Hugh Laurie: The future is ours to shape

Hugh Laurie doesn’t believe the future is predetermined.

The 55-year-old actor portrays Nix in new Disney sci-fi film Tomorrowland, which centres on a brilliant teen who teams up with an inventor in a mission to unearth a secret realm that exists within collective memory.

Tomorrowland depicts the future in a more upbeat manner than many other modern science fiction features and Hugh thinks it’s important to maintain a positive mindset about what’s to come.

"If we approach it with dread, it will probably become dreadful. And if we approach it with hope and patience and kindness, then that's what we will get. The future is ours to shape,” he told BBC News.

"There was a point in our film-making history when the future turned from being a place of hope and optimism to being a scary apocalyptic one.

"The film allows us to really think about and understand why that has happened in our culture and where it comes from.”

Hugh is convinced the many dystopian movies and television shows produced in the past 50 years or so indicate a sense of “morbid defeatism that has gripped the world”.

The thespian was “completely struck” by the positivity in Tomorrowland when he met with director Brad Bird and writer Damon Lindelof for the first time.

"They laid out this extraordinary vision of a future that ran completely counter to all popular ideas about how the world is going, and I was completely taken with it,” Hugh recalled of the meeting. “Cynicism and sarcasm are fashionable. Honesty, optimism and love are a little out of fashion.”

Tomorrowland, which also stars George Clooney and Britt Robertson, was released in American theatres on Friday May 22.