HUGH LAURIE HOOKS US
From House to BBC's Political Thriller Roadkill
For eight years, Hugh Laurie dominated our TVs as House’s titular character on Fox’s hit medical drama. An American accent masked his native British speech pattern, but Laurie’s dry, dark sense of humor remained.
Laurie’s career spans decades, and the actor has worked nearly non-stop since 1982. He has always possessed the agility to jump from TV to film and back again.
Since House’s finale in 2012, Laurie has maintained a presence on our screens — from serial comedies to mini-series. He had a role in The Night Manager, starred as Tom Jones in Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Veep, and appeared in the Hulu hit Catch-22.
2020 now offers Laurie fans two top-notch performances. Avenue 5 puts him in the captain’s seat of a sci-fi comedy. It also reunites him with Veep creator Armando Iannucci, part of the HBO stable of talent.
PROVOKR’s favorite Laurie role this year is in the BBC/PBS political thriller Roadkill. It follows Peter Laurence, a Tory (British Conservative) who is unashamed of anything. He is politically motivated and will stop at nothing to complete his plan.
In an interview with Variety, the creator David Hare said he made the four-part series to examine the British Conservative party and its members. He found that many other shows satirize the Tories instead of trying to understand them.
As for Laurie, he’s interested in a lack of guilt. “He’s a character who really feels immune to the idea of shame,” Laurie says. “David’s theory is that public disgrace no longer exists; it just seems to have vanished from the vocabulary, certainly among the political class. Politicians feel aggrieved that they don’t get treated with the deference that Churchill or FDR or Kennedy would have been treated. But at the same time they also have a much smaller burden of expectation on them, and people don’t seem to mind if they’ve been fiddling their taxes or fiddling their women or fiddling anything else. People almost seem to expect that of them.”
Keep up the momentum, Laurie. We love seeing you on our screens.
