“I’d some very dark times when I first arrived here. I was taking on this pretty overwhelming thing and it could all get a bit much. I felt the strain. So it was good to spend time with someone who wasn’t going to tweet my stuff all over the place. It is still good. Good too for that person not to be a friend, so that I don’t have to feel guilty about boring them. You don’t have to entertain a shrink. You’re paying for the responsibility to entertain to be lifted, and that’s a great relief to me.”
I operate in this horrible world of false names, dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats. The modern world, I believe it’s called. I even had the windows of my car tinted because it just became so boring, trying not to get stuck at the front of the line at red lights.
“Everyone’s got digital cameras, and before you know it you’ve caused a hold-up. Pedestrians crossing might spot you and gawp. You daren’t look to the left or right either, in case you catch another driver’s eye. It was pretty much straight ahead only for me, pre-tinting, which made route-planning very laborious.”
“Pick up groceries or collect dry-cleaning? I haven’t done that stuff in years. Terrible of me. Terrible. But the last time I did try going to the supermarket I was photographed and I hated it. I hate people peering at what I’ve bought, taking photos of what’s in my basket. I just hate it.”
So fame on this scale has made him unhappy? Laurie gives a sharp little laugh. “No, I was that way already.” He reaches for his coffee. “I am of course incredibly grateful for all I have. It’s hugely satisfying to be part of something which you believe is good and which resonates with people. I feel amazingly lucky to be experiencing it. You can’t be taken on a journey like this and then complain about the bumps in the road. I know how blessed I am, especially when so many other people are facing all kinds of adversity.
“But you can’t go out and lead a normal life. You can’t just be yourself. Oh, I know, that’s a very low-level form of adversity compared to being imprisoned and tortured by the Iraqi secret police, isn’t it?”
he enjoyed a privileged education: Eton, then Cambridge, during which time he became president of the Footlights Club and went out for a time with fellow member Emma Thompson.
It was she who introduced him to Stephen Fry, who would become not only his lifelong friend but also his partner in Blackadder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie and, later, the P. G. Wodehouse series of adaptations,Jeeves and Wooster. In each of them he played, well, a bit of a twit, and a certain level of typecast fame seemed assured. But then, somehow, he turned that expectation on its head and won himself employment as the sexy, American antihero of what quickly became a hit show. I can’t help but wonder how his peers and old Cambridge chums have reacted to him achieving such overwhelming popularity across the world. Is he familiar with that old Morrissey track, We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful?
I suppose it’s possible that there are people who are resentful at some level, but then they probably weren’t very good friends in the first place. And incidentally I don’t remember that Morrissey track but I do recall the Gore Vidal saying, ‘It’s not enough to succeed. One’s friends must fail.’”
Laurie has no illusions about Los Angeles as a working town. “This is a good place to live when things are going your way, so mine has been an unusual experience. From what I hear, it’s not a good place when they’re not. There’s no community. You don’t run into people by chance. Here [he gestures at the Chateau’s courtyard] is one of the few places where you might. It’s all planned in advance, all strategic, with people thinking of any meeting they’ve arranged, ‘What am I going to get from this?’
“It’s actually rather a lonely city. You could go quite mad and end up spending all day in your pyjamas, never washing, growing those super-long fingernails. There’s no general rub of existence. No one around to say, ‘What on earth are you doing? Pull yourself together!’ Just lots of isolated lives, some of quiet desperation, I imagine.”
is there no one with whom he can relax when his wife Jo is back in England?
“In the age of Facebook, Twitter and all the rest, it’s hard to confide in anyone. There’s this malevolent delight in spreading stuff. I might say something on set and two hours later I’ll read about it on the net. It’s happened. The result is that I can’t be completely honest in any situation. I always have to think what will be a political or diplomatic way of dealing with it.
“Everyone can just run off to their computers now and buy themselves some feeling of importance. To have a secret is to have power, however briefly: ‘Oh yeah. I was there. I saw it. I heard it all.’” As in the case of Christian Bale’s leaked meltdown during the filming of Terminator Salvation? “Exactly so!”
Another good reason to embrace psychotherapy, then. “Well, you do find yourself needing someone who’s professionally bound, if bound in no other way, to treat you with courtesy and in confidence. The whole notion of privacy… 20 years from now, I’m not sure people will even know what the word means. It’s actually dying as a concept before our eyes.”
(Wrote a book) The novel, a spy genre spoof called The Gun Seller, came out in 1996 and was well-reviewed and has now been published in 30 languages, “including some I’d never heard of”.
Laurie submitted it under a pseudonym and only revealed his identity on the manuscript’s acceptance. Hoping to have it published under that same pseudonym, a bigwig explained why that wouldn’t work. “This is no place for shrinking violets. In our world, you have to scream in order to whisper. Think you’re being coy and modest? No one gives a f***. You’ve disappeared. You were never even there in the first place. But shout at the top of your voice and then you might − just might − have a chance of appearing coy and modest, as you intended. Then you might be whispering.’”
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