Q&A; WITH STEPHEN FRY & HUGH LAURIE : From Cambridge Cutups to ‘Jeeves & Wooster’ Stars

The term “Renaissance man” gets tossed around too casually to say often without choking, but there are still Brits of accomplishment who can try it on--and it seems a good fit for Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who separately and together are men of tremendously versatile comedic letters.

In America as well as on their native shores, Fry and Laurie are best known for their starring roles in the often hilariously silly “Jeeves & Wooster,” a TV adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s dryly slapstick ‘30s tales featuring a zesty young aristocrat and his all-knowing manservant. Some of the segments done for British TV air here as part of PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre,” with the last scheduled new episode Sunday night on KCET and Tuesday night on KOCE.

Both actors can also be seen in the current comedy “Peter’s Friends,” in which they co-star with their old Cambridge cohort Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh, who also directed .

In England, they first came to mutual prominence with their irregular self-penned sketch series for the BBC, “A Bit of Fry and Laurie,” which occasionally airs on cable’s Bravo channel.

Individually they’ve made names for themselves as writers: Fry’s acclaimed first novel, “The Liar,” went to the top of the British bestseller charts . He wrote the book for the Broadway musical “Me and My Girl . “ And he’s currently writing a screenplay set in America for Paramount. Laurie, meanwhile, has written a script of “Shadowlands” that Sir Richard Attenborough is set to direct.

Amazingly, Fry and Laurie hold court with the same sort of motor-mouthed erudition as they do in the warp-speed “Jeeves & Wooster.” “As soon as you’re done with us, we won’t say another word for the rest of the day,” Fry mockingly promised, a most unnecessary pledge.

Question: Initially you were reluctant to play Jeeves and Wooster for TV because the original stories are considered “sacred text” in England. But once you did start into it, did the rhythm of the series--which basically seems to be as fast as possible--immediately suggest itself? Or did it take a while to find the right tempo?

Fry: We watched the dailies, and from the first moment we were saying to ourselves “It’s got to speed up.” We got the clapper loader on the set to write the word PACE on the back of his clapboard, so that it would remind us at the beginning of every shot . . .

Laurie: . . . Because of the language. Of course Jeeves and Wooster in the books are fabulous characters, but they’re characters in a fairly superficial sense. The real star of the thing is the language, and the beauty of it is the way the language just sort of skates , almost as if it were verse. You can’t afford to take too much time about naturalism, really. The sentences are so beautifully constructed you want to hear them ping through in one go, without someone breaking it and doing a naturalistic “um” and an “er” and staring at the ceiling.

Q: That’s part of what makes the lines so funny, that they’re tossed off in the most casual and rapid-fire blase manner, not slowing or straining to point out the pithiness.

Fry: We’re very conscious of trying to be fast, because one of the problems with most costume things is how immensely slow they’ve become . . .

Laurie: . . . My theory is that it’s because in those (older) days the actors were wearing more or less contemporary clothes, and that if you put actors in period clothes now, they talk slower maybe because they feel less comfortable and more awkward. You put modern women in big hats and fur coats and broaches and gloves and handbags and all this gear, and therefore they feel more self-conscious and more obliged to give a stately sort of reading.

Fry: Whereas with comedy of this kind, one thinks of (recapturing the pacing of) those great movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s, the Capras and the Preston Sturgeses and the speed of Cary Grant going rat-a-tat-tat. . . . A ‘30s screenplay would probably be twice as many pages as a ‘90s screenplay. They just go at it at a heck of a lick.

Q: Is it safe to assume that the British are pretty depressed about their film industry, or the current lack thereof?

Laurie: People in the film business are immensely depressed. But the British people generally I don’t think miss it. I’m afraid to say it’s got to the point now where English audiences, when they go to see a film, expect it to be American. If they go and see an English film, they treat it like a foreign-language film. It’s their own language, but they treat it like it ought to have subtitles. . . . But the British do rejoice in period things.

Fry: It’s an absolute index of our lack of cultural self-confidence really, that the only thing we can make is “Howards End”--a beautiful film, but it’s about an England that is 80 years old and no longer exists. Whereas America makes a movie and it starts in a modern city, now, with new cars and it’s not set against old-fashioned buildings, because you’re confident about what America is now. You don’t need to retreat into a glorious past, because you’ve got a glorious present. Ironically glorious, perhaps--it’s ambivalent and it’s dangerous and it’s all those things that it is--but at least it’s alive. And there is a sense that we’re slightly turning into a museum country, moribund.

Laurie: And we’re contributing to that by making “Jeeves & Wooster.”

Fry: Yes, exactly! Which is hardly stark reality.

Laurie: One hopes that people watch it because it is funny. P.G. Wodehouse was arguably the greatest comic writer who ever lived, I think. But in England a lot of the audience are watching it not because of the drama but because of the setting--”Oh, I love those old clothes, they’re all double-breasted suits, and those cars, so lovely with the big curves and chrome bumpers, and the big, lovely houses.” Because it’s a taste of a kind of garden of Eden that never really existed in England, or if it did, it wasn’t on the scale that’s suggested in Wodehouse. You can argue that it’s an unhealthy facet--and I’m afraid it’s our fault!

Q: Both of you have contributed to present-tense British cinema by acting in “Peter’s Friends.” Since the two of you and Emma Thompson and co-writer Martin Bergman are alumni of the Mayweek Footlights Revue at Cambridge of 1981, and the characters in the movie are revue alumni holding a 10-year reunion, did you feel many real-life parallels making the picture?

Fry: I do have a house in the country. It’s not like the one that the character has in the movie . . .

Laurie: It’s slightly bigger, isn’t it?

Fry: . . . and I did have people staying with me over Christmas and New Year, and when I was collecting wood for the fires, I suddenly thought “Hang on, I’ve done this before.” And of course most of the people staying with me are people I’ve been at Cambridge with and their spouses.

In that sense, there is a similarity. In the actual shooting of the movie, there’s no question it helped greatly that there were four of us who had all been at the same university and had all stayed friends and knew each other well. But I don’t know, what you’re paid to do as a film actor is pretend--though it’s easier if you’re not actually pretending as much as you otherwise would be, it’s fair to say.

Obviously people in England were more aware of that side of it than they would be over here, where they don’t know us from Adam or Eve. And England being the sort of place it is, there was this strange sense that there was a Cambridge mafia washing its dirty linen in public, and people thought it was a lot more autobiographical.

I got rung up by one of the particularly nasty papers saying, “Is this Stephen Fry’s way of telling his public that he has AIDS?” Extraordinary idea, that I would have asked a film writer to write a script about that. They were obviously disappointed by the fact that I didn’t. That’s the British press for you. They would much rather Charles and Di broke up than they didn’t.

Q: This is the fourth year of “Jeeves & Wooster.” How long a future do you foresee?

Fry: We’ve probably shot our bolt. Twenty-three hours, I know (isn’t much); an American series, if it’s any success, goes on for 11 years like “Cheers” or something. But for a start, we’re limited by the amount of stories P.G. Wodehouse told, because I don’t think his estate, which is still active, would relish the idea of brand-new stories being made up.

Laurie: There’s a possibility of a stage play based on a couple of the stories. We’re sort of worried about doing a play, though, because it seems like it’s cashing in on something that we’ve already done for four years.

Fry: John Cleese is convinced that we should do a movie, which I find utterly incomprehensible. But for television, anyhow, there’s the limitation of the number of stories to start with--and also just a feeling, I suppose, on our part that we don’t want to be too identified with those roles, and each of us is working on our own things.

Laurie: I’m going bald as well.