HOUSE: Lisa Edelstein Talks Huddy & Candice Bergen

Now that House is in its 7th season, the show has kicked the House-Cuddy (affectionately known as “Huddy”) storyline up a notch with House and Cuddy dancing around a committed relationship. Taking time out of her busy schedule for a brief conference call with NiceGirlsTV, Lisa Edelstein shared some of her insights on the relationship and what to expect next.

Lisa revealed that, while it has been a challenge to portray a character that is just now tentatively embarking on a personal relationship with Dr. Gregory House, because she and Hugh Laurie have been working closely together for so long, it has also made it easier. She explained, “[Hugh and I] know each other quite well now as we’ve been working together for seven years, which in our line of work that’s like dog years, that’s like 49 years. So, I really feel like as our friendship as people, as we got to know each other better this kind of intimacy between the characters was an easier thing to do than if it had started from day one, where you have to kind of just jump in and pretend to know each other.” But Lisa would not have it any other way. She warmly shared, “It’s been great. I really appreciate if there was anybody that I would have to be intimate with on camera, to have it be somebody that I knew and trusted as much as I do Hugh.”

In the February 7 episode, entitled “You Must Remember This,” Cuddy finds out that her mother is ill and House will break every conceivable rule to save her. Working with Candice Bergen who portrays Cuddy’s mother has been a dream for Lisa. She said, “Candice is amazing! She’s an incredibly bright woman, which I think just shines right through all the dialogue, and is really fun to work with. I was really happy to be on set with her, just historically, just because I’ve grown up watching her.” It also provided Lisa the opportunity to stretch as an actor and test her character a bit. She has enjoyed pushing the envelope a bit, particularly watching how House deals with a very pushy mother-in-law figure. Lisa laughingly said, “I think having met the character of Cuddy’s mom, it’s clearer why she would be able to tolerate a guy like House!” It has also provided a bit more insight as to who Cuddy is and why she is the person she is as well. Lisa insightfully said, “It definitely enlightens us about who Cuddy is and where she comes from and why she can tolerate a guy like House, because her mother’s so difficult.” However, she cautioned that when all is said and done, it may not be as easy as Cuddy and House first envisioned, particularly as “when the health crisis hits, it’s even more complicated — and it gets very, very messy.”

Looking back at this season’s opening episode which turned the camera lens microscopically on the beginning of the House/Cuddy relationship, Lisa described it as like being in a two-person play; and she loved the intimacy of it all. Talking about how it came about, she elaborated, “The writers felt, and I certainly agreed, that you couldn’t just get these two characters together and go on as normal right away. You had to just kind of take a moment, experience these two people together, and then get back to the normal hospital stuff and House stuff.” She added, “They really thought about it long and hard. They went down several different roads trying to figure out how to handle it and that was where they ended up to have this very intimate play-like episode where you just kind of were with these two people alone and experiencing intimacy and friendship.”

Looking beyond the immediate health crisis involving Cuddy’s mom, Lisa noted that for House and Cuddy, “There’s a great history there — and as you get older that is a really important thing to have with somebody. A sense of time having passed and problems having been conquered, truths having been faced, that really has enormous value. I think for him, she is someone he trusts; he knows that she wants the best for him. He knows that she’ll tell him when things have gone too far and then he decides for himself whether he wants to listen. . . . For her, I think it’s his intelligence and his brilliance that really excite her. Getting attention from a man like that is not an easy thing to achieve, and having achieved it, I think there’s kind of a rush of excitement. Whether or not he is ultimately someone she can trust is I think something he still has to prove.” She then mused, “I don’t think that show was centered around will they or won’t they. So, that gives you a lot more freedom to play with, will and won’t. It doesn’t rely on them ever getting together, it really is a show about House and his journey, and in his journey he’s had a series of relationships on the show that he’s explored and learned from and this is one of those, this is part of his path.”

As far as where the House-Cuddy relationship is going, Lisa was hesitant to speculate and cautiously said, “I think they’re two very complicated people who really want to be together, whether or not they can is another thing, but they’re going to try as hard as they can.” But beyond that, Lisa was reluctant to speculate. She graciously acknowledged, “I stay out of it, I would hate to see David Shore reading my opinion about what should happen about my character and House. So, I just stay out of it and enjoy the ride!”

Giving props to the show’s creator, Lisa explained that the House-Cuddy journey is not really about the characters changing, it is simply about peeling back another layer. Thinking about it, she reflectively said, “According to David Shore, characters don’t change, they get unveiled. They become more complicated in terms of how the viewers perceive them and how the writers get to write them. When you sign on to a show, you are as an actor hired to perform something that came out of the writer’s imagination. As the show goes on, how you perform that affects how the writer imagines the character and it becomes like a melding of the two. Of course, it’s always David Shore’s characters, it’s always his stories, he controls the world he controls all the puppets. But, rhythms and humor and all those things kind of become embellished once you put an actor in the part, any actor, and it’d be different no matter who plays the role. So, I think just because the show has matured, the characters have to become more complicated, more real, make different choices and have life experiences that take them on a journey, but, they don’t in essence ever really change.”

Looking back at last season, at the “5 to 9” episode which was told from Cuddy’s point of view, Lisa shared, “I had a great time. I mean not just because the show was about my character. It was really fun for me to kind of be the person that’s on set the most, kind of setting the pace and the atmosphere on stage because you really are responsible for that when you’re there the most. If you have an attitude or you’re tired then it kind of drags everything down. It was fun to have that responsibility and I loved doing it. I loved it, but boy, Hugh must be exhausted!” But in fairness to the character and the stress she is under and yet handles so gracefully, Lisa also noted, “[Cuddy] has a remarkable amount of responsibility and she takes it all on and she does a good job at it . . . sometimes she screws up, but she keeps moving forward, she doesn’t let it get in the way. She’s really trying to learn and really trying to live a full life despite the fact that she’s working from 5 to 9 every day.”

Lisa is also the first to admit that she was not surprised by the House-Cuddy relationship. She even thought she saw a glimpse or foreshadowing of it in the pilot episode. Yet she understood that such relationships do not necessarily come to fruition right away. She remembered thinking, “[House and Cuddy] have a complicated relationship and, if the show lasted long enough, it would be a relationship worth exploring.” But showing a bit of her sly humor, she quipped, “Now if you had told me that House and Cuddy would be getting together in Season 6 or Season 7, I would have more surprised that we would have had a Season 7 — because that’s probably more shocking than anything else!”

While everyone is far too busy making the show to play around or pull practical jokes on the set, Lisa revealed, “There are a lot of great wits on this crew. There’s some very smart, very disturbed people that work together so it’s more of just funny … but mostly, it’s a lot of fun because we all like each other. . . . The lighter scenes are of course always more fun and playful.”

When asked why she thinks people are still tuning in to watch after seven season, Lisa happily replied, “It’s the magic bullet, isn’t it, I’m so happy about it. I can only thank David Shore and Hugh Laurie and just be grateful for the ride. It’s so arbitrary what makes it and what doesn’t, and there’s so many elements. We had the luxury of being on after American Idol when we started. Our first six episodes we were on our own and we would’ve been canceled on any other network because we didn’t’ really have a lot of audience. But, as soon as American Idol started that season and we got some eyeballs—we got 28 million eyeballs on our show—it was an incredible thing and a lot of those people stuck with us. I think that really had a lot to do with it.”

Then giving a shout-out to her wonderfully gifted co-stars, Lisa happily noted that, like their characters, her castmates are “a very funny, goofy bunch, but bright, super-smart.”

And on that high note, to find out what is indeed next for the most cantankerous doctor on television and the strong woman attempting to do the impossible, tame the wild beast, be sure to tune in for an all new episode of House on Monday, February 7 at 8/7c on FOX.