Well, who saw that coming? Not just Hugh Laurie’s week, but his entire career. In the past seven days he has dominated the small screen with his shock return as Richard Roper in the BBC’s The Night Manager and his role as the nuclear inspector Eric Peterson in Tehran on Apple TV. The latter is a remarkably timely Iran-set drama that vied with Netflix’s His & Hers to be the most watched show on the planet, and not just because it keeps popping up when people check in on regime change via #tehran. The show strongly speaks to Laurie’s second-act MO — he saw the first series of Tehran and said to his agent it was the only show he was hooked on. Some months later, he had a part.
We are a long way from the start when, for over two decades, Laurie was a comedian, bursting on to the scene with his friend Stephen Fry and friend and one-time lover Emma Thompson at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1981. The trio came from Cambridge University in a banner era for the Footlights comedy society, and during the 1980s and 1990s Laurie was a mainstay on British TV. He stole the last two series of Blackadder, created the sketch show A Bit of Fry & Laurie with Fry and, again with Fry, brilliantly took PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster to ITV.
He’s not the first funny man to go straight, of course. I remember the shock when I introduced a friend, bingeing on the serious films Robin Williams made, to the absurdity of Mork & Mindy. “He went from this to One Hour Photo?” they wailed. That is the point of acting, to try out different minds and moods, but Laurie’s journey from comedy to tragedy feels different — a 66-year-old entirely reborn.
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Laurie as Bertie Wooster with Stephen Fry as Jeeves
ITV/SHUTTERSTOCK
In 2004 he began starring as the acerbic genius Dr Gregory House in the American TV show House — a role that was such a pivot its producers did not even know he was British, his eccentric aristocrats on terrestrial TV having not quite stormed America. Laurie, though, wanted a change and, stuck in Namibia in a support slot on a shoot for the deeply average remake of The Flight of the Phoenix, he went into a bathroom to record an audition.
“We had met a lot of people,” said David Shore, the creator of House, “But it wasn’t working. The funny stuff might, but then the dramatic stuff wouldn’t, or vice versa. Then Hugh went into the bathroom, put himself on tape, sent it in and a light went on.” Laurie was rumoured to be paid $50,000 per episode for season one, a number that leapt to $700,000, the highest salary for a TV drama, according to Guinness Book of World Records. It was a pay packet that eased the difficulty of shooting in the US while his theatre administrator wife, Jo Green, and their three kids, then teenagers, stayed in London, making him an “absentee father” for the best part of a decade, Laurie mostly free to return home on Thanksgiving. “Though we don’t give thanks in England,” he once joked to Ellen DeGeneres. “We mourn the loss of the colonies.”
Armando Iannucci has long benefited from Laurie’s ability to be both serious and silly, American and British. He cast him as Senator Tom James in Veep, the US version of The Thick of It, and Mr Dick in The Personal History of David Copperfield, before creating the sci-fi comedy Avenue 5 with Laurie in the lead.
“Obviously Hugh has an extremely sophisticated sense of humour,” Iannucci tells me. “So it’s a massive treat if you get him to laugh. When he does he doubles over in an unstoppable chuckle that tells you how much he simply adores stupid, funny, infectious comedy. It’s very rewarding.
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“But as an actor, though, a lot of his power comes through stillness. He has the most expressive face, and can do things with his eyes that will say more than half a page of dialogue could. I felt this filming David Copperfield. Hugh was playing Mr Dick, perhaps the first honest, humane portrayal of mental illness in English fiction. Mr Dick can often be played as a ‘mad eccentric’ bobbling around, but Hugh was beautifully still and deeply kind. We could see sadness in Mr Dick’s eyes, as well as love. I don’t know how he does it, but I’m glad he does.”
Sadness? Love? Eccentricity? It has been there all along for Laurie. Think back to the start. In 1987 the team behind Blackadder needed a new hero, a cartoonish, outlandish, flawed character for Rowan Atkinson’s lead to bounce off, to scowl at. Miranda Richardson fulfilled that role in the second series as Queen Elizabeth I, aka Queenie, but her reign was over and the third series would shift to the Regency in all its pomp, with the focus on the future George IV, living his best, camp life among the vast wigs and blouses of late-18th-century England.
Laurie as the The Prince Regent in Blackadder
Tony Robinson, who played Blackadder’s beaten and roasted turnip of a slave, Baldrick, was one of the returning characters. There were nerves. Richardson was a firecracker, a “hard act to follow”, Robinson recalls. But the writers, Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, had a trick up their sleeve: Laurie, who enjoyed cameos in Blackadder II, but still remained largely unknown …
“From the first day of rehearsals Hugh came roaring out like a terrified tiger,” Robinson says. “What a fantastic performance. His Prince Regent George was silly, charming, needy, over-the-top but absolutely believable. Hugh was self-deprecating about his contribution to Blackadder, but he made that series work.”
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Robinson is spot-on. Laurie returned to the show’s peak, Blackadder Goes Forth, in the First World War trenches, as the naive, tragic upper-class twerp Lieutenant The Hon George Colthurst St Barleigh, a character who embodies the shocked stillness Iannucci says he would later bring to Mr Dick. “He’s a delightful man,” Robinson adds of Laurie. “Modest, kind and serious — I haven’t a single bad word to say about him.”
How funny then that this week, as Laurie returned to our screens in a shock mid-series twist for The Night Manager, it is as a man nobody has one good word to say about. Indeed, so ruthless is Roper that he is described as “the worst man in the world”. The first series, broadcast in 2016 and adapted from the John le Carré novel, follows the former soldier Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) trying to bring down Roper, but at the start of this year’s much hyped return Roper seemed very much dead, with Olivia Colman’s intelligence officer, Angela Burr, identifying his battered body.
With Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager in 2016
ALAMY
Was it all a dream? Seems so. Last Sunday Roper returned, this time in Colombia as a man out in hiding, still in the arms game, working with Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), who may well be his son. “Absolutely, José, old boy!” came the voice we know so well. This Sunday expect to see Laurie much more. He was only meant to produce this series, but could not stay away.
“Roper’s a conqueror, a pirate, and will never stop dreaming of taking people, territory and control,” Laurie said this week. “I’ll be honest, I love Richard Roper — I probably shouldn’t. I’m repulsed. But I do…” One spoiler-free line from the show this Sunday: “I am going to feed you to my dogs, piece by screaming piece!”
Laurie explains Roper’s return by saying his character has spent years as a prisoner to a cartel to whom he owed money, having crossed the wrong people in a business where that is inadvisable. “Initially they were going to simply kill him,” Laurie says, “but Roper’s a good talker and he was able to bargain. He got himself back into the playing field — he has a weakness for power, for control and he was beaten by Pine once, and is not a man to forgive or forget easily…”
Roper’s return has invigorated The Night Manager, a watchable returning series in need of a headline. Yet the BBC show is not even the most-watched spy show with Laurie this week. What else can you call it other than a comeback? Tehran, about a Mossad agent heading to Iran, has been picking up plaudits since its launch in 2020, but the combination of Laurie’s stardom and an actual war is turning it into the next essential binge, with a fourth series already commissioned.
Laurie has not exactly abandoned comedy — Avenue 5 harked back to his start. But making us laugh is far from his focus. A decade ago he played another American doctor in Chance, and six years ago he led David Hare’s political thriller Roadkill. Next he is in The Wanted Man, another Apple TV show, in which he will stretch himself to Roper levels as an ageing crime boss.
It really is a far cry from A Bit of Fry & Laurie. Fry remembers when the two men, who helped each other to have long careers, first met. Thompson took Fry to see Laurie. “And Hugh was sitting on the bed with a guitar writing a song, stuck on the lyric,” Fry has said. “He sang the verse and chorus and I said, ‘You can always swap that around?’ We finished the song and picked up another piece of paper and wrote a sketch… We’re still best friends.”
Friends are constantly asked if they will ever reunite as a duo. “We see each other a lot and talk about it often,” Laurie once told the BBC. “I think it might happen, yes, but somebody’s got to take charge.” That was half a decade ago, before Laurie carried on with a career that, perhaps, was always in train.
The comedy writer Jon Canter met Laurie in north London in the 1980s and went on to script-edit A Bit of Fry & Laurie. “Hugh and Stephen were obsessed with espionage,” he remembers. “They used to have marathon sessions watching the 1979 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Canter says that le Carré adaptation inspired the sketch spy characters Control and Tony. “But I was always teasing Hugh that he could be an extremely effective dramatic actor in an espionage role, not unlike James Bond. He’s an old Etonian, a gifted sportsman and very good-looking…”
What was Laurie’s reaction? “Well, Hugh’s innately self-deprecating, so he thought I was just joshing. But deep down? I think that he had a fantastic sense of destiny about him.”
The Night Manager continues on BBC1 on Sundays; Tehran is on Apple TV
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