TELEVISION HUGH LAURIE IS DRAWNTO THE DARK
In his Hulu drama ‘ Chance,’ he plays a doctor again, this time with a film noir twist
Hugh Laurie descends into the darkness of the mind and a film noir San Francisco as a forensic neuropsychiatrist in the Hulu drama Chance ( Wednesday).
Laurie, known for AMC’s The Night Manager, HBO’s Veep and especially Fox’smedical drama House, saysworries about playing another doctor dissolved when he read Kem Nunn’s novel, which inspired the 10- episode first season. ( Hulu already has ordered a second).
“I got drawn into the melancholy and claustrophobia of it and, although this is a contemporary story, the strange period feel,” Laurie says.
“It has sort of a Sam Spade feel to it, which I loved.”
Laurie’s Eldon Chance, who evaluates themental trauma of patients he cannot cure, is dealing with his own struggles — melancholy about professional accomplishments, a broken marriage, the challenges of staying close to his daughter — when he’s drawn to a potential hazard: an alluring patient, Jaclyn Blackstone ( GretchenMol), who may have multiple personalities and definitely has a threatening husband ( Paul Adelstein).
Chance “feels himself adrift in his life. And then suddenly this spark is lit in the form of this patient and he sees the possibility of some meaning re- entering his life, some connection that will make all the pain and suffering worthwhile,” Laurie says. “But it pulls him down a hole.”
At the same time, Chance is captivated by a powerful giant, D ( Ethan Suplee), who leads the strait- laced doctor on a mesmerizing tour of San Francisco netherworld, brutally taking the law into his own hands along the way.
“I am the innocent in this. Paul’s and Ethan’s characters are physically and psychologically menacing, and Gretchen’s character is the great enigma,” Laurie says.
“We don’t know if she is the fire who will warm Chance and rekindle the meaning in his life or whether she will burn down the house.”
As a doctor who has seen a patient’s life unravel after a blow to the head, Chance is aware of the precariousness of life, but still he tempts fate.
“He is closer thanmost to the realization that what separates us from a happy, stable productive life and a life of chaos and madness is the tiniest membrane of good fortune, good health, employment, stable relationships,” Laurie says.
“You kick away one or two of those legs from the table and everything comes crashing down.”
Executive producer Michael London, who initially saw Chance as amovie, welcomes the chance for the series to become Hulu’s “crown jewel.”
“There’s something so essentially Hugh- like about Chance. He’s got a dark world view. He’s got a wonderful self- effacing quality. He is emotionally vulnerable. There’s a Jimmy Stewart, Everyman quality,” he says.
Mol “plays two characters who are very different. One is enormously sympathetic and wounded and fragile. One is dangerous and has a very powerful sexual edge,” London says.
She made “both poles of that character credible” while leaving open the question of whether she actually has a mental disorder.
The San Francisco setting reminds London of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which also features a “mysterious, captivating, beautiful woman who draws a man into this kind of madness.”