From Brit twit to man of the House

Alex Strachan
Canada.com

September 10, 2005

Hugh Laurie as the irascible but brilliant doctor on House. The second season premieres with back-to-back episodes on Global and Fox Tuesday night.

Blame the bin Laden tape. Hugh Laurie, English character actor familiar for playing foppish twits in class-conscious British comedies like Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, was filming last year's big-screen clinker Flight of the Phoenix in the Namibian desert, when he recorded an audition tape for the lead role of a cranky doctor in a new TV show called House.

Laurie had grown a beard, for his Flight of the Phoenix role.

He looked, to hear him describe it, like hell on earth.

Emaciated from weeks of self-imposed deprivation, woozy from the relentless African sun and inwardly skeptical at the absurdity of an upper-class English twit playing a bad-tempered, Vicodin-popping American doctor -- with a gimpy leg, no less -- Laurie recorded what he surmises just might have been the most bizarre, off-putting audition tape in the history of entertainment television. It was, he says, his Osama bin Laden moment, and he buried himself in the role.

Little could he have known that David Shore, House's Canadian creator, head writer and executive producer -- and filmmaker-producer Bryan Singer, the director of X-Men, X-2 and The Usual Suspects, among other big-screen films -- would take one look at Laurie's audition tape and say: "That's our House."

Little more than a year later, with one season of House behind him and another about to begin, not to mention that Emmy nomination -- the actual awards will be handed out on Sept. 18 -- Laurie is suddenly faced with the peculiar prospect of being labeled a sex symbol, a lady's man and the quintessential American actor. Die-hard devotees and casual viewers alike recoil when they hear the Eton in his off-screen accent.

Laurie, far from being the upper-class English snob about it, is privately tickled by the newfound attention. He has also found time to shave and don a better cut of clothes. The only resemblance to bin Laden now is that both men are tall and lanky.

"I'm rather enjoying the whole process of reinvention," Laurie said recently. "To be able to pretend to be something that I'm frankly not is very liberating and exciting."

Playing the irascible Dr. House, a diagnostician who hates patients almost as much as he loves a good medical mystery, has not turned Laurie off the medical profession in any way. He would, he insists, take the kind of abuse Dr. House hands out to his patients, if he were on the receiving end.

"Yes," he said. "I love abuse. I really do. But I have a private arrangement with someone. You needn't know about that."

Yes, the real Dr. House is also capable of being serious. On occasion. "Plainly, if your life is hanging in the balance, the most important thing to you at that moment is going to see the best person for the job," Laurie said. "If you have an ingrown toenail, then the abuse would probably take on a different shade of importance. It's all about proportion, isn't it?

"If your life, or the life of someone you love, is hanging in the balance, of course you would withstand any amount of abuse to get the job done and to get the life saved. Of course, you have to be convinced that person knows what they're doing. In real life, you have no way of knowing that you're dealing with the best person for the job. It's only on television that you can know that."

House's physical ailment -- chronic pain from a crippling injury to his leg -- affects the way Laurie plays him, but not in the way one might expect.

"It's not his physical gait that is transforming," Laurie said. "It's the having one hand. It's being one-handed. I find that much more constricting than walking with a limp. Actually walking with a limp is not that troubling. But to be one-handed, to drink a cup of tea and put two sugars in, and open a door and answer a telephone -- it all becomes incredibly time-consuming. Every scene, for me, is about, where am I going to park the cane? When I pick up this, where am I going to put the cane? That's a physical constraint. But, you know, you adapt incredibly quickly. Human beings do. We're very quick."

Characters don't always change, however. In subtle ways, over time, perhaps -- but deep down, faithful viewers suspect House has not changed much from the day he delivered his first diagnosis, in the first episode, when he said: "Brain tumour. She's going to die. Boring."

It's up to Laurie, and to Shore, Singer and House's writers, to show House maturing over time, growing older and wiser. Sela Ward will return for seven episodes this season as House's ex-flame, newly married, and she rekindles a light in him.

It will all be very subtle and on the up and up, however. This is not Desperate Housewives. Shore named his lead character -- House -- as a synonymous tip of the hat to Sherlock Holmes ("Homes"). Whatever happens with Dr. House from here on, it won't be elementary. And Laurie is perfectly happy with that.

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