After House MD: The Cast’s Surprising Next Moves
Look, I don’t want to be the one to remind you that you’re still Googling “Is it lupus?” two decades on, but guess whose careers we just re-examined? The cast of Fox’s House MD—your favorite misanthropic doc and his ever-revolving squad—has been busy since signing off in 2012. I told you so: pop culture never truly cures itself.
Princeton-Plainsboro’s cranky diagnostician, Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), held a firm prescription for drama from 2004 to 2012. Laurie’s razor-sharp delivery and Vicodin dependency made him the anti-hero of every medical cliché. As he confessed to the Los Angeles Times, “no matter how hard he was on them, he was harder on himself,” which is code for “he’s still a pain in the neck.” By 2012’s finale, Laurie admitted to The Telegraph that the real burnout came not from playing House but from clocking 170 episodes—roughly 50 feature films’ worth.
While House tangled with oncologist Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) and sparred with boss Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), his first-wave diagnosticians—Omar Epps, Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer—paid the price for his genius. Enter season shifts: Olivia Wilde flirted with fame beyond TV, Kal Penn jumped between White House cameo gigs and Harold & Kumar reruns, and a slew of new faces kept the formula intact: admit baffling symptoms, shout “Everybody lies,” then solve the puzzle before closing credits.
Fast-forward to today, and here’s where the magic—or tragedy—happened: Hugh Laurie snagged standout turns on Veep and snagged his third Golden Globe for The Night Manager as the despicable Richard Onslow Roper. Plus, he’s flexing his behind-the-camera chops with an Agatha Christie adaptation on BritBox. Charlyne Yi, who popped up as Dr. Chi Park in season six, shifted gears to movies like This Is 40, Second Act and even voices quirky aliens on Steven Universe. Amber Tamblyn’s brief but memorable run as Dr. Martha Masters led her to Two and a Half Men and turned her into a prominent #MeToo advocate. Odette Annable—late to House’s diagnostics squad—went on to star in The Grinder and The Astronaut Wives Club before suiting up as Reign on Supergirl. I told you so: no one ever really retires from TV.
Peter Jacobson’s Dr. Taub, an addict with a conscience, hopped onto Ray Donovan, The Americans, NCIS: Los Angeles and Colony, proving some roles leave a permanent scar. And yes, Jesse Spencer swapped surgical scalpels for firefighter axes as Lieutenant Matthew Casey on Chicago Fire—because who wouldn’t swap medicine for flames? As E! Online’s latest checkup confirms, these actors didn’t vanish; they just moved on to other drama-filled franchises. Did anyone expect a different outcome? No? Thought so. And that, dear reader, is why we can’t have nice things.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and E! Online; Los Angeles Times; The Telegraph
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
