Hugh Laurie: “I have someone to love”

I wait for him in the lobby of the Chateau Mormon in Los Angeles and order a cappuccino. On the couch next door, two lovely young women coo carelessly – a typical product of Californian glamor and the cult of total “fine!” I squint at them, and it’s only through this disregard for good tone that I notice how they both fall silent, focusing on something obviously significant behind my shoulder. In one of them I recognize the actress Katie Holmes … And she identified my future interlocutor. Hugh Laurie is approaching us, and it was this that silenced the wife of Tom Cruise himself …

And Lori, at the word “success”, used about him, frowns in disgust. He is against thoughtless word usage. He claims: “I don’t have any success, I just got lucky.” And again: “The luckier I am, the more frightening I am. Success is deserved, and I won the lottery, although I didn’t even buy a ticket.”

But he doesn’t look like a frightened person at all. Although in fairness it must be said that he does not look like a minion of fortune, and a successful pro. Lori does not even look like just an actor – he does not have that imprint that a profession that requires self-demonstration leaves. Hugh Laurie is like a man who is 51 years old, who raised three children, worked all his life and thought a lot. Who has a habit of thinking, although he hides it: like most men of our time, he would like to appear as a man of action, not thought.

Laurie has clear and piercing blue eyes, and from him emanates the deepest calmness – this usually comes from big, tall, monumental people. And Laurie – a strange thing, I did not notice this on “Doctor House” – seems to me almost a giant: his height is in no way less than 190 cm, and he seems even taller due to his clearly asthenic physique … He is exquisitely polite, I would say – courtly : before each of the countless cigarettes lit during our conversation, he asks my permission to smoke. Another oddity: the smoke from his cigarettes does not annoy me. As well as intonations, and the timbre of the voice, and pauses, and manners … Hugh Laurie seemed to be created in order to be accepted. And there is nothing wrong with the fact that he has not yet learned to accept himself.

Psychologies: Your life changed dramatically when you were 45. To leave your native country, live away from your family – and deal with such matters as undeniable success and worldwide fame …

Hugh Laurie: Hugh Laurie: Listen, there is something absurdist about this fame of mine, that’s why I don’t trust it … Unfounded, unmotivated – I’ve always been wary of this. You know, I lived in this hotel for almost half a year when the casting was going on.House“. All the other members of the cast, as soon as they were approved for the role, picked up mortgages on new houses. And I didn’t immediately realize that House was the main character. I read the script for a long time with the feeling that Dr. Wilson, the oncologist, should be in charge. A positive person, friendly, attentive to patients, kind and sympathetic. So when the series was finally decided to be done and my colleagues went into real estate, I very confidently said to Jennifer Morrison (actress, partner of Lori on the TV series House M.D. – Ed.): “Jenny, I am telling you as an adult and a father three children – you are doing an unimaginable stupidity. We will be closed this season.” Jenny, a young and desperate woman, answered me something like: “Ah, we only live once!” For me it was just a shock when House became the rating leader almost all over the world. I had the feeling that I had spent six years in a coma, suddenly woke up and now I wanted to ask: “Is Elizabeth still on the throne? Do we still drive on the left in Britain? Do we still have pounds or already euros? In fact, I’m still in this state in a sense. House is too unusual – both as a series and as a person. Too unillusory for a TV series and too unheroic and uncomfortable for a hero. He can’t be a pop star. And became. I am shell-shocked by this fact – my picture of the world, based on suspicion, has undergone a deformation.

Suspicions?

H. L.: You know, I belong to the type of people for whom the glass is always half empty. True, I don’t particularly share this worldview – I don’t like whining myself and try to fill my glass somehow, but the better things go, the more suspicious the course of events seems to me. My motto: if everything is good, it’s only a matter of time before it gets worse. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a wonderful title, a brilliant wording and absolutely about me. The lightness of being is something unbearable for me. I am always tormented by the question: is what is happening worthy of deep feelings, or should we treat everything resolutely easier? Or, on the contrary, for the completeness of the feeling of being, one must experience everything seriously? With regard to reality, I have too many open questions, and the trend is that their number does not decrease. We British, you know, have a certain sentimentality, sensitivity. It is this sensitivity that has made many of us cynical. Self-defense, protection from our own feelings, from painful effects on our thin skin… I balance on emptiness – depression, trying to maintain sensitivity and not fall into cynicism. And at the same time, I am aware that, in fact, my depression is far-fetched: I do not do anything that could act overwhelmingly. My life is easy – have you noticed that I’m not a miner? Yes, I’m not even an actor – I never studied this profession and for a long time I was engaged in it at the “cabbage” level. Even ours with Steve (Stephen Fry is a famous British actor and prose writer, a friend of Laurie. – Approx. ed.) The super-successful long-term show of Fry and Laurie on the BBC was something of a continuation of our not so much theatrical, but theatrical activities in Cambridge. Maybe my depression is related to this – I’m not ready for the side effects of the profession. Well, sort of famous. A state alien to me.

But isn’t this kind of doubt related to your hero?

H. L.: I like it completely different. In “Star Trek” (American television series. – Approx. ed.) There is such an episode. Captain Kirk looks out into outer space through a hatch and says, “Somewhere out there right now, someone is saying the three most beautiful words in any language.” You think he means “I love you”. But then the captain clarifies: “Help me, please.” By the three most beautiful words, he meant a request for help. And he is right – it contains absolute beauty, because behind it is a natural and noble contact of human beings. That’s what I like about House – there are requests for help everywhere, they come from all the characters, and from House, maybe to a greater extent.

Isn’t that your version of happiness?

H. L.: Maybe. But it is also important to overcome, the happiness of testing. For my 40th birthday, my wife gave me a parachute jump. That is, I went to training, and then I had to jump. But on day X, when we took to the air, it turned out that the wind was too strong and it was impossible for fools like us, amateurs, to jump. We returned to earth. An interesting detail: the women from our group were upset, and all the men – and I was no exception – breathed a sigh of relief. But one way or another, we all ended up there to test ourselves, to overcome. To know for myself if I can really jump into nowhere when at the height this instructor guy opens the door and says: “Come on!” It turns out that I never could: then the jump was canceled, then it was postponed, and then it was not at all up to it. And it turns out, I’m afraid of falling. Perhaps out of vanity. Or maybe because of the lack of vital energy. But all this combined makes me a vain pessimist.

There is something very British in the idea of ​​overcoming as the meaning of existence – aggressive, colonialist. In addition, you played Bertie Wooster and other English aristocrats. So to what extent are you an Englishman, with all this national kit: irony, snobbery, carefully hidden “golden heart”, a passion for conquering new spaces, a desire to win, assertiveness and good manners?

H. L.: That is, to what extent I tend to be English? You know, I kind of like British football fans. As you know, the most malicious of all. Because they refute this myth of yours about an Englishman, a colonialist in a pith helmet. I don’t believe in national character in the modern world. I only believe in accent. In order to become a XNUMX% American House – with all his experience of historical and cultural disappointments, he still lives in an era of political correctness and post-classism – I had to deceive … language.

But you got a truly British upbringing: Presbyterian ascetic values ​​in the family, then a school – the prestigious Eton, then Cambridge …

H. L.: But I think something else is important. I grew up in a family of a doctor and an athlete. My father was an incredibly gentle, incredibly well-mannered man, a doctor, exceptionally dedicated to his patients, a true athlete – he won the gold medal in sculling at the Olympic Games in London in 48th. And I wanted to be like him and also rowed, quite seriously. A friend of my youth, Emma Thompson, recently said: “Listen, I remember you then and I can’t believe my eyes – you were huge.” Yes, rowing is a strength sport. I was huge. This is partly why they took me to Cambridge – the sports uniform was impressive. But I wanted to be like my father and at the same time denied him – and his tact, and his honesty. I was a bad teenager, a kind of nasty teenager … But we are all doomed to realize ourselves as only a worsened version of our fathers … And this is how it ended: pretending to be a doctor House, I earn ten times more than he would earn if he were alive. Journalists ask if I’m sorry that my father died before House. No, it’s not a pity – perhaps I would be ashamed of this pretense. But I’m sorry that my father is no longer alive. I never came to terms with his death, I miss him – and this delicacy, and purity, and devotion. Shortly before his death, I went to the United States to shoot in Stuart Little, I think. I knew that he felt bad, but I decided not to go to him and not say goodbye in detail. And I did it quite deliberately: I did not want to … let him go, I did not want to give him permission to leave. He had to “hang” this case – to meet with me. And I didn’t really say goodbye. Now I regret it. But it is possible that he would have done the same if the situation had repeated itself.

In general, do you think it’s worth leaving unfinished business? Does life make sense in open endings?

H. L.: Life itself leaves the finals open. For me, a clear example is my mother. She was a woman suffering from mood swings, with oddities – for example, in my opinion, she was the first in Europe to really implement “green” ideas: she collected waste paper from neighbors and handed it over … She despised the idea that one must live for the sake of happiness, that it is necessary to sure to achieve. She hated the very word comfort. She was hostile to sentiment, to manifestations of tenderness, she simply hated tears. As a reaction to our children’s tears, she could say: “Do not breed dampness!” We had a strange relationship: it seemed to me that she expects too much from me, sees in me something that I can never match. And all I did was break the image of my ideal self: I lied at school, I refused to seriously learn to play the piano. He became a self-taught actor, and not a doctor, like a father, as she wanted … Our relationship was not cloudless, and it seemed to me that, on the whole, I disappointed her. But after her death, my brother told me that I, it turns out, was a mother’s favorite, that she was proud of my stage experiences … But she is no longer there, I have no one to say what I want now. The final is still open.

Didn’t moving to the US make you less of a pessimist? After all, it is still generally accepted that America is a country of optimistic life-builders.

H. L.: Listen, when I close the door behind me in England, I enter my fortress. In a solid stone receptacle of vital foundations. And when I slam the door in a house in Los Angeles, the walls tremble! Here everything is flimsy, everything is temporary, no one thinks about permanence. They are building here, but without going in cycles, so that it is convenient now. In general, I like this American principle of life – fast & easy (easy and fast. – Approx. ed.). There is nothing to declare to the world about yourself as something permanent!

But how, having a tendency to depression, did you play comedies for so many years and write comedy scripts and sketches yourself, that is, make people laugh?

H. L.: Why, I’m just a depressive type, not a misanthrope. I like people. And they know about it – no one will say a bad word about me. That’s why I say bad things about myself.