He was paid millions to play a miserable man — and couldn't tell where the character ended and he began.
When the creators of House M.D. were casting their lead in 2004, they wanted someone quintessentially American. British actors, they believed, just couldn't pull off the accent convincingly enough. They weren't even considering anyone from overseas.
But thousands of miles away in Namibia, Hugh Laurie was filming a movie and heard about the role. He didn't fly to Los Angeles. He didn't walk into a polished audition room. Instead, he went into his hotel bathroom — the only room with enough light — propped up a camera, grabbed an umbrella to use as a cane, and recorded himself performing two scenes.
He sent the tape in, apologizing for how rough it looked. Executive producer Bryan Singer watched it and was blown away by the performance of this, as he put it, brilliant "American actor." He had no idea Laurie was British.
That tape changed everything.
But the show didn't explode overnight. The pilot drew about seven million viewers — respectable, not earth-shattering. It was over the following seasons that House became a global phenomenon, eventually reaching over 80 million viewers worldwide and making Laurie the most-watched leading man on television according to Guinness World Records.
What nobody saw was the weight of carrying it all.
For eight seasons, Laurie woke at five in the morning for sixteen-hour days on set. He was in nearly every scene. And because the show filmed in Los Angeles while his wife and three children remained in London, he spent nine months of every year six thousand miles from home.
The isolation crept in slowly. Laurie had struggled with depression since his youth — he'd first sought help for it back in 1996, long before House existed. But the pressure of the show deepened everything. He later admitted he had "very, very black days" on set and that the situation often felt overwhelming.
The painful irony wasn't lost on anyone. Here was a man battling his own darkness, being celebrated for portraying a character whose entire identity was built on misery, cynicism, and emotional isolation. The line between Hugh and House grew thinner with each passing season.
He kept his American accent between takes to stay in character. He rode his Triumph Bonneville motorcycle through the streets of Los Angeles in the early mornings — a lifelong passion that became something more during those years. "The feeling of air rushing over your body at high speed," he once said. "You can't help but feel things being swept off you — worries being blown off your body."
But he never walked away. Even as the routine became a conveyor belt, even as the exhaustion mounted, he stayed for all eight seasons and all 177 episodes. Because as hard as it was, it was also the role of a lifetime, and he knew it.
When House finally ended in 2012, Laurie stepped back. He took three years away from Hollywood and turned to his other great love — music. He released two blues albums, toured with a band, and let himself breathe for the first time in nearly a decade. When he returned to acting, it was on his own terms — smaller roles, stranger projects, a Golden Globe-winning turn in The Night Manager.
He didn't disappear. He just stopped running on someone else's clock.
Hugh Laurie once said that playing House was like carrying a beautiful but impossibly heavy stone. You can't put it down because it's too precious. But you also can't pretend it isn't crushing you.
Sometimes the greatest performances come from people who understand the pain they're portraying — not because they're acting, but because they've lived it.
On the tribulations of an expatriate in Europe
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
He played misery so well, he couldn't tell where the character ended and he began
From Understanding to Intimacy
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Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Five Health Benefits of Eating Bread
Bread is one of the most ancient forms of prepared foods by human groups. Throughout history, especially after the industrialization of bread making, it has taken a few hits from the health and wellness community, most recently by the low-carb diet and then the gluten-free trend. However, bread is still a staple food in diverse territories, like in the United States, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom, remaining close to the hearts of many.
Despite the rumors that present bread as evil, people don´t want to give up their “villainous bread”. And you don´t have to either. It is possible to live a healthy lifestyle and eat a balanced meal that includes bread.
To begin with, we all know that generalizing is a bad habit. There are so many types of bread around the world. Even though most of them are made from flour, water, and yeast, ingredients and cooking methods are plentiful and vary from one place to another. For example, bread can be made from wheat, chickpeas or potatoes. What is more, bread making is a tradition so highly regarded in France that it is protected by a legislative decree and Paris hosts the most prestigious bakery contest on the planet: The Coupe du Monde de Boulangerie[1] (The Bakery World Cup). If bread is the enemy why would a nation protect it and celebrate it with an international competition?
Secondly, a single loaf of bread is the result of the knowledge, experience, and dedicated work of three valuable individuals: the farmer, the miller, and the baker. Their input directly affects the end product. Hence, it is important to consider all these factors. Starting with the kind of crop; is it a cereal grain, root vegetable or legume? What seed variety is it? How was it grown? Then pay attention to the way it was milled. For example, in order to produce whole meal wheat flour the entire kernel is ground, whereas the bran and germ is removed during the production of white flour. And lastly, what cooking method and oven were used?
The bottom line is that some kinds of bread are nutritious and can actually be good for your health. Apart from being convenient, delicious, versatile, and comforting! So let´s look into what are the health benefits of eating bread!
Finally, just remember that the recommended amount of grains for an adult in the Healthy Style Eating Pattern[15] (2000 kcal per day) set by the U.S. government is 6 servings per day, of which at least half should be whole grains.
[1] https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/chapter-1/a-closer-look-inside-healthy-eating-patterns/
[1] http://www.europain.com/events/bakery-world-cup
[2] http://www.diabetesselfmanagement.com/nutrition-exercise/nutrition/just-add-fiber/functional-fibers/
[3] http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplements/ingredientmono-919-guar%20gum.aspx?activeingredientid=919
[4] https://nutritionreviews.oxfordjournals.org/content/67/4/188.full
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20920376
[6] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/prebiotic-effects-metabolic-and-health-benefits/F644C98393E2B3EB64A562854115D368
[7] https://mrheisenbug.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/why-resistant-starch-prebiotic-fiber-improve-sleep-and-dreaming/
[8] http://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-food/benefits-of-complex-carbs-and-the-best-ones-to-eat/
[9] http://www.clevelandclinicwellness.com
[10] http://www.clevelandclinicwellness.com/food/good-carbs/Pages/this-is-your-brain-on-carbs.aspx
[11] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257747/
[12] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6401a2.htm?s_cid=mm6401a2_w
[13] http://www.aicr.org
[14] http://www.aicr.org/foods-that-fight-cancer/whole-grains.html?referrer=https://www.google.com.mx/?referrer=http://www.aicr.org/foods-that-fight-cancer/whole-grains.html
[15] https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/chapter-1/a-closer-look-inside-healthy-eating-patterns/
Source: https://grainfoodsfoundation.org/five-health-benefits-of-eating-bread/
Which bread is good for health?
For eight years, I was completely and utterly obsessed with the idea of "healthy, whole wheat bread." I’m talking about the dense, gritty, three bucks a loaf stuff you can only get in the health food stores—isn't this obviously the best possible decision? But, in fact, despite my diligence with my "healthy, whole wheat bread” and my rigorous exercise program, every time I looked in the mirror, I was gaining weight around my middle, feeling as if I were perpetually bloated, with gas pressure building up inside me, finding myself unable to focus enough at my job to do any good, all while simultaneously dealing with pain in my hands and knees, which my physician couldn’t figure out. Yet ever for a moment did it occur to me that my "healthy, whole wheat bread” habit might perchance be part of my problem, inasmuch as whole grains have been touted as the key to good health?
The fact is that most commercial breads, even the health food or whole grain or organic breads, contain ingredients and processing methods that can actually harm your gut, raise your blood sugar levels to heights higher than table sugar, and trigger an inflammation reaction throughout your body. It is true that aside from the bloating and weight gain, commercial breads also come with glyphosate residue from sprayed wheat, added sugars and preservatives, highly processed grains that have been made devoid of any nutritional content and then “fortified” with the intention to mimic nutritional content, and gluten that has been altered in ways that ensure digestion is even more difficult than from 50-year-old breads. It was because of a health encyclopedia found in the Internet that I was able to gain knowledge from the various ways one can choose or even produce their own breads that can benefit the body rather than harming them. This encyclopedia has literally helped me kick my joint pain issues completely, lost 22 pounds, and even got my brain fog to clear in only four months of an account of my changes in eating bread. Now I do not simply grab any loaf that calls itself “whole grain” thinking that it would be healthy. Instead, I have started to ensure that I consume bread that would help rather than hurt my health. This includes searching for sprouted grains in which the grains have already been germinated to lower the amount of antinutrients in it, opted to go for Sourdough bread that would have been fermented for a rather long period of time to help break it down so that it would be easier to digest rather than piled-up blood sugars in my system, gone for bread that would be made of ancient grains such as Einkorn or Spelt that have been less likely to undergo any sort of heavy hybridization, avoided any bread that would have rather long lists of ingredients that would be loaded with preservatives along with sugars.
Worship from the Heart
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Monday, February 09, 2026
Did anyone attempt to climb down the towers during September 11th?
Yes, indeed. A man bravely managed it. He started his descent from the North Tower near the impact zone at around 9:40 a.m. He made it down about 20 floors, which is no small feat.
Here are two pictures where you can see him. It's the same picture, just enlarged. You can see the floors above him, where he descended. Undoubtedly, he watched as colleagues and people above him jumped to their deaths rather than be burned alive or forced out by the heat and smoke. That was a choice these people had made. They chose to die more quickly and painlessly than to be burned alive or suffocate in the smoke. This man chose a different option. He wanted a chance, even a miracle, so he began to descend.
Here is a photo showing one of the towers up close. As you can see, the columns on each side have hardly any support, apart from the rails for the window cleaners. If you could wedge your fingers into those grooves, it would be a very uncomfortable grip. In the photo, it looks as if he is instead balancing on the very small ledge where the floor and the window insert meet (as you can see in the picture above) and continue to extend downwards inch by inch. The distance between these columns is approximately 18.5 inches.
Theoretically, this man could have made it quite far down, but sooner or later he would have ended up on the 76th machine floor, where the space is about 25 centimeters narrower and the leverage is even less.
In this image, the dark grey lines on the towers show the mechanical floors.
It's doubtful whether this man was aware of this, because why should he have known? He wasn't a craftsman or an engineer; he simply worked there, like the more than 2,000 others who lost their lives in the towers that day. What would have happened if he had reached those floors is pure speculation, because unfortunately, he never made it that far.
He was not seen again after the collapse of the south tower. It is very likely that the collapse of the south tower caused the building to sway and that he may have lost his footing and toppled due to the wind generated by the collapsing building.
All the victims that day displayed a certain degree of bravery. This man's determination to survive speaks volumes. I can't imagine what was going through his mind. Looking down over 80 stories, seeing people falling all around him, knowing that one slip would mean the same fate. And then considering what drove him to attempt this unthinkable feat? Undoubtedly, the thought of his family. Making it down and seeing his children or his wife just one more time. He didn't give up without a fight; he showed that he would try to get out alive until the very end, and he did.