In rude health

Hugh Laurie

When you think of Hugh Laurie, chances are you'll fondly recall his Blackadder roles - the narcissistic Prince Regent or the equally dim-witted Lt. George.

"I don't know, there's something about my face. I don't even want to speculate on what it conveys but I appear to be very well suited to playing stupid people," Laurie explains in typically self-deprecating fashion. But in his latest role as the leading man on new medical drama House, he has bumped up his IQ.

Laurie plays Dr Gregory House, a brilliant but unsympathetic man with a reputation for diagnosing mysterious ailments. As for his bedside manner, he's the person you would least like to consult should you have some kind of embarrassing rash.

Even a young kindergarten teacher suffering unexplainable seizures can't escape his blunt cynicism. "Brain tumour. She's gonna die. Boring," he moans. Just wait until you hear what he tells the man with the orange skin.

"Kindness is a lovely thing but if lives are at stake then I think you want the best," says Laurie of his character.

"Of course, in an ideal world you want both but in an ideal world we wouldn't bother to make TV shows ... It's a thrillingly mean bunch of people making the show."

Perhaps brave is a better word. How many medical series can you think of - let alone TV dramas - in which the main protagonist is an absolute prat? Although you see glimmers of House's humanity, for the most part, he is a risky choice for a character helming an hour-long TV show.

Viewers get a double dose of tactlessness in the United States, where House screens directly after American Idol, the reality series that subjects pop star wannabes to caustic judge Simon Cowell's often humiliating comments. Laurie says there is something refreshing about TV personalities who speak their minds.

"People can sort of rejoice in this freedom from all the anxiety the rest of us have about the world - does this person like me, does that person like me? And to watch a person who doesn't give a damn ... it's exhilarating to play and I hope it's a bit of a thrill to watch."

In House, he is not free of his own anxieties, the most significant being the chronic pain he suffers from a muscular problem in his leg, and his subsequent addiction to painkillers. Laurie, a healthy man, says he got into character through method acting.

"Yes, I'm swallowing a wide cocktail of genuine psycho-tropic drugs. It just makes the day go by, you know?"

He's joking, although he claims he did take a Vicodin, a narcotic pain-killer, "just to know what that was like. And very pleasant it was, too. I'm aware of having lost half a million brain cells, and I didn't have that many to start with."

This time he's downright lying. Laurie must be one of Britain's most educated actors. He studied at Eton and later Cambridge University, where he did an anthropology degree. He even considered following in his father's footsteps and becoming a doctor before realising he was "too damn lazy".

Instead he threw himself into the world of theatre, working with fellow students Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry.

Laurie's career was steeped in the annals of British comedy. He starred in four seasons of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which he co-wrote with Fry, three seasons of Ben Elton and Richard Curtis' Blackadder with Rowan Atkinson, and four seasons of Jeeves and Wooster, in which he and Fry re-lived a 1920s-30s world of Hooray Henries and splendidly indomitable aunts. Aside from roles in American productions Stuart Little and a guest role on Friends, House is his first major part in which he speaks with an American accent. The significance of the about-turn is not lost on Laurie, who believes some Brits will experience "big difficulties" when it screens there.

"British people are embarrassed at hearing their friends try to speak French. If your friend starts speaking French in the shop, you have to walk outside. I think the same will happen for people watching me play an American.

"It is just a difference in style between British TV and American TV. American writers tend to write about clever people, they write about people they admire. In Britain, we tend to write about people we don't admire. Most British writers write out of revenge, that's my theory."

He insists that despite his growing familiarity with American viewers, he wasn't looking for a role that would bring him to the US. He was shooting a film in Africa when his agent sent him the script. Impressed by its "intelligence, taste, humanity and wit", he sent in a tape and eventually got the part.

That meant moving from London to LA, leaving behind his wife and three children. "It is hard being away from my family and being in a strange city and living out of a suitcase. It is rough but that's the gypsy nature of what I do. It's remote parenting and it's very tricky. They're teenagers now so they're entering that interesting phase.

"We talk every day and I've got a little video camera so we can see each other when we talk, and I tell them to eat their broccoli and go to bed early and they pay no attention. They come out here whenever they can and I go out there. We just have to make the best of it."

Getting his lips around some of the show's medical terms was another challenge.

"You can never predict which ones will be the problem. There can be other reasons for it, depending on what you had for breakfast or whether you slept well. Suddenly you can't say the word, 'table', never mind, encephalopathic hyperinsulinemic. The first time I tried to say that one I got a nose-bleed."

Imagine the Prince trying that.