Hugh Laurie by Emma Thompson

Interview, part 3. Hugh Laurie = Dr. House. Emma Thompson = brilliant British actress - aside from the Harry Potter movies and Nanny McPhee, she's done Sense and Sensibility, Love Actually, Stranger Than Fiction, and just out now, Brideshead Revisited. Plus a bunch of older things and period pieces. She wrote the screenplays for Nanny MacPhee and Sense and Sensibility as well as acted in them, too. She and Hugh Laurie are old friends - went to Cambridge and were active in the drama program there. It's funny - I think she may have said more than Hugh Laurie in interviewing him. Hehe.

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: Now, do you think you would describe yourself as a misanthropist or a misanthrope?
HL: No. I don't think so. I have misanthropic days--or half-days. I can get into a sort of muttering, curmudgeonly state. But no, I don't think I am overall. Believe it or not, perhaps I don't show it much, or well, but I think I like people.

I think it's interesting how the general mood and tone of people reflects their cultural values and ultimately, their culture. In America, what do we have? Commercialism. But we also have this odd sort of unrealistic sentimentality that they mention, and this nostalgia, almost, for times when that sentimentality was more real than it is now. Now it's sort of affected, or a way to escape the coldness that is now reality. It's romance, versus reality. Whereas, according to these two, it's the other way around in Britain - coldness and reservedness on the surface, but really they have lots of warmth and sentimentality and this old-world, romantic, quality. At least, that's what it seems they're getting at. I suppose if you think about it, the Brontes had those great, epic romances, and the novels that came before that - the Gothic romances, like Ann Radcliffe's novels, must be somewhat sentimental, and I'm sure there's others. Then stuff after that too. Funny how things change and how sentimentality comes in waves and all that.

(I suddenly just lost all desire to write anything, and now am off to sleep. Hehe. Still to come: Marc Jacobs, and remembering Andy Warhol...)