Hugh Laurie's Playboy Interview Reminds Us Why He's a Hot Piece of Man Meat

Nude pictorials aside, Playboy Magazine‘s 20Qs is by far one of the best pleasures the publication offers. They always have the coolest people, and the upcoming February issue is no different, which features House actor Hugh Laurie.

As a matter of fact, their 20 question interview with him made me rethink this whole boy-lover thing. Older men don’t normally make my pink bunny all wet, but in Hugh’s case it’s his intellect that makes him so charming. In the end there is absolutely nothing sexier than an intelligent man.

This line totally opened up the flood gates: “He takes pleasure in language, pleasure in a good joke. He is a believer, as I am, in the power of humor. In a world of death and misery where people are dropping all around him, where fate is often cruel rather than kind, humor is his only meaningful response to existence.” That just made me warm in all the right places.

 

Interview excerpts in 3…2…1…

Click here for the full Playboy interview.

 

PLAYBOY: Were you a rebellious teenager or just bored?

LAURIE: I think I suffered from the arrogance of youth. When I was 15, I and a group of school friends took a sort of pledge that we wouldn’t live beyond 40. We decided we’d kill ourselves. In fact, there were some hard-core members of the group—I wasn’t one of them—who wanted to make it 30. “I hope I die before I get old” sort of thing. Talk about arrogance. The arrogance of youth, it trumps all. We felt we knew absolutely everything there was to be known and the future held only decay and compromise and defeat. We vowed to get out of here before that happened. It’s an interesting problem, isn’t it? Because it’s hard to know whether your 15-year-old self is the true expression of who you are and everything that follows is a sort of diluted, watered-down, compromised version of that, of all those ideas and dreams you’ve had and that sort of fiery essence you had at 15. Or whether actually you’re just a sort of pencil sketch at 15. Which is the true you?

 

PLAYBOY: Does it surprise you that people view House—and you—as a sex symbol?

LAURIE: Completely. It’s utterly absurd. Weird. Deranged. I can’t explain it.

PLAYBOY: How do you explain it?

LAURIE: House is a sexy character in his own way. You know, he’s that sort of wounded genius. There’s a Beauty and the Beast element and a bit of the Phantom of the Opera thrown in. House is a scarred figure hiding in the upper reaches of the opera house. I can see there’s something attractive about that. Women want to fix him. For some reason women find that terribly sexy.

PLAYBOY: But he doesn’t get a ton of action. Why doesn’t House have more sex?

LAURIE: I think he does want that, and I think he’s getting it somewhere, somehow. I hesitate to speculate on the liaisons he has when he’s not at Princeton–Plainsboro. But he’s primarily a loner, a character driven by torment. It’s hard to get close to someone like that. But that’s the case with a lot of men.

PLAYBOY: Men are loners by nature?

LAURIE: I was having a chat on the set recently; we were discussing what the bathroom stands for besides the obvious function of what the bathroom stands for. Most of the men agreed the bathroom was sort of a refuge, a place of “Oh, world, please go away,” whatever that may mean—either the conversation or the worry or the phone call you don’t want to take. It’s a sanctuary where you can retreat and silence the world. By contrast, most of the women were thinking, I go to the bathroom because I want to chat with other women, then they rush to get back to the table because they fear they’re missing something. Men and women are very different in how they relate to other human beings. Except on Facebook, of course.