Hugh Laurie on NPR
Hugh Laurie's 'House': No Pain, No Gain
Fox Hugh Laurie has received two Golden Globe awards and two Screen Actors Guild awards for his portrayal of Dr. Gregory House.
For the past eight seasons, actor Hugh Laurie has played Dr. Gregory House on the Fox medical series House. House is brash, narcissistic, unsympathetic, addicted to painkillers, confrontational — and 100 percent American.
Laurie is none of those things.
"I am not playing House today, so I am dressed as an Englishman and speaking as an Englishman," he tells Fresh Air's
Terry Gross. "I'm wearing a bowler hat and carrying a furled umbrella.
It's nice to have a day every now and then off from the vocal
exercises."
Those vocal exercises include
letting his "throat go floppy" and lowering his vocal register. Still,
there are certain words and phrases — "New York" and "murder" — that he
says he just cannot master.
"I suppose it's
R's," he says. "R's are problematic letters. But I do find that I cannot
think of a single word or a single syllable that really comes out the
same in English and American. ... Almost everything is alien to me. But I
got more comfortable with it."
Laurie has had a lot of time to get comfortable. House,
which is wrapping up its final season, has been on Fox for the past
eight years. During that time, Laurie's character has diagnosed dozens
of patients suffering from rare ailments, while continually mocking his
colleagues and maintaining a serious addiction to Vicodin, which he uses
to manage a chronic leg condition. (Dr. House walks with a cane.)
Playing a character with chronic pain — and a limp — did not come easily for Laurie, he says.
Related NPR Stories
"I think pain is an extremely hard thing to
empathize [with] moment to moment," he explains. "You often don't
remember your own pain. That moment that you broke a limb or injured
yourself ... the memory of the pain is hard to summon up and hard to
relive, thankfully. ... And it's also hard to imagine someone else's."
Laurie
spoke with physicians about House's injury to find out things like how
his character would sleep and how he would move. But he says House's leg
injury occasionally took a back seat to other more pressing issues,
like how to stage a scene.
"It is just
sometimes dramatically more important that he can skip over a desk with a
certain amount of agility and brio, never mind the fact that he's
obviously dragging a severely damaged leg with him," he says. "So it's a
constant mixture of things, trying to make a judgment about what is
believable, what is an accurate presentation of the pain that he's
suffering — but also what actually plays a scene in the best possible
way."
And limping continuously on screen for House has occasionally presented problems during other acting gigs, says Laurie.
"The first time I had an acting engagement outside of House,
the first scene I did, oddly enough, was set in a hospital," he says.
"And the director called 'action,' and I started limping. And I think
that's a bigger problem for me now, that I just have a Pavlovian
response to cameras. If I see a camera or if someone says 'action,' I
will start limping."
Fox The Peabody Award-winning series House is ending after eight seasons on Fox.
0 Comentarios:
Publicar un comentario
Suscribirse a Comentarios de la entrada [Atom]
<< Página Principal