it, if I heal myself, well, then what?” Laurie pauses, hits mental replay. “That may be incorrect,” he says, and forges onward: “But most of all, a privileged, Western, reasonably healthy actor who is living the life I live has got no business, really. It’s just ill-mannered. It’s ill-mannered to complain—”

“That sounds British.”

“Yeah, I suppose it is. I think British people would certainly have that response.”

Laurie sits back and runs a hand through his hair; his smile suggests benign capitulation. “I think I’m very different now, for reasons I alluded to before, which I probably wouldn’t want to go into.” But then he does. “I think I am less troubled than I was. Better. Actually better. I don’t know if that makes me a better person. But the moody introspection I’ve got more sort of under control. I see it coming, and I have ways of heading it off.”

Period.

Then: “Now, of course, I’m thinking I probably shouldn’t have said that at all.”