Does he feel guilty that he is so well paid? “Yes.” Does he feel guilty about
being celebrated? “Yes. It’s absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to
be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel
or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if
it’s all punctuation.” The people he admires are “those blokes in Fair Isle
sweaters with pencils behind their ears who knew how to design mechanical
things better than anybody else in the world”. Concorde, he thinks, “is the
most beautiful thing. The absolute pinnacle of form and function. I cried
when I saw the last flight on television. What an old codger I am!”
He saw a Vincent Black Shadow not long ago – “just breath-taking”. Motorbikes
are a passion. He’s got a Yamaha in London and the Triumph in LA, which he
rides “with a weird chauvinistic pride… I was watching Biker
Build-Off and there was this Japanese custom bike designer called Shinya
Kimura. You could tell within seconds he was a genius.” Laurie thought about
buying one of Kimura’s bikes. “It was $26,000. I thought, ‘I can’t possibly
justify that’, and then I thought, ‘Well, why am I doing this job?’” Did he
buy it? “No. Something in me says you shouldn’t have toys.”
He has, however, bought a ping pong table. “That’s a real luxury.” Is he
better than his children? “Er… I’m not bad actually,” he admits shyly. I say
I thought he was supposed to be Mr Self-Deprecation. “Yes, I spoke to my
shrink yesterday on the phone in LA – you have to have one before they let
you in – and I mentioned I was doing this [interview]. I said, ‘I can’t bear
going through the same f****** dance of despair. I’m just going to say what
I feel.’ And he encouraged that. So yes, I’m quite good at ping pong.” But
is he better than his children? “Er… that’s a parenting issue. If I announce
publicly… Er… I’d better skip over that one.” His children, he says, are “an
unending delight”.
So, do I gather he doesn’t like doing interviews? “No, but who would?
Obviously, you’re in a very vulnerable position. You are putting your
testicles out on a chopping board. Well, not a chopping board, that’s not a
good image… I get anxious about a lot of things, that’s the trouble. I get
anxious about everything. I just can’t stop thinking about things all the
time. And here’s the really destructive part: it’s always retrospective. I
waste time thinking of what I should have said or done. I go through an
experience like this and think, ‘Next time I’m not going to mention the
shrink’, but I don’t learn anything.”
Given that he has mentioned the shrink, how often does he see him? “Once a
week for an hour. I’d been doing this job over there for a while, and I hate
to use the word stressful – it’s not stressful like being in Baghdad – but
it got to me, and continues to do so from time to time in a big way. But
things are only stressful if you care about them. Marcus Aurelius, I think
it was who said, ‘If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is
not due to the thing itself, but to your own estimate of it; and this you
have the power to revoke at any moment.’”
And what is it he is caring about? His performance? “Everything, actually. I’m
a pain in the arse. I meddle. I have ideas about how a thing ought to be
played, the psychological details, the truth. Work is almost like a piece of
music, and I’m a pain in the arse about music, too.” Indeed, he has been
using his three-month hiatus in London (filming of House was
suspended due to the Hollywood writers’ strike) to practise the piano. “I’ve
been playing a couple of hours a day. Cracked a couple of pieces I couldn’t
do before. If I could, I’d do ten hours. I just love it, but I have a neck
problem and it gets blindingly painful.” Is it true he’s very accomplished?
“Oh that’s nonsense, complete nonsense.”
One of Laurie’s most attractive traits is that, while he may play Rachmaninov
and quote philosophy, he has the self-confidence to judge more popular
culture on its merits. It’s rare to meet someone who isn’t some type of
snob, traditional or inverted, but Laurie, like Gregory House, is his own
man. He cites Stephen King with approval, for instance, and Friends
and Michael Caine. Indeed, he gets quite cross with himself at one point for
misquoting Get Carter.
In House, I ask, how much acting is he doing? “Oh, a lot. I’m working
quite hard. I’m conscious of the artifice with every gesture.” Why has the
public taken this not very likeable character to its heart? “Oh, he is
likeable, he’s just not good. But we don’t only like people because they’re
good. He’s funny, honest, very good at what he does. I would like him if I
met him, and I also feel absurd talking about a fictional character, so I’d
better stop.”
Laurie finds it ironic that his father was a doctor and “now I’m being paid, I
don’t know, five times more [an underestimate, surely] to pretend to be a
doctor”. William “Ran” Laurie was a GP in Blackbird Leys, the council estate
built to house the workers at British Leyland’s Cowley plant near Oxford.
Laurie, the youngest of Ran and Patricia Laurie’s four children, was born in
Oxford in 1959. Although he says “every man feels himself to be an imperfect
version of his own father”, his father was not the problem, such as there
was one. “Yes, my mum was the problem,” he says, but declines to elaborate.
She died when he was 29, his father ten years ago.
Like his father, Laurie attended public school, in his case, Eton. “I had a
happy time. I understand institutions quite well.” He does admit to “a crazy
period at 16 when I thought Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades were
strivers after social justice”. The memory of this misjudgment now
embarrasses him so much that he can “hardly speak”. He remains a man of the
(albeit less bloodthirsty) left. “I was in my car listening to a report on
how foreign workers in Abu Dhabi are paid so little and housed so poorly,
and I was pounding my leather-clad steering wheel in frustration and
thinking of the fatuity of my own neuroses and self-indulgence.”
Despite the comfortable background, his parents made financial sacrifices for
him to attend Eton. “I went to a very posh school with some very posh
people, but I’m not especially posh myself.” He followed his father to
Selwyn College, Cambridge, where, again like his father, he rowed for the
university, earning a Blue in the Boat Race of 1980, a thriller that
Cambridge lost by five feet. With such a narrow margin, had he ever
considered it was his fault his crew lost? “No, but that’s a good point.
Thanks for that.”
Laurie’s current sport is boxing. He took one of his sons to the
Hatton-Mayweather fight in Las Vegas and has been sparring at a gym in North
London. “I don’t know if I’m looking to affirm masculinity,
but there is something going on there, a feeling of men testing themselves,
and when the test is over a weirdly gentle atmosphere and a feeling of
comradeship.” I tell him that the writer Tony Parsons, whom I recently
interviewed, boxes at the same gym. Parsons’ dad got a DSM in 1944. Laurie’s
old man won a gold medal for rowing at the 1948 Olympics. “He was in a
coxless pair with a man called Jack Wilson. I’ve got a fantastic picture on
my desk of the two of them getting their medals on a pontoon at Henley. I
imagine they were playing the national anthem and my dad is very rigid,
‘this is the way to behave’, and Jack Wilson is loose and groovy and looks
like he should be mixing a martini. I sometimes wished my father could take
that pleasure in himself.”
