Hugh Laurie will star in the pilot for Avenue 5, an outer space comedy Veep creator Armando Iannucci is making for HBO, Variety reports. Details on the project are slim, but Laurie’s character is named Ryan Clark, and Variety describes him as “the charming and in-control captain of Avenue 5,” which would imply that Avenue 5 is more of a space ship than an avenue. The show is set in the future, so perhaps the streets can fly.
Laurie has worked with Iannucci several times already, first in a recurring role on Veep and more recently in Iannucci’s upcoming Dickens adaptation The Personal History of David Copperfield, which wrapped principal photography earlier this month and is scheduled for a 2019 release. For a taste of the two together, here’s Laurie in a scene from the fourth season of Veep:
Although Laurie is most famous in the United States for his starring role on the medical drama House, he has a long, long history in comedy, going all the way back to his days in the Cambridge Footlights, where he, Stephen Fry, and Emma Thompson were part of a legendary 1981 lineup. If we’re very lucky, we’ll soon get to see him in a bone-dry reboot of Space Force.
