From left, "The Oranges" stars Allison Janney, Oliver Platt, Hugh Laurie and Alia Shawkat.'I must warn you from the start," Hugh Laurie says apologetically, "I don't have any funny stories."
I tell him I'm not particularly worried about this, but Laurie has just come out of a news conference for his new film, "The Oranges," in which he was asked to provide some amusing memories of the shoot.
He didn't have any, and it left him feeling a bit of a failure.
"I think there are two types of people in this world -- the people who go to the dry cleaners and come back with a funny story, and the people who are lucky to come back with the dry cleaning," he says, taking a seat in a Soho hotel room.
"I am one of the latter, unfortunately. In fact, I believe I am one of those people to whom nothing funny has ever happened, in their entire lives."
Which is funny, in itself. Because he's spent so much of that life making audiences smile, from his silly antics on British TV to his eight serious yet beautifully sardonic seasons here on the Fox hit "House."
His new film, opening Friday, combines the silly and serious.
Set in West Orange, it stars Laurie, Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt and Allison Janney as friendly, middle-class neighbors. But then Laurie begins an affair -- with Platt and Janney's college-age daughter -- and things fall apart.
"I do feel he's essentially a good man who ends up doing something hurtful," Laurie says. "But it's not done out of any desire to cause hurt ... You reach a certain age, you start to notice these extraordinary things that are disappearing, like hair or testosterone, things you used to have in abundance. And there are men who hit this patch and decide it's time for a last hurrah, one last shake of the bottle."
The character's a bit of a change for Laurie. For someone Emma Thompson -- a former girlfriend -- once described as "lugubriously sexy," he's never gotten a lot of passionate parts.
"No, I suppose the true English expertise is in concealing passion," he says. "It's not a common thrust of our cinema. I suppose you get the romantic period pieces occasionally, the strapping hero on a braying stallion, but generally we don't do passion very well. We English don't even do heroes in great volume."
And James Hugh Calum Laurie, 53, could not have grown up more English. His father was a Cambridge-educated doctor and an Olympic medalist in rowing; Laurie prepped at Eton. He grew up with every advantage except, perhaps, unbridled affection; he remembers being a bit of a disappointment to his mother and trying hard to impress his father by carefully following in his footsteps.
But another seed had already been planted.
"I remember at 11 or 12 taking part in some school musical called '1066' and feeling a true satisfaction in making people laugh," he says. "And then I won a prize at school for acting, and although my parents missed the actual performance -- they were frequently late to these things -- I remember peeking through the curtain and seeing their gratification when my name was read. I had a very good feeling at that and it stayed with me for a very long time."
Still, Laurie decided on a more respectable path, even dutifully entering Cambridge and joining the rowing team; when mononucleosis put his athletic efforts on hiatus, however, he looked about for another extracurricular activity. He chose the drama club.
Although Laurie insists "it still didn't dawn on me that this could become a career," that's exactly what happened. His senior year show, with classmates Thompson and Stephen Fry, went to the 1981 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, then the West End and, finally, television. It made them all stars, yet Laurie -- who admits he has sometimes struggled with serious depression -- didn't allow himself to enjoy it.
"It's a curious thing, but as an amateur, I had a degree of confidence in front of an audience that I absolutely lost once I started to do it professionally," he says. "When I was young, up until 19 I would say, I thought of the audience as female -- not composed of females, but female in character, an audience which could be charmed."
He takes a quick sip of espresso.
"But then from 20 to 30, the audience became, in my mind, very much a bunch of men sitting there with their arms folded," he says. "They became an opponent. They had to be bested in some way. I still can't explain why this change happened -- I don't think I was entirely sane during my 20s. But by the time I reached 30, I think I became sane, and in my mind, the audience became more of a mix."
During his mad 20s, though, Laurie was starring in some of the best British TV shows of the period, including "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" and, with Rowan Atkinson, "Blackadder," a hilarious, century-hopping historical comedy which often played the muttered sarcasm of Atkinson's conniving characters against Laurie's foppish fools,
"Yes, we are drawn to the silly, aren't we, in England?" Laurie asks. "There's an element of cruelty to our comedy, too, I think, of seeing the character who seems to be in control come unstuck -- Basil Fawlty, you know, suffering all sorts of indignities and finally blowing up. Whereas a lot of American humor strikes me as coming from the other direction -- of the little guy finally triumphing. There's something a little crueler in our approach."
As the '90s began, Laurie and Fry reteamed for "Jeeves and Wooster," with Laurie as P.G. Wodehouse's charmingly clueless aristocrat and Fry as his indispensable manservant. It couldn't have been more perfectly cast, yet in a way it was almost too perfectly cast; instead of branching out, Laurie seemed to be stuck forever playing the twit.
"It's not something I fought against, particularly," he says. "In fact I enjoyed it, and rather indulged it. Possibly I overindulged it, and enjoyed it at the expense of confronting more serious things in my life or the life of the world. It was certainly true that I let myself be perceived that way, and I didn't get a chance to step outside of that until the character of House came along."
Ironically, what played in Laurie's favor was that, outside England, his best-known part had probably been playing the dad in "Stuart Little." So he was pretty much a blank slate to the director who finally cast him, and to American audiences. He seized upon it.
"It's unusual for an actor in his 40s to be able to present a new face to an audience, and that was to my great good fortune," he says. "And I think to the benefit of the show. There was no particular preconception of who I was, or what I'd come from. If, say, Val Kilmer had played House, they'd say, 'Well, it's a Val Kilmer thing, all right, we know what he does, and what to expect.' ... But that wasn't true in this case and that was huge."
The TV show -- which starred Laurie as a brilliant, damaged doctor at a New Jersey hospital -- made both the character, and the actor, unlikely icons.
"I think there is something endlessly attractive about the Byronic hero, sort of limping about and hiding his true nature behind his wit," Laurie says. "And I think our desire to help and heal that hero is very strong ... Of course, for all of House's cruelties, he was himself a tortured person. Whatever he inflicted on others, it brought him no joy."
Nor did he bring the man who played him much pleasure, either, for the first few seasons.
"I always fancied myself as more of a technical actor, the sort who could walk away from a part," he says. "That turned out not to be true. I definitely had some pretty dark times -- some pretty dark times. But then I was spending my day immersed in this world where pain -- psychological pain and physical pain -- was a daily companion, and it causes you to dwell on the rather bleaker sides of human nature."
Still, Laurie says, "I will always think fondly of that character and miss his presence. I won't miss, however, getting up at 4 in the morning."
Since the show ended, Laurie has enjoyed spending more time with his family -- he and his wife of 23 years have three children -- and reconnecting with old friends. (He's already planning to reunite with Fry for a cartoon remake of "The Canterville Ghost.")
Mostly, though, he's been making music, particularly classic American blues, a love that, he says "goes as deep as acting, as deep as anything gets with me." He has an album out, "Let Them Talk," and tours with the Copper Bottom Band (they recently played the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown). Laurie handles vocals and, although he plays guitar as well, doubles on the piano.
A bit of the old stage anxiety coming out again? After all, a piano is a good, sturdy thing to hide behind.
"There may be something in that, you know, there really might," he says. "Although, of course, I do like sitting down, too. But the whole thing just seems to suit me better. The footloose guitarist hopping a freight train, the gypsy traveler with a sack of stories -- I don't know that I quite identify with that."
No, the troubadour in the ragged cap, going wherever his bootheels will go wandering -- you can't look at Laurie and see it. He's too proper, too British, too nice (he tends to talk in long, fluid paragraphs, and limits his interjections to things like "Gosh!") But you can imagine him there on the piano bench, working his way through some Otis Spann, a cigarette burning itself out in a nearby ashtray. Just losing himself, for a blessed minute or two.
"Almost every day on 'House' I would leave with some frustration, completely of my own doing," he says. "I had wanted to accomplish something in a particular way, and I hadn't, and I'd be pounding the steering wheel, thinking, why couldn't I get that right? But in music -- and my chops are nowhere where I'd like them to be -- but in music, you can hear it. Playing the same songs, practicing something over and over again, you can actually hear yourself advancing. And to have just those brief, brief moments -- it's a great solace."
Stephen Whitty on Twitter: @StephenWhitty
More Stephen Whitty reviews and interviews