Anyone with sense enough to read these words will love Hugh Laurie. Upper class twit of the new wave of British comedy in the early 80s, he escaped with Stephen Fry to star in their own comedy series as well as appearing in three series of Blackadder and became, again with Fry, the epitome of Jeeves and Wooster and has found an indecent amount of fame as an American doctor in House MD.
I can’t remember seeing Laurie in anything approaching a leading role on the big screen for a long time, IMDb is taking me back to 2000’s Maybe Baby (when he played a character named Sam Bell – perhaps Moon is the unofficial sequel to this?) or Stuart Little the year before. He’s a talented dramatic actor, particularly when playing against type (at least against what his tpe was before his tenure in House), and today’s news that Shrek man Andrew Adamson has signed Laurie up to play the lead in his adaptation of the Lloyd Jones novel Mister Pip is welcome indeed.
Jones’s novel won the Commonwealth Writer’s prize in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Booker prize in that year and tells the story of Mr. Watts, a man who stays behind after his fellow teachers flee the island of Bougainville during the struggle for Independence in the mid 19990s, and how his reading of Dickens’ Great Expectations inspires the children he is left with.
Filming begins next month. I’m sold.
Deadline had the source code.
