Laurie never expected the show to do so well. “Everybody assured me it would end in a few weeks,” he says, a little sadly. “It took me a long time to believe it was real.” His family never relocated to Los Angeles; he’s married to Jo Green, a theater administrator, and has three children, 18, 20 and 22. He thinks this season is probably the show’s last. The ratings have dimmed slightly of late, though it remains a mainstay of the Fox schedule, placing No. 13 last season among viewers 18 to 49 years old. “We’ve had a fantastic run,” he says. “Long enough for me to become not just a professional doctor, but a specialist.”

Many actors take a blithe pleasure in pretending to be somebody else, but Laurie seems more interested in blotting out his own personality. When he’s acting, he doesn’t have to be himself. From this perspective, the role of House is a first-class vacation: an abrasive and acid-tongued American doctor. The longer Laurie plays House, though, the more of himself comes through in the part: his comic timing, his musical ability, his fondness for motorcycles. He has slowly remodeled House in his own image: a charming rogue trailed by a black cloud. Escaping yourself, it turns out, is never as easy as it seems.

Eating beef and drinking beer in a nearly empty Scandinavian restaurant, Laurie discussed his approach to the character. He said that other actors might see six ways of playing a scene and then agonize over which is the best one. “When I read it, I know exactly what it should be. My struggle is trying to do what’s in my head.” He shrugged. “Which might be wrong.”

Fry told me, “If the ‘House’ set has a reputation of being a place of some tension, which I think it does, it’s because of his perfectionism.” When they wrote together, he said, “I’d be the one saying: ‘We’ve got to do something. We can’t not do anything because it isn’t perfect.’ ”

Is Laurie happy playing House? “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s not a question I ask myself very often. I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.” Laurie doesn’t make pronouncements like this in the morose tones of Marvin the Paranoid Android; he remains affable, as if he were describing somebody else. “I have spent part of my life projecting what’s expected,” he said. “People expect me to be foolish and goofy, but essentially cheerful. But I am closer to myself than I used to be.”

He recently received his sixth Emmy nomination for “House”; he has never won. He cited the aphorism, which he attributed to General Douglas MacArthur, that no piece of news is as good or as bad as it first appears. “The politic thing is to say that the nomination is a great compliment, but there is hassle involved,” he said. “However it may look on television, the reality is four hours of uncomfortable clothes and other people’s aftershave and the constant dread of vaguely knowing someone: have we actually met or do I only know him because he was in that film? And then there’s the stomach-churning anxiety of what is going to happen if I win. I’m going to have to stand up and say something. Please, please, please let it be someone else. . . . Anyway, you can’t say that. You have to say, ‘I am deeply flattered and humbled and indebted to the members of the Academy’ — whoever they are.” He thought for a moment. “Wait — I probably am one of them.”