Several years ago, Hugh Laurie was reading John le Carre's first post-Cold War thriller The Night Manager, then hot off the presses. "I actually tried to option it when I was about three chapters in," he says ruefully. "I didn't even know what the word 'option' meant, but I knew it was a thing people did." He wanted to play the title role: a young hotel manager who joins a covert operation to nail an international arms smuggler. He was disappointed. "It had already been taken."

As it turned out, it took over two decades for the BBC to bring The Night Manager to the screen as a complex, much-feted six-part television series with Susanne Bier, the Danish director of films such as In a Better World and After the Wedding, at the helm. Laurie is in it, too, playing the cocksure, clubbable British arms dealer Richard Roper, dubbed by the woman pursuing him from inside British intelligence "the worst man in the world"; Jonathan Pine, the eponymous hotel manager, is played by Tom Hiddleston. "It's pretty tough to watch Tom Hiddleston now playing that young man's role," says Laurie with mock bitterness, "but this is life, to be embraced. And I can't think of anybody else who could have occupied that role with such commitment."

Hugh Laurie plays British arms dealer Richard Roper in The Night Manager.

Laurie, who is charmingly clubbable himself, has become chiefly famous as the maverick medico at the centre of the US series House, which ran for eight years and finished in 2012. Before that, he was just as famously half of a comedy duo with Stephen Fry. It was his old chum Fry who first introduced him to John le Carre at the writer's 80th birthday party. How did Fry know him? "Stephen Fry was apparently born knowing everybody," Laurie says. "I can't account for it. It was a thrill, even though I felt very much the plus-one. I have no idea how they let me in: that was a bit of a mystery."

There is none of this self-effacement in his Richard Roper, a man of amoral certainty underscored – at least in Laurie's interpretation – by a desire to be punished. "Without a doubt, his day-to-day experience has been the pleasure of the game," he says. "He wants to win, to outwit everyone else. He's a pirate who has put himself beyond the normal realm of laws and customs and revels in that. But there is a kind of weariness underneath that, where he can't believe he's getting away with it and knows that someday, someone is going to come knocking. He knows he's going to hell."