Hugh Laurie: From 'House' to home on three new projects

LOS ANGELES – One is a diabolical arms merchant, the other a debonair senator.

Both are played by Hugh Laurie, who has expanded his acting practice beyond Fox's former hit medical drama, House, with three new TV projects.

Laurie is doing double duty in drama and comedy as high-flying outlaw Richard Roper in AMC’s The Night Manager (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. ET/PT), a suspenseful six-episode miniseries, and vice presidential candidate Tom James in HBO’s Veep (Sundays, 10:30 p.m. ET/PT).  And he'll play a very different kind of doctor in Chance, a Hulu drama scheduled to premiere this fall.

Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie duel in AMC's 'Night Manager'

“I’m lucky,” the English actor tells USA TODAY, adding a bit of self-deprecation about playing different characters: “Maybe I’m doing a wide range of roles equally badly.”

When John le Carré's novel The Night Manager was published in 1993, Laurie, whose natural charm infuses Roper and James, wanted to play the arms dealer's younger, infiltrating adversary, hotel manager Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston).

“Within moments of Tom starting to do it, I couldn’t imagine anyone else. He has that inscrutable grace and charm that is such a perfect cloak for Pine,” he says.

Laurie, 56, says  Roper, who secretly manipulates government officials, would be “a platinum member … of the weird fraternity of rich and powerful people” described in the real-life Panama Papers.

Is Roper evil? “Even terrible villains and dictators don’t see themselves as evil. In some ways, Roper is more conscious of his villainy, perhaps,” Laurie says.  "I have a theory that Roper knows he is a damned soul and is looking to be betrayed.”

Veep also has a real-world parallel. “What a weird time to be writing a satirical political show when this country is in the grip of an electoral process that you couldn’t make up.”

He's playing an urbane foil to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s President Selina Meyer, who finds herself in an Electoral College tie that could somehow result in her running mate James, whom she scathingly calls “that smug, Dick Van Dyke-looking (expletive)," becoming commander in chief. ("It's sort of beautiful, isn't it?" Laurie says. A wrinkle of the American Constitution.")

Taking the recurring role has caused one problem for the Veep fan, who doesn't like to watch his own performances.“Now that I’m in it, I can’t watch it.”

If playing an immoral entrepreneur and elegant officeholder aren’t enough, Laurie will be going back into medicine, too, in Chance, a “noir-ish thriller” based on the Kem Nunn novel. And no, Laurie cautions, neuropsychiatrist Eldon Chance, a man caught up in a story that includes an obsessive relationship and confused identities, is nothing like Gregory House.

“I read a couple of pages of the script and thought, ‘Oh, that’s a shame. This is really good, but I can’t play a doctor.' After another couple of pages, I’d forgotten all about that. I didn’t see any similarity," he says.

Laurie, who plays blues and jazz and tours with The Copper Bottom Band, says musical opportunities “stopped me from dropping into a pit of bereavement” after House ended its eight-season run in 2012.

Asked if he misses the critically acclaimed series, he says: “I don’t miss it, because I feel like it’s there. Quite often, I will just be walking down the street and some line or idea or some attitude that he had will pop into my head and make me laugh,” he says. “I’m immensely proud of House.”