Hugh Laurie has apologised after his online exchange with a journalist who criticised House triggered a pile-on, claiming that he was “slightly drunk and already upset” when he responded to her.
Laurie is perhaps best known for playing caustic diagnostician Dr Gregory House in the hit American drama, which ran for eight seasons between 2004 and 2012. It followed House and a team of fellow doctors at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital as they attempted to solve medical mysteries.
Laurie won two Golden Globe awards for the role in 2006 and 2007 and became one of the most recognisable British actors on American television during the show’s run.
Journalist Janet Murray joked about the show’s repetitive formula on X, writing that House was just eight seasons of the doctor repeatedly getting diagnoses wrong for a patient with a “mysterious illness”.
Laurie responded with a lengthy and sarcastic defence of the series and told Murray that if all she saw was “hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you”.
Murray said the following day that while she found Laurie’s defence of the show “genuinely amusing”, she had received “fairly horrific trolling” from “abusive” House fans.
I’m sorry if people have been having a go at you because of my tweet. Not at all the plan. I was very slightly drunk and already upset about something that had nothing to do with you. If it’s any comfort, I got it in the neck too. I’m a thin-skinned twat, apparently, even…
— Hugh Laurie (@hughlaurie) June 8, 2026
“I’m sorry if people have been having a go at you because of my tweet. Not at all the plan,” Laurie wrote in response.
“I was very slightly drunk and already upset about something that had nothing to do with you. If it’s any comfort, I got it in the neck too.
“I am a thin-skinned t***, apparently, even though it wasn’t my skin,” he continued. “I was sticking up for the writers who I adored.”
In his original response, Laurie had compared episodes of House to “variations on a theme” while referring to composer Johann Sebastian Bach and his “30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure” as well as artist Frida Kahlo’s self portraits.
Laurie later acknowledged that he “obviously” should not have compared the popular TV series to such titans of culture, saying it was “asking for trouble”.
He quipped that he “would have done better to go for the 10,000 blues songs written around the same 12 bar chord structure”.
“I’ve listened to most of them and will keep doing so,” he said. “Because we love what we love.”
Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and…
— Hugh Laurie (@hughlaurie) June 7, 2026
After Laurie’s apology, Murray responded that she appreciated it and recognised the actor “may have been sticking up for colleagues”. “For what it’s worth, I like the show – despite the repetition – and I like you in it. The response to my initial post was so warm-hearted and affectionate towards House, which perhaps made what followed all the more surprising,” she wrote. “Anyway, no hard feelings. I’m hoping you’ll be back for another series of Tehran.”
Laurie most recently appeared in the Israeli espionage thriller Tehran, playing a South African nuclear inspector named Eric Peterson. The Apple TV+ series follows Mossad agent Tamar Rabinyan, played by Niv Sultan, as she undertakes covert operations inside Iran. He will next be seen in The Wanted Man, a thriller in which he plays crime boss Felix Carmichael.
