nicole_21290 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nicole_21290) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} squirrel_scene,@ 2008-02-13 11:05:00 |
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Some Lovely Stugh Interview Quotes
Hello again. You guys have probably already read these a dozen (for dozen read thousand) times but nonetheless I thought I would just put a couple of my favourite quotes here for you all to fawn over again.
Wogan (w/ Jonathan Ross) – HL
JR: How did you and Stephen actually get together? I know you met at Cambridge but, I mean, why did you become a partnership? Did your eyes meet across a crowded room?
HL: It was exactly like that. It was exactly that. We didn’t speak for the first week or so. It was just one motel room to another. You know, it was the heady days, Jonathan, heady days. Somehow language didn’t seem to be important then. You find other means of expression.
JR: Just touching.
HL: Yes. (laughs)
JR: You gotta keep behind those tall dark Johnnys. Haven’t you?
HL: Yeah.
JR: Well, let’s talk about Stephen a little more because obviously he’s a big part of your life. What would his best and his worst points be?
HL: Well his best points are just too numerous to mention. He, he’s, uh… (long pause) Oh, wait a minute. No. He’s tall. Very tall. Dark. Um, no. He’s a fantastic chap. And it’s a great honour and a thrill to work with him. You know. Because he’s bright and I mean immensely bright. In fact, sometimes nauseatingly bright. Um, generous and good company. It’s great fun. It really is.
JR: That must have been the look you gave Stephen when you first met him. (You know the look already dammit so I won't bother posting it here)
HL: That’s right.
JR: That’s when language flew out the window, wasn’t it?
HL: You felt it, didn’t you?
JR: And you got lured, you got seduced by Stephen into the world of comedy.
HL: That’s right. Seduced is the word... Don’t use it again.
Wogan – HL/SF - 1991
SF: And I think Hugh’s done it brilliantly. I mean, really.
HL: Oh stop.
TW: Why wouldn’t they have invited you, Hugh? I mean, Stephen’s seen as the clever one, isn’t he?
HL: Yes, he is. The interesting thing is actually off screen it’s completely the other way around. Yeah. I don’t know. I was immensely hurt obviously. But it must be said I have no opinion.
SF: But Hugh is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met.
HL: Oh shush.
SF: No. It’s true. He really is. But he doesn’t have the kind of awful smarminess that I do that gets me invited onto Question Times. He’s far too charming and nice.
TV AM - HL/SF - 1992
HOST: And Stephen, you’re a master of papering over all problems?
SF: No. Would that I were. I mean, if anything in our… relationship? Can I use that word?
HL: That’s too strong a word.
SF: It is isn’t it?
HL: Yes. Far too strong a word.
SF: Yes. Well, in our nodding acquaintanceship it tends to be Hugh actually, I think, makes, is the more practical and sensible one. And I’m more kind of vague and vascillatory. That sounds like some kind of lubricant. It wasn’t meant to.
HL: Stephen’s got a better vocabulary though.
SF: Sorry. I’m doing all the talking. Why does that happen all the time?
HL: No. It’s very good.
SF: Y’know. Because the moment we go away he’ll be gassing away and I’ll be going like this (puts head down and is quiet).
SF: We’re not joined at the hip, so to speak.
HOST: But interestingly enough you do obviously actually enjoy one another’s company. Because again you see people who come one, do a wonderful act together and go off and clearly have nothing to do with one another. I mean (to Stephen), you’re godfather and best man in your partner’s life.
SF: Yes. I always get terribly upset when I hear people spreading malicious rumours about Laurel not getting on with Hardy and everything. I’m sure it’s a lie. I can’t bear the thought of it. And I don’t think we could work together if we didn’t get on, you know. It would just be pointless.
HL: Horrible.
SF: I always find it weird. I know there are people saying “Yeah. We’re on stage together but the moment the curtain goes down we go off to separate restaurants and that’s it, you know.”
HL: Little hates large.
SF: Yeah.
HL: So upsetting.
HOST: Shocking stuff. I read an article about you a couple of weeks ago which said that with Jeeves and Wooster that you could actually change your parts around and you’d be equally capable of being able to play the other role. Do you think that’s true?
HL: Very confusing for the viewer, though, wouldn’t it? But, um, I don’t know. I’m not sure about that actually. I think Stephen’s pretty, um, pretty much in the, y’know. He’s got all the equipment to play Jeeves. I can have a crack at it but…
SF: You’ve got the big, round blue eyes and the innocence and whatever.
HL: Oh, why thank you.
HOST: (To Hugh) I mean, you’re always pursued. You’re pursued by young women in this one. You have Aunt Agatha coming after you and trying to get you to marry Honoria Glossop. Is this true in real life?
HL: No. Markedly not.
SF: He’s a happily married man. But he is, let’s face it, incredibly sexy and handsome.
HL: Oh shut up.
SF: It’s true.
HL: Shut up.
Wogan – HL/SF – 1992
TW: Do you like dressing up?
HL: Cross dressing, you mean?
TW: As a woman.
HL: I do. Yes. It’s very pleasurable. It’s very pleasurable indeed and to do it professionally and be paid for it is obviously a heck of a bonus.
SF: I mean, basically, how do two people write together? It’s the endless question.
HL: That’s what he’s asking.
SF: Yes. That’s right. Does one person hold the pencil and the other person write, as it were? Does one person pace up and down? All that kind of thing. Well, we have this thing of sitting in front of different desks.
HL: Very important. Different desks.
SF: And, um, essentially what happens is I’ll write something and get fed up with it and give it to Hugh and he’ll give me what he’s doing. We swap work.
TW: Are you sensitive to criticism from each other? Do you boldly criticise each other?
HL: No.
TW: Cos you are chums.
HL: We are chums. But we don’t boldly criticise each. We have, we basically say the exact same thing whether we think it’s great or it’s terrible. We say “That’s great!” but you can say “That’s great!” or you can say “That’s great!” and there’s a very big difference.
SF: We criticise ourselves. I mean, I will write something and say to Hugh “This is completely awful. It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing that’s ever been written but perhaps you can do something with it.” And he’ll say “No. It’s brilliant. It’s not nearly as bad as this” and he’ll give me what he’s written. And I’ll say “No. Yours is brilliant. Mine is awful.” It goes on like that. It’s feeble really.
TW: Be fair. You’ve got an album from the series coming out.
HL: Oh. I see. Yes.
SF: Oh. He’s referring to the album. More bum than al in this case.
TW: But are you singing in this?
HL: Yes. There is singing.
TW: Who’s singing?
SF: Hugh’s singing. I can’t…
HL: Well, I do a bit of singing.
TW: Do you?
SF: Hugh has a wonderful, Hugh is musically brilliant. I mean…
HL: No.
SF: …I’m sorry but he is. And he refuses to come out about it. And I’m outing him now. He can play anything. He really can – mouth organ and saxophone and piano and guitar and I am hopeless.
TW: You’re jealous, aren’t you? (To Hugh)
HL: Deeply jealous, yes. It is maddening. Um.
SF: Tish.
LateLateShow w/ Craig Ferguson – SF – 2006
CF: Hey. The Fry & Laurie… (shows DVDS)
SF: Yes.
CF: Hugh Laurie has become…
SF: M’colleague Hugh has become stratospherically important in the world.
CF: He’s a big time huge star over here.
SF: He took time off to get a medical degree and a degree in American accents as well which is rather…
CF: He’s very good though isn’t he?
SF: I know. A lot of Americans believe he is American.
CF: They get upset when he’s all “Ooh. I say!”
SF: I know. He’s a, he’s a remarkable actor. It think he, House is an extraordinary achievement. Because he does, I mean, one of the hardest things to do as an actor is to play smart. You actually believe that he is as intelligent as his character is. As you know, most actors are, well, they don’t really know which way to sit on a lavatory.
CF: They’re not very bright, bless them.
Parkinson – SF – 2007
SF: But my agent in America said “Would you do an episode of this series Bones?” which I have to confess I hadn’t heard of but they sent round a DVD and I watched it and it seemed very charming. They sent round a script and then I said to my friend Hugh Laurie, who is American television. I said, “What do you know of this Bones?” He said, “Oh. They’re awfully nice. They just live round the corner on the FOX lot.”
I know, so I thought it would be rather sweet to do an episode and say hello to m’colleague, you know. So I did this episode and we had lunch together which greatly annoyed him in some ways because he, for very good reasons, playing an American in his series House, keeps his American accent all day. It would be rather stupid to dive in and out of it. And so, of course, he finds it very embarrassing when an English person comes and he goes (in American accent) “Hi. Great to see you Steve. How ya doing?” I’m like, “Hugh. Snap out of it, man! What are…” On the other hand if he lopes forward and goes “Hello! What ho! Hello. Hello” the Americans are going “What is Hugh Laurie doing?” So he’s kind of trapped between two accents.
But anyway we had a great day and then they asked me to do two more episodes, and then they asked me to do the rest of the series, which sadly I couldn’t do. But I did have a great time. It’s a very odd thing, American television. Because, well, y’know, they make 24 episodes and you’ve got about seven or eight days to do each hour episode, or an hour minus the commercials. And they have very little time …
And at three in the morning on the FOX lot, for example, it’s busier than at three in the afternoon. There are golf carts going backward and forwards. There’s Kiefer Sutherland over there blowing up terrorists, there’s Hugh Laurie sort of pulling something out of somebody’s bottom and there’s me, sort of, y’know, pretending. It is absolutely extraordinary how alive it is there.
People say to me “Gosh, you must envy Hugh.” And I admire enormously what he’s done and I’ve always envied him – his talent, his good looks, his charm and all the rest of it – so in that sense I don’t envy him anymore than I ever did. But I do recognise that he works phenomenally hard. I mean, it is, the idea that he goes off and then has dinner with Brangelina in the evening or whatever is nonsense because he arrives home at 11 in the evening and falls on the bed and then he’s up at 6.
Mark Lawson – SF
SF: I’d seen him on stage because… His first year he had gone up to university to row – he was a fine oarsman – and had rowed internationally, under 18s for England and so on, so he was obviously going to get his Rowing Blue but in his first year he got glandular fever. Some fellow Etonian had said to him “You’re a funny sort of fellow. Why don’t you go for the Footlights?” So Hugh thought ‘Oh. Okay.’ I went to see the Footlights revue and there was Hugh, being brilliant, and Emma, as well who was the same year as me. And they were all the same year as me. I thought “Gosh. He’s very good.” He did a brilliant American accent and I remember thinking “God, he can do a good American accent” which turned out to be very true.
ML: It now makes him a million an episode or something in House.
SF: He does pretty well. Certainly. Yeah. But, ah, I knew Emma because I’d done straight plays, as actors would say. Serious sort of like Shakespeares and things like that with Emma. And she, in my last year, the very beginning of my last year, said that Hugh had seen a play I’d written at Edinburgh called Latin! Which was a comedy and he had said to Emma “You know him, don’t you?” And she said yes.
He said “I’d really like to meet him because I’m going to be taking over the Footlights next year and apparently he had this choice and he flipped a coin as to whether he’s be president of the Boat Club or the Footlights and it came down Footlights. I think he was too smart to be an oarsman all his life. So, anyway, Emma then got in touch with me and said “I’m going to take you round to meet him because he wants to meet you.”
So I went round and he said “Hello. I’ve just written a song. Would you hate it if I sang it to you?”
I said, “No. I’d love to hear it.” And he sang this awfully funny song about Americans who raise money for the IRA which was very good and we started writing. We started writing straight away. About 20 minutes in. And it was as if I’d known him all my life. It was just extraordinary, I mean it was absolutely, I found him funny and charming and I knew that his judgment and my judgment were roughly in the same area. It was just so easy. It was just wonderful. There was just an instant synergy, I suppose people would call it.
ML: And though you’re both tall there generally has to be physical dissimilarities in double acts which did help, didn’t it?
SF: Yes. I mean, I think so. I’m slightly taller than Hugh. Hugh always astonishes people when they met him and saw how tall he was cos they always assumed I was average height and Hugh, therefore, was quite short. But in fact he’s 6”2 and I’m 6”5 so there is quite a difference.
Yeah, generally speaking the relationship, though it wasn’t consistently so, was that I’d be the rather verbal, mouthy one and he’d be the rather more charming dumb one. And certainly in some of the early sketches we did that were successful, things like sort of Masterclasses in which I’d be the pompous teacher and he would be rather, sort of, no exactly gormless but not either sharp pupil. Because he has the big, round blue eyes and so on. There were other ones where occasionally the roles were reversed.
We both had the same sense of guilt I suppose. We were aware just as we were leaving Cambridge that the wind was blowing from another quarter. Alexis Sayel had started up, Rik Mayell was beginning to make a noise in the world. We thought, oh well, it’s too late. Naturally our timing has been abominable. No one’s ever going to want to see anyone from the Footlights anymore. It’ll all be this alternative stuff.
So we felt incredibly lucky and grateful and guilty that we won this first Perrier Award and then were asked to do the show in London and then the BBC asked to do and then we got the series with Grenada in which we were put together with Ben Elton and Robbie Coltrane so there was this though that these young people had just left university and were different. We’d got this Cambridge sort of tradition but we’ve got these young spiky ones as well.
ML: There have been double acts who have ended up not speaking to each other, communicating through lawyers, separate dressing rooms, all of that. You’ve never had any of that with Hugh?
SF: No. No. Not at all. We’re incredibly lucky in that regard. Although we often say that almost everything that we regard ourselves as lucky in may well actually be a curse. The fact that we haven’t had these stormy relationships, the fact that we haven’t had, we haven’t fired people, the fact that we haven’t formed companies to make money and do co-productions with other people and things. Which we’re all very pleased about but then we think “But maybe, maybe we would have been more successful if we’d done all those things.” Really taken control.
But we just felt slightly embarrassed to be where we were, slightly not worthy, slightly… We couldn’t pretend to be, y’know, of the street streetie. We couldn’t go “Yeah. Right. Yeah. Uh. Right. Okay.” You know, we were just hopeless. That wasn’t going to fool anybody. So we’d had to be who we were but we were aware that that was no longer an interesting thing for anybody to be. That it was old-hat. We hoped that people would overlook the disadvantages of public school and Cambridge and be nice to us and, you know, allow our true voices to come out.
Our show was quite old-fashioned, we didn’t really want moving graphics and all the things that were beginning at that time. Even in its day it looked quite staid in terms of the way it was shot and made. We didn’t want to go for parodies and instant catch-phrases and our parodies weren’t really of anything specific if there were parodies. People would say “Who are you being there? What program is that?” and we would say “It’s not really any program at all. It’s just…” So we almost bloody-mindingly didn’t do things that would make us popular.
