It may surprise some readers to learn that Hugh Laurie was “papped” – photographed without permission – on his way to this interview. We still tend to think of him as Bertie Wooster, or the less celebrated half of Fry and Laurie, or an upper-class twit in Blackadder. That view is, to say the least, out of date. What he is these days is the biggest British star on American television, hence the market for a snap of Hugh Laurie walking from a car to a photographic studio in North London.

The presence of a paparazzo certainly surprised Laurie. Irritated him a little, too. “It used to be the case that the only people who paid any attention to me were those who liked what I did,” he says, drawing on the first of many cigarettes. “Now I get noticed by people who don’t care whether I live or die – probably want me to die. That takes a bit of getting used to.” But he gets a reasonable press, doesn’t he, by and large? “I don’t know. I try to avoid it. I hope you won’t be offended, but I won’t read this.”

He is, however, as he is throughout our conversation, keen not to moan. “I’ve had it a lot better than many people. I went to a pub with Kenneth Branagh once and a man shouted, ‘Oi, Branagh! You’re a c***!’”

A recent poll put Laurie in the top five favourite television personalities in the US, up there with Oprah and Jay Leno. This popularity is due to his role as Dr Gregory House, which has also won him critical acclaim (two Emmys) and financial security (he supposedly gets $200,000 per episode). “That’s an exaggeration. I am being very handsomely paid, though. My ship has come in and I’ll be forever grateful.” He has made three series of House to date, is halfway through the fourth and is signed up for three more. Will he then be able never to work again? “That would depend on how long I live,” he replies (he is 48), with impeccable logic. “If I step under a bus in a week’s time, the answer is yes.”

The holy grail of American television is to make 100 episodes (House is up to 82). “Then you sell it to syndication and it’s on for ever and it will haunt you in a Hong Kong hotel bedroom.” Will he get a slice of that? “I don’t know, I think they have to pay something to the cast.” Er, shouldn’t he find out? “That was all on page 65 of the contract. At the time [when the pilot episode was made] I blindly signed up thinking it wouldn’t go anywhere. I don’t know what the odds are [of a pilot becoming a long-running hit] – one in 100? One in 200? Not that I regret it. It’s just at the time I didn’t realise what I was getting myself into.”

What he was getting himself into was nine months a year in a rented flat in Los Angeles, away from his wife and three children in London, 15 hours of filming a day, sometimes six days a week. For obvious reasons, he is reluctant to complain, yet, “It is a bit of a gilded cage, I suppose. But what are the choices? Everything in life is an exchange of sorts. The one thing that bedevils actors, lack of security, I have gained at the expense of freedom.”

Besides, there are compensations. “Southern California is beautiful. There is a real sensuous pleasure in riding to work [on his Triumph motorbike] at half past five in the morning.” Laurie is also “a huge admirer of the openness, energy, optimism and dynamism of Americans… and this idea that Americans have no sense of irony – I mean, Americans hardly do anything unironically these days. If you want a drink of water, you have to say, ‘I really don’t want a drink of water.’”

His sons are 19 and 17, his daughter 14. With another three-and-a-half series to go, his family might now move to California. “It’s taken us a long time to adjust to the permanence of it. The first year I was in a hotel. Everyone else in the show was signing leases on houses and I said, ‘You’re mad. We’re only going to last a month.’ I literally didn’t unpack. I suppose it’s a form of pessimism: if a thing is going well, it’s only a matter of time, tick tock, before someone’s going to take it away.”

He says he would struggle to settle permanently in America. “I do feel very foreign there, as if I’m on safari, looking at the exotic animals and the way they behave. Then again,” he adds, “America is made up of people who don’t feel American until they do, so I’m not alone in that.”

Many interviews with Laurie focus on this pessimism, tipping over into depression. I wonder if his success in America has made him any less miserable? “Oh, I hope nothing would ever do that. I won’t let go of my roots.” As with a lot of his (near constant) irony, there’s a measure of truth in the remark. When I ask him if he has friends in LA, and he replies, “I don’t have any friends anywhere”, I’m sure that isn’t true (he and Stephen Fry are still very close), but I’m equally sure he is a hard man to get close to, something of a loner, self-sufficient. He likes to be in control, he admits. Not so much of others, but of himself – all the time. He barely drinks for that reason. “I don’t think I’ve ever been completely out of control.”

He admits he can’t shake the idea “that there is virtue in suffering, that there is a sort of psychic economy, whereby if you embrace success, happiness and comfort, these things have to be paid for”. One newspaper has taken to printing pictures of a glum-looking Laurie and asking why he doesn’t look happier, but his upbringing was Scottish Presbyterian, and Scottish Presbyterians are not supposed to look happy.

“The religious aspects didn’t mean a great deal,” he says. “I admire the music, buildings and ethics of religion, but I come unstuck on the God thing.” Some of the cultural aspects of Presbyterianism, however – “the denial of pleasure, the virtues of thrift and hard work” – have stayed with him. “I had a wonderful if uneventful upbringing. My parents were very loving, but there’s no question they were suspicious of ease and comfort. My mother was the first person I can think of who was into the idea of recycling. In about 1970, she was collecting newspapers from the whole village, baling them up and taking them to a paper mill. She’d get a shilling a half ton or something.”

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