Interview

ET: What's the most valuable thing your parents taught you?

HL: That I'm lucky.

ET: Oh, Christ.

HL: Yes. That I'm lucky.

ET: So guilt, basically.

HL: Yes, when the sun strikes it at a certain angle, it feels like guilt.

ET: How long does it take to shoot your TV series, House?

HL: Well, leaving aside the strike, a season is about nine or 10 months.

ET: So then, in between, you go back home, so you don't experience, as it were, life as a star in L.A. You come right here to England. What's it like here now? Is it different? Has it changed?

HL: No. It hasn't, in fact. Because House hasn't made much of an impression on British television, I am able to move about the place unhindered and without people having any sort of violent opinions about it one way or the other.

ET: It sounds a bit as if you thought, Fuck, I've worked all this time and I'm not getting any of the perks. I don't mean being famous is a perk, because one knows that it's not necessarily a perk, but there are certain perks to being well-known and respected in one's field. Public perks. Like, I don't know, general friendliness and willingness to please, just to point out two. Do you feel like somehow you've been denied that?

HL: No, I don't. I don't at all, actually. I've been incredibly lucky. I think it's worked out extremely well that I am able to be who I was and who I am in the place where I live. I went to Spain for a few days, and Spain is . . . They're nutty. I had a bodyguard, for Heaven's sake.

ET: Really?

HL: Yeah. House is a very big thing over there. Very, very, very, very, very big. Gaggles of shouting teenagers. It was really amazing. But of course, Britain doesn't do gaggles of shouting teenagers much anyway.

ET: No, we don't.

HL: It's not really in the national character.

ET: When we've talked about the U.S. in the past, one of the things that has certainly drawn our fire has been the tendency toward sentimentality.

HL: Yes.

ET: Yet it doesn't seem to haunt House. Have you come across it? Because it is definitely there, don't you feel, in the U.S.?

HL: I do feel it there. But then, one of the interesting things about doing House is that an audience of Americans who might, as we suppose, turn toward the sentimental, have actually embraced someone so starkly and brutally cynical. Although, of course, the show is actually conceived by Canadians.

ET: But see, I think underneath that American sentimentality, there definitely is a much, much more realistic attitude to people.

HL: Yes.

ET: I do. I think, funnily enough, there is, as it were, an opposite reaction in England in the sense that we all look cynical and sort of reserved, and in fact, I don't think that we are. I think we're softer, in a sense.

HL: I think there is much in what you say. We have had some various peculiar fevers of sentimentality.

ET: Didn't you once have a convertible? I have a memory of us driving around in a convertible. It's just come to me.

HL: Yes, I did. I had an MG.

ET: You had an MG?

HL: Yes, I had an MG. What does this mean?

ET: I don't know why that came to me then. Just I remembered that you did have a convertible, and you drove me around in it somewhere, and I can't remember where it was, but anyway, in the mist of time . . .