09/02/05

There's a doctor in the House, and Hugh Laurie plays him

By Luaine Lee
KRT News Service

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

Actor Hugh Laurie admits he's a faker. He always has been.

At first it was in school, where Laurie amassed good grades because he harbors a facility for exams, he says.

Then he conned the world with his acting. At least that's Laurie's humble assessment of his recent success as the irascible, anti-social Dr. House in Fox's hit series, ''House,'' which starts its season Sept. 13.

''I can fake scholarship reasonably well when presented with tricky exam questions,'' he shrugs on a hot, sunny day in the business center of a hotel here.

''I could talk knowledgeably about books I hadn't read … It's sort of a curse. At the time you think it's a blessing. But you look back and say, 'How did I gain from that? I didn't really gain anything like what I should've gained.' It can be a bit of a curse, that easy facility with exams and the process, people who can navigate the process.''

He displays an ease with acting, too, but says he notices from watching the extras on the show that some people have it and others don't. ''There is a definite skill to this because most of the time I'm almost embarrassed by how skill-less actors are. I mean, here we are pretending to this enormously profound medical knowledge and expertise when, frankly, the cast of 'House' could scarcely put on a Band-Aid without reading the instructions,'' he says, his large eyes dominating his gaunt face.

''And sometimes actors can feel rather ashamed of that. We're rather ashamed that we can miss having a concrete skill, a concrete expertise that can save lives or build bridges or explain the world.''

That's particularly true of Laurie whose father was a physician. ''As much as every man feels himself to be a fake version of his own father, I feel it even more acutely because I'm pretending to have a skill that he genuinely had and worked very hard to get — as all doctors do — work seven, eight, nine years.

''He was a general practitioner but it's a huge body of knowledge that the human being has to acquire. And I'm pretending to acquire it and, let's face it, being paid better than he was to actually have it. The world is not a fair place.''

Laurie was in Namibia filming ''Flight of the Phoenix'' when he received four pages from the pilot script of ''House.'' ''At that time quite a few actors on the film were being sent things and were making tapes and sending them in because they wanted to keep themselves in the swim. So it was almost a daily occurrence that someone would say, 'Oh, I just got a script, what do you think of it?' I got these four pages and I thought, 'Oh, this is well-written stuff.' You know it, straightaway. But I assumed the character of House was going to be a sort of peripheral entertainment buddy,'' he says.

''The scenes I got described House and Wilson and I actually read for both. But I saw that Wilson was the main character. He was the sort of clean-cut hero who would save lives and do battle with evil and fight crime generally, and I would be the sort of irritable but softhearted sidekick. So I did this tape and really thought no more about it for that reason.''

Before he knew it, Laurie, 46, was cast as the acerbic anti-hero and working non-stop. It's a hardship on him and his family, including his three children ages 16, 14 and 11, because they live in London.

The family visits when they can, but Laurie is always working.

Fame from the series hasn't caught up with him yet, he grins. ''There's one guy at a gas station on La Cienega where I fill up my bike at 2 o'clock in the morning. He doesn't watch the show, I can tell. He's the only civilian I see in the day. I don't really go out so I haven't really had to deal with the notoriety angle,'' he says.

Is the separation from his family worth it? ''It's a question I try not to ask myself because if the answer is no, then what do I do?'' he shakes his head.

''I'm stuck unless I run away, get some plastic surgery and change my name. So I don't ask myself the question that often.''

Laurie, who was an avid rowsman at Cambridge (they lost to Oxford by five feet), never watches his show. ''I stopped watching myself a long time ago because I find it very painful. I'm constantly thinking, 'Oh, if only I'd done this or why did I do it like that?' You know, you have good days and bad days.

''There's not a lot of time for reflection and self-torture because there's always another bunch of scenes that have to be shot and we've got to do this by lunch and this by 3 p.m. and we're going to lose the kid at 5 — you're always a half-hour away from disaster.

''That's one of the things I quite like about this. I happily complain to my bosses about the hours, but secretly deep down — don't tell them — but I quite relish the quantity of it, the fact that you haven't too much time to stop and think. You've always got to keep moving.''

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