By Harry Haun
16 Jun 2011

	Robert Sean Leonard
	photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

One landing directly above Belushi's star dressing room is Leonard's temporary digs. At 43, he's frightfully unfussy about where he's holed up off-stage. Wherever, it's still an easy sprint for him into the play. "I don't care where my dressing room is. All I do is put my clothes on and go on stage, and then I go home. I'm not living here."

In point of fact, he doesn't even live on the East Coast — although he expects he and his wife and daughter will move back when (or if) "House" comes tumbling down in the ratings. Distributed to 66 countries, it was the most-watched television program in the world in 2008, so don't start planning any homecoming parties anytime soon.

Born Yesterday is literally the first chance he has had to get to New York theatre since he signed up seven years ago to befriend Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), the loopy, misanthropic medical genius who heads the diagnostic department at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey.

Not an easy gig, television: "When you're working on a sitcom — that's the best job — the hours are minimal, and you get a long hiatus. You just have to deliver 22 minutes of stuff on tape, whereas with an hour show you need 48 minutes of edited film. It's almost like making a small movie every ten days, so it sucks. The money is great, but boy! it's the worst schedule! You wake up at four in the morning and drive to work in the dark, and the sun comes up as you're putting your makeup on, and the sun cresses, and the sun goes down, and it's dark, and you're still there, and you get home at ten at night. Very long days. We are well compensated, but it 's tough."

This was the first year Leonard was allowed more than six weeks off, and the reason for that had to do with Comcast buying NBC-Universal. "Everyone had to renegotiate so it looked like our break was going to be longer than usual. My contract was up, so my agent said, 'Robert is going to take a play. If you want to shoot on June 10, which is when we usually start, you're going to have to shoot without him.' I didn't want to say no to a play I've always wanted to do because I might have a contract."

	Leonard in Born Yesterday.
	photo by Carol Rosegg

Leonard, a learned type who is more believably bespectacled than William Holden was in the 1950 movie version, is rather ideally cast as the erudite journalist Brock unwisely hires to increase the wattage of his embarrassingly dim-witted girlfriend.

"My friends call a role like Paul Verrall 'the third bow from the last' role. Sometimes you want to shine, and sometimes you don't mind too much if someone else does. You kinda wanna be the guy who has the third bow from the last. I've always wanted to play this particular role, even though it's not my favorite role in the play."

That role would be Ed Devery — the fourth bow for the last — a once-lofty politico turned mouthpiece-for-hire who does Brock's dirty bidding and takes large gulps of booze for his moral pain. In this production, the part is played by Frank Wood, but Leonard hopes that time will one day give him a shot at it — and the play's famous last words that go with it: a bittersweet toast to Billie's triumph.

"Thornton Wilder wrote that speech. Kanin was having trouble ending the play when it was out of town — I think it ended with Billie's exit, and it wasn't working somehow — so Thornton Wilder gave him the idea of having Ed do a nostalgic toast to the time when he was one of those people — 'one of those crazy broads and dumb chumps who make it so hard on bastards like us.' Leave it to the guy who wrote Our Town to know that the heart of the play actually resides in the guy who says, 'For a man who has been dead for 16 years, I'm in remarkable health.'"

When Leonard went into rehearsals for Born Yesterday, the fate of "House" was very much up in the air. It has since been renewed for an eighth season, and he heads West at play's end to further the adventures of Dr. James Wilson, head of the oncology department at P-PTH and lone confidant of the unconventional Dr. House.

	Leonard and Hugh Laurie on "House."
	photo by Adam Taylor/FOX

"Let's say House is three-dimensional, and the characters surrounding him are slightly less so," he tactfully words it. "I'm the friend, the guy who worries about him and gives him advice that he doesn't listen to. It's sort of a television role. It doesn't happen in theatre, these guys. In fact, I don't even think it happens in real life."

By any other name, the series would be "Holmes Sweet House." Such, says Leonard, "was the original intent — Sherlock Holmes in a medical setting, a doctor who has an addiction [Vicodin] and solves mysteries [medical ones]. Wilson is his Watson, but that role changed a bit when he got a diagnostic team of three doctors. Watson's kinda split in half now. The medical team is a bit of the medical Watson — they're, basically, a sounding board for all of the scenes where Sherlock sits in his room and bounces case-ideas off them. I get the ideas bounced around about his personal life."

Laurie and Leonard play effortlessly well together, and it's not all acted. "I love working with him," Leonard admits. "And I love his past. I'm a great admirer of the world he comes from — the world of Imelda Staunton, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, that group of people who came out of that time in London so I knew very well who he was when they cast him. In fact, I was surprised — and impressed and excited — they did. I was expecting someone more TV-like."

The gamble paid off, too: "He's been nominated for everything and won a bunch."

What happens after Season Eight is anybody's guess, but, whatever comes, he'll be grounded — the result of solid values instilled by his father, Robert Howard Leonard, who teaches Spanish in New Jersey. Case in point: "The night I won the Tony, right before the party, my dad called me on my cell. I don't know if he did it on purpose or not. I don't care. I said, 'Hey, I won.' He said, 'I saw you. Your speech was great. By the way, who won the Best Featured Actor Tony last year?' I said, 'Uh, I dunno.' He said, 'Oh. Well, anyway, have a great time.' I thought, 'Wow! That really puts this in perspective.' A little too much perspective, in fact — but he was right."

Let the record show Leonard's predecessor for the Feature Actor Tony was Roy Dotrice for A Moon for the Misbegotten — and, no, he hasn't been back.

Happily, Leonard has his "House" to run to for a season or two more of shelter.

(Harry Haun is a longtime staff writer for Playbill magazine, and pens the Playbill On Opening Night column for Playbill.com.)