“I find I am always faintly suspicious of happy people. I always think there is something going wrong or missing somewhere.”
That isn’t Dr. Gregory House speaking to the UK Times, that’s Hugh Laurie, the British, Cambridge-educated actor who plays him. After doing six seasons of the Fox medical series House, has Laurie acquired the distrustful antisocial mien of House? Probably, as he says doing the show for six seasons and 124 episodes should be long enough to have qualified to become a doctor.
Nevertheless, it is the fact that House is not “necessarily a good man” that keeps Laurie enthralled and interested.
“Yes, I still like him very, very much. I know he has problems, and he is not necessarily a good man. But I realized long ago that one doesn’t only like good people. Sometimes one doesn’t even like good people.”
Indeed, the character study of House has taken a turn when the current season opened, when the doctor found himself in a psychiatric hospital. Yet just when we think House has changed post-Mayfield, he does something that makes House fans go, “Oh there he is.”
“I suppose I am drawn to people who worry, who are tortured,” he adds. “The fact that he is not happy makes a lot of his misdemeanors more forgivable. If someone is behaving badly, yet remains unhappy and tortured, the bad behavior is very often its own punishment, so it’s hard to be too upset by it.”
Which is not to say that Laurie’s love affair with the character he plays was there all along. Way back in season 1, when House wasn’t the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning drama that it is, he had doubts that it was going to fly at all.
“Those first years, that was tough going,” Laurie says. “It was hard to keep morale up and keep concentrating, keep forging ahead… I used to worry much more about the prospect of failure. That 200 people were going to be out of a job. That shame and disgrace would attach, and I would have my acting uniform stripped from me.”
Source: The Times
(Image courtesy of Fox)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
