The Radio Times Interview
June 14-20, 2003
Hugh and cry
ANDREW DUNCAN MEETS HUGH LAURIE
We meet in the "honesty bar" of a boutique London hotel. It is, I
suggest, quite the most inappropriately named room in which to conduct
an interview, and Hugh Laurie grins. He's a fantasist, polymorph,
writer, actor, director - anything you want, really, he says
laconically.
"Who am I? What am I? I haven't the faintest idea. I'm whatever I'm not
doing at the time. I never have to stick my neck out and say, 'This is
what I do.' I hide behind this dilettante thing, which is an admission
of cowardice. I can't say I like acting. I'm still wondering what to do
instead." He's writing his second novel, but it's late. "How boring for
publishers to get books on time. A little literary angst does them no
harm."
Slim and 6ft 2in, Laurie affects an unworldly Wodehousian attitude of
blissful unawareness, yet he's delightfully subversive and slyly
understated. "I have a memory of who I thought I was at 17. If I could,
now, meet myself then, would I think I was a callow, arrogant, feckless
Etonian? Or would I see my present self from that perspective as a
compromised, washed-out, good-for-nothing, comfort-monger who takes the
easy route?
This afternoon, he's been ordered by his wife, Jo, a former theatre
administrator, and mother of their three children not to mention the
D-word. Several years ago he admitted he'd been depressed, following an
affair with a film director (no, we're not going to discuss that).
"Every time I'm suckered into making a remark about it, we get letters
for six months asking me to talk to family therapy groups. I'm not
qualified to give advice to anyone. And no," he declares, "I am not
depressed."
He then seems to wonder about the wisdom of such a categorical remark.
"Do you think I'm a tortured soul? By all means help yourself to that
analysis if you like. We all have to be a bit tortured because it's only
discontent that gets us out of bed in the morning. I read about a new
type of plane designed to be unstable in flight, the idea being that
it's much quicker to maneuver if it's wobbling all the time. Maybe
entertainers are designed with a deliberate instability that enables
them to wander off in all directions. And occasionally crash.
Laurie prays he hasn't crashed as he stars next week in Fortysomething,
ITV's six-part dramatisation of Nigel Williams's endearingly funny novel
about midlife crisis. Laurie hasn't read the book. "You may be shocked,
but I was instructed by Nigel not to because there have been so many
changes he thought it would be a distraction." His part, Paul Slippery,
was a radio soap actor in the novel, but is a Wimbledon GP in the
series. "Apparently there's a rule in ITV that it's verboten to do drama
about actors. Beats me why. You can't set them at the seaside either,
because it's middle-class. You mustn't have actresses with short hair,
except for Amanda Burton. You'd hope their strategy would rest on
whether a programme is good or not, but life is more complicated than
that."
Laurie also directed three of the episodes - a last-minute arrangement
after two previous directors left. "Unhappily, I would say, if that's a
legal term. The project was floundering. I'd only directed commercials
before, so the producers were insane. It's equally mad to direct
yourself as an actor. I had many qualms, but was drawn to the stupidity
of it. Suicidal missions become attractive for some reason. Since I was
a boy, I'd had this fantasy - still do - that whenever I'm on a plane,
the stewardess will announce, "Both pilots ate the fish. They're
unconscious. Can anyone back there fly? I rehearse in my mind all the
procedures I'd go through before taking over."
The day we meet, the series has been shown for the first time to TV
executives. "I have no idea if it's good. I have almost no idea about
anything I do. When I'm pleased about a sentence I write, a scene I act,
no one agrees with me. I'm baffled because in Fortysomething the
executives laughed at different things from me - for example a scene
where I'm naked, locked out of my house with a bath towel that's
snatched by a dog. I suppose they hoped there was comic capital to be
had out of me naked. I think there's less than they thought. It's not a
pretty sight. Perhaps it's a daily occurrence in Wimbledon. People open
their curtains and go, 'Not another naked man'."
The youngest of four children, Laurie was brought up in Oxford, where
his father, Ran, was a GP, modest to a fault. He never discussed the
fact that he'd won an Olympic gold medal for rowing. "I wouldn't say he
was uptight, but upright an pathologically shy. I suppose I get a lot of
my character from him - also my mother. Humility was the quality she
admired above all. Comfort was the work of the devil. Dad wasn't
joyless. He had a strapping Presbyterian heartiness. My mother took it
even further. She was a complicated personality and we had our good
times and bad.
Laurie went to Eton, followed by Cambridge, ostensibly to study
anthropology but really to continue the family's rowing tradition, like
his older brother, who was in the Boat race. "I was in the 1980 eight
[which lost] but never assumed I was my father's equal. During my
childhood, large men with red faces would slap me on the back and say,
'Hell of a man, your dad!' He was a bit of a hero, and I knew I'd never
achieve that, but I suppose I was competing with him and my brother.
There's nothing else in rowing except competition, certainly no
pleasure. It's a miserable sport. But you get astonishing satisfaction
from beating others. It's like a drug. If you win one big race, it stays
with you all your life.
In his first year at Cambridge he had glandular fever [mononucleosis],
so he took up acting. "The reason is not pleasing to the ear. It has to
do with showing off to girls. I was so unconfident with them it was a
relief to know if I couldn't interest them in any other way, I could at
least make them laugh on stage. I thought maybe I'd catch someone's eye.
He did. He became Emma Thompson's boyfriend and the best friend of
Stephen Fry, with whom he went on to make several TV series, including A
Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster.
"I thought hard about becoming a doctor, but didn't in the end. I wanted
to go into the Hong Kong police. We're all susceptible to images. For me
it was probably The Third Man. I saw myself as Trevor Howard getting out
of a Land Rover, being laconic and sucking on a pipe. Pity I didn't go
to Hong Kong. Policing there became a cushy number for Brits. They've
all been sent back on pensions at 35. Sorted. Playing golf all day - not
that I'd wish that on anyone."
Just turned 44, Laurie recognizes the sins of midlife crisis. "It seems
to happen to men more than women. I suppose it depends on how
emotionally mature one is. You can have a midlife crisis at 26, if
you're really ahead of the game. I'm in one all the time, basically
because I feel late at everything. I haven't grown up accomplished what
I thought I would, or become the person I hoped to be. "I had ambitions
of opening the batting for England, climbing Kilimanjaro. I assumed
there was plenty of time, but now the clocks have gone forward and I'm
late, stuck because all my fantasies were based on the achievements of
younger men like David Gower. I have no older role models. I don't want
to become home secretary or conduct the Philharmonic. Who would I be now
as an actor, father, husband, writer? I don't know. And that's tragic.
This realisation should have happened when I was 35, but being rather
dim I didn't perceive it until six months ago.
Either I've enjoyed it all, or I've never found the thing I'm really
good at. I play gormless twits. Maybe that's what I am. I'm slow to
notice things. Even in Blackadder [whose 20th anniversary is marked this
weekend on UK Gold] I played an intellectually compromised character.
That's where most of my mileage lay. "I'd like to play a clever person,
but there are few opportunities in this country. British drama is about
stupidity. My theory is our writers are motivated by revenge in cruel
teachers and playground bullies who made their lives miserable.
Americans write about those they admire - The West Wing is about
characters who are angelic. Our first position would be that all
politicians are on the make. I'm depressed by that view. It's lazy and
cowardly, and it makes humour extremely cruel. I'd like to do more
positive things. I'm worn out and bored by cynicism.
"Unlike Radio 4th John Humphrys, I'm inclined to think most politicians
hope they can make the world a better place. I find his abrasiveness
wearing, and resent the way he thinks that in order to be probing one
must necessarily be rude. Politicians may have made pacts with the
Devil, but any of us might do the same, even Humphrys. We don't have the
right to pretend to purity because we didn't join the fray but just
stood on the sidelines and commented."
He's starred in Hollywood films, such as Stuart Little and its sequel.
"Starred? Just a pair of shoes, more or less. It didn't give me a big
profile in America, but it did no harm. How well a film does has nothing
to do with how good it is. There's a lot of luck, and you're dependent
on weather, what other films open on that weekend, news stories, a
baseball game. It's as trivial as that."
Comedy is a wall he's hidden behind most of the time, he agrees. "It
makes it sound like a strategy, but it can never be that. I suppose some
people consciously adopt a comic mask in order to conceal, but why would
you do that unless you feel you're not worthy without it, unable to
please your partner or your friends?"
He pauses, sounds a bit glum, but doesn't look it. "I still feel that. I
suppose it's a lack of confidence. I envy the peace of people who know
they can make others laugh but don't feel obliged to do so all the time.
Stephen [Fry] has a good analogy. He says your signature begins as an
affectation when you're a teenager and realise you have to make a mark
on the world. You practice one that seems to chime with who you are, and
over the years it develops to the point where you can't write it any
other way. The affectation has become the reality.
"Almost everyone has an affectation, or public persona, that makes their
lives look better-organised than yours. The more perfect it appears, the
more suspicious one ought to be. One sees it with relationships that
seem to be wonderful for 15 years, and then suddenly it's revealed that
these two people have been at each other's throats, nearly separated
five times, and the husband's drunk two bottles of vodka a day and gone
off with a Brazilian lap dancer. It's thoroughly interesting, the stuff
of life.
He brightens when he explains his one unfulfilled ambition, to
capitalize on his accomplishments as a pianist. "My autumnal career will
be playing in a hotel lobby somewhere. I know it's not considered a
rewarding gig in the world of professional music. I have a friend who
plays five hours a t a big London hotel for 25 pounds and a meal. No one
listens, but you have a skill, and there's something romantic about the
freedom to ply your trade anywhere in the world. I'm dissatisfied that
I'm never able to achieve what I want. I go home at the end of every day
thinking I screwed up again. But there comes a time when you have to say
'move on'. And that's what I've decided to do now. I think."