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" Thursday marks the first season finale of USA&amp;#039;s Rush, about LA&amp;#039;s hottest mob doctor\u2014or, as we know him, Tom Ellis. Ellis hails from the UK, where he&amp;#039;s reached megastar status as the adorkable love interest on BBC&amp;#039;s popular sitcom Miranda. But stateside, he&amp;#039;s rechristening himself as the new smoldering, renegade doctor in town. It&amp;#039;s impossible, therefore, not to compare him to Hugh Laurie&amp;#039;s House. They&amp;#039;re both handsome Brits with impeccable American accents, monosyllabic last-name show titles, and drug addictions that shape sticking subplots. They&amp;#039;re also both bona fide badasses, but where House has a hospital behind him every time he cries Lupus, Rush performs heart-thumping operations on gangsters at gunpoint. Ellis, our #MCM this Monday, visited the BAZAAR offices so we could get to know the guy behind the scrubs (well, suit). Turns out he&amp;#039;s a little more of a softie than his on-screen alter ego. A father of three girls\u2014Marnie, 4, and Florence, 1, with ex-wife Tamzin Outhwaite and Nora, 8, from a previous relationship\u2014he dances with his daughters and comes from a Welsh family of pastors. But that&amp;#039;s not to say he doesn&amp;#039;t have a leather-jacket side to him too. Ellis opened up about his best friends (whom you might know), his personal addictions and licking one eccentric fan&amp;#039;s face.  Your character Rush is addicted to cocaine, among other vices. I&amp;#039;m kind of dying to know: what is it you snort when you&amp;#039;re making it look like you&amp;#039;re snorting cocaine? [Laughs] We snort lactose powder! Thankfully I&amp;#039;m not lactose intolerant, and it&amp;#039;s fine like once or twice, but we were shooting a scene the other day where we did take after take, and by the end of it, I was like &amp;quot;I need a tissue, and I need to go.&amp;quot; I disappeared for a few hours and\u2026cleared my nasal cavity. What&amp;#039;s your personal, real-life addiction? My sins\u2014I have to say cigarettes. I&amp;#039;ve tried so hard in the last few years to give up, but it&amp;#039;s difficult. That and coffee. Have you tried those e-cigarettes? Everything. I have one of those vapor pens. You know, where you press the button and it lights up? You look like the Pied Piper when you&amp;#039;re walking down the road. You&amp;#039;re from Wales, right? Yeah, I was born in Wales, and I moved around quite a lot as a kid because my dad is a Baptist pastor. So I moved to a town called Swindon, which is pretty nondescript. And in my formative years, I grew up in the city of Sheffield, which is probably best known as the steel city of the UK, but also, to Americans, as where The Full Monty was filmed. My dad&amp;#039;s brother is also a minister, and my older sister and her husband are a ministry team at a church in Sheffield. I wouldn&amp;#039;t have known your birthplace from the show, though. You do a flawless American. Slowly in the last couple years, my understanding of the American accent has gotten a lot clearer. I did this play in London last year by a New York playwright called Nicky Silver, and out director made the point that it&amp;#039;s not so much about doing an accent but being American, embodying an American, their sensibility, how they articulate and gesticulate, how they use language. It&amp;#039;s much more direct than the old apologetic Brits. I stay in accent all day when I&amp;#039;m at work. At first I found it a bit weird, but we improvise around what&amp;#039;s scripted, and it&amp;#039;s helpful to not even think about what&amp;#039;s coming out of your mouth. I think I&amp;#039;ve started to dream in American a little bit. It&amp;#039;s impossible not to make the comparison between Rush and House. Did you watch that show back in the day? I did. One of my best friends was in that show, Jesse Spencer [who played Dr. Robert Chase]. Jesse and I used to have a house share in London, years ago, with my best friend from drama school, James McAvoy. Do you still see them often? James and I see each other a lot. We live very close to each other in London. Jesse I stay with a lot when I come to the states. Have you thought about Rush vs. House? There&amp;#039;s the obvious comparisons of these brilliant medics that are reliant on their self-medication, but I think that&amp;#039;s pretty much where the comparisons end. Rush is a much darker, visceral show. It&amp;#039;s certainly USA&amp;#039;s foray into trying to do a slightly edgier, darker, sexier show.  As an American, I&amp;#039;d never heard of the show Miranda, but in the UK the show&amp;#039;s made you into something of a rock star.  It was a strange one really. This pilot script came in for a tiny, low-budget thing called Miranda, written by this comedian called Miranda Hart who was just starting to rise in the comedy circuit in the UK. I remember reading it and thinking, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t really work out whether it&amp;#039;s funny or not. I think it is.&amp;quot; And I came out of the audition thinking, she&amp;#039;s hilarious and really off the wall. We did the pilot, got picked up, it created this momentum, and now it&amp;#039;s one of the most popular comedies in the UK.  I read an interview in which you said that a Miranda fan at a charity event asked if she could lick your face. Is that true?  That is the absolute truth. The funniest thing was that it was her asking to lick my face, and it was her boyfriend that was taking the photograph. And the boyfriend was egging her on, going &amp;quot;Go on, Tom, lick her face, lick her face!&amp;quot;  Is that the strangest request you&amp;#039;ve ever received from a fan?  Yeah. I mean, I&amp;#039;ve had people ask me to sign their breasts and stuff.  Well, did you?  That was a red carpet thing where people are throwing pens and books, and I think I probably did, actually.  Speaking of wholesome fun, do you ever take your daughters to set with you?  I have, yeah. The nice thing about Miranda especially is that the audience that we had was school kids right through to pensioners. It seems to be a show that people watch as a family, so it was the first job I&amp;#039;ve been involved in that certainly my oldest daughter and my middle daughter are big fans of, and proud that I&amp;#039;m in it, which is a nice feeling. My eldest daughter&amp;#039;s been to a few sets of mine and gets spoiled when she&amp;#039;s doing her nails, her hair. Though more often than not, you bring them to set, and they realize the filming process is pretty boring.  What&amp;#039;s your favorite daddy-daughter activity?  I have a big sign in my flat that says &amp;quot;No Dancing Dads&amp;quot; because from a very early age we&amp;#039;ve just put music on, and we dance around the flat. I have three sisters, and as a kid we used to go on this camping holiday every year to a farm in Wales. It&amp;#039;s a beautiful, picturesque farm with a river that runs right through it and rope swings, and I took my daughters there last year with my sisters and my nephews and nieces. That&amp;#039;s something that I&amp;#039;m going to do every year.  Do you watch other TV shows while filming?  The last TV show I really indulged in was Breaking Bad, and I was in such a state of mourning when it ended. I&amp;#039;ve got to choose my next one carefully. Breaking Bad I think in about three weeks. It&amp;#039;s almost like I had an affair with a TV show. I was like &amp;quot;one more.&amp;quot; It was as addictive as the stuff they make in the show. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a3613/rush-star-tom-ellis/>