CityLife

Interview: Eddie Izzard

By Sarah Walters

1 / 1 imagesEddie is going back to basics

IT may be a choice he hopes he’ll never have to make, but Eddie Izzard knows which career he’d pick if he had to opt for just one. And it wouldn’t be comedy.

“I think film was always my first love – I was about 10 when I decided I wanted to do that,” he says with a halcyon sigh.

“I do love stand-up, you know, but if I had to do only one, it would be film.

“I’ve done more years doing stand-up, that’s why I’m better at stand-up, and the more I work at something the better I get at it. I’ve only done half the time in film, so I’m still playing catch up.

“Fortunately, I don’t have to do only one, so I’ll do film and stand-up, and I work like crazy to make that possible.”

Working like crazy is a fairly accurate picture of how Eddie has spent the noughties. As the decade turned, Eddie’s 1998 stand-up show Dress To Kill was picked up by the US networks, boosting his profile Stateside and earning him two Emmys.

Since then, he’s become a Hollywood movie star – scoring roles in massive blockbusters Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen, The Chronicles Of Narnia, Igor and Tom Cruise’s controversial Second World War flick Valkyrie – and he’s written and starred in successful American TV drama The Riches.

Which is plenty for one man to tackle in nine years. But not Izzard, who at 47 has also laid out his intention to run for political office in 10 to 15 years ?(although there’s still a lot of doubt in his mind).

“When most people are thinking of retiring, I’m thinking of starting,” he says, “and I suppose I’d have to say goodbye to one career, ‘I won’t do that again’, and that’s just a bit tough.”

'Good bonkers'

He has also squeezed in a stint of running, completing 43 full marathons in 51 days in aid of Sport Relief – despite being a lifelong sceptic about long-distance running.

“I’d run as a kid – I liked running about and running races, so I was into it up to about the age of 13,” he enthuses, as Izzard only can.

“Football as well was a big passion of mine. But never long distance running – if I ever had to do that, I thought, ‘What the hell is the point?’. It didn’t grab me. And from 13 onwards, everything sporty disappeared.”

He rekindled a passion for exercise to get healthy, choosing to run while he was on film sets or on tour because it didn’t involve any equipment. But the plan to do what he calls ‘a big quest’ was never meant to be such a public one.

“I’d had this plan of doing a big adventure, a whole bunch of running, then Sport Relief sent round a mass email to anyone with a certain profile asking if we wanted to do any challenges.

“I got the email and I thought, ‘No, I’m not doing that’,” he laughs. “But then I thought, ‘Hang on, I could marry those two things together’. I realised that actually it could help because they’ve got all this access to Olympic advisors and doctors who can tell you whether you’re going to make it.

“The doctor was rather shocked. He obviously thought it seemed a little crazy, a little bonkers, but I was saying ‘good bonkers’.

“I had to decide to do the whole thing because if I was just doing it to have a go, it wouldn’t work. So I thought, ‘I will complete this whole thing no matter what happens’.”

Three arduous weeks of rain, blisters, psychological battles and pulled muscles followed until one memorable morning that Eddie finally woke up ready to run a marathon.

“I’d sort of got used to it: I’m going to run 26.2 miles on this day... it was like going to work; going to work is kind of like a marathon. As a kid, you’d never think you get up every morning and go to work. I just kept going.”

Less daunting

In the end, he enjoyed the experience so much that he’s now going into barefoot running. “It’s the same,” he says when we ask about the challenges of removing the trainers. “Just no shoes. And hopefully fewer blisters.”

This Christmas, he’ll take his first major role in a British drama when he plays sadistic autocrat Torrance in a remake of Day Of The Triffids for the BBC. Its airing is something he awaits with trepidation.

“It’s with Dougray Scott, Joely Richardson (Nip/Tuck), Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox… that was a great thing to do and I really enjoyed that.

“Making films is odd work in the way that you put pieces of a jigsaw together in a film and you shoot them out of sequence, which at first makes you feel kinda crazy but you have to get used to that, and I have pushed myself hard to get used to that.

“I hope Day Of The Triffids turns out the way I think it turned out. I mean, you can shoot something for a year and a half before it comes out.”

But before all that, Eddie is back in the UK for a massive comedy tour. He’s already had to do battle with a raging head cold that threatened to steal his voice just a few days into the tour, but that and any nerves are now behind him.

Stripped has been a work in progress for over a year. He first performed the show proper at the Lyric Theatre in London at the end of 2008, and is releasing a DVD on November 23, filmed at the 23-night residency.

Better still, he brings it to the MEN Arena for two nights this weekend – his first in six years – and he says revisiting the arena is far less daunting this time round.

“Last time I did the arena tour, it was a big challenge, it was the first arena tour in the UK for stand up and it was about getting used to those venues,” he remembers.

“But now it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember these places’, and it’s so much easier. And I’m also very much on top of the material so I’m playing around a lot more on this very large stage which doesn’t seem so large any more in front of this really large audience, which doesn’t seem so large any more.

Randomness

“I’m just trying to make it like my front room; it’s just a lounge and everyone’s in the lounge and I’m just going, ‘So yeah, what about this? And what about that?’.”

Eddie’s discursive style of comedy is very like that; it’s designed to swallow the audience in a disorientating ramble, or throw them off the scent via some massively off-topic tangents.

Stripped, he says, is no different, but there’s a notable theme: Izzard is taking a pickaxe to the idea of God, having recently decided he is a ‘non-theist’. “I don’t believe in God,” he explains, “but I do believe in people.

“I’ve sort of summed the show up as the complete history of everything, but maybe that’s what my shows always are?

“I’m coming down quite hard on the official idea of God because I’ve decided that there’s so much randomness in the universe that I can’t believe someone had planned such randomness.

“It’s like a kid who just got one of those dice and kept throwing it, saying, ‘Ooo, what’s going to happen? Shall we have a tsunami now? Shall we have pestilence and a bit of plague here? And some big papist running a country?’.

“It just doesn’t look like a merciful person would come up with this.”

Its title, though, is also a reference to Izzard’s attire. A transvestite, Eddie says he’s gone back to ‘boy mode’.

“People were starting to feel that make-up equals stand-up, and that’s not the way it was supposed to be,” he says, sounding a touch frustrated.

“The show is kind of stripped back and based on material I developed in very small rooms, so it seemed right that I should strip back too.”

Eddie Izzard
MEN Arena
November 7 and 8, 2009
£30

Published: Fri, 06 November, 2009

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Tanya Wightman wrote:

I was so disappointed when I went to see Eddie Izzard. He looked and sounded bored and he sadly bored me and my husband. I too started nodding off. He kept thinking the audience didn't get his jokes, but the fact was he wasn't funny.

bluemoons wrote:

I went to see this show in Newcastle with my sister her husband my husband our son and his friend (uncle tom cobley too) ranging in age from 64 to 20 we all found the show far too random bit like a history lesson, my husband fell asleep !!! even the woman behind us in a very very sparkly top who laughed hysterically at everything Eddie said even Hello and was so excited as she had just got her tickets for the next strictly tour could not keep him awake by the way my husband was not the 64 year old.