Eddie Izzard interview: ‘I won’t play a straight female role – it would be taking from others’
“I’m not saying having nails is part of what makes me a woman,” says Eddie Izzard, showing off an enviable set of gleaming crimson fingernails. “I just like them. I like the sound they make,” – a hand clickety-clacks across the table – “and I wasn’t allowed nails when I was growing up as a boy.”
These days, Izzard – one of the most talented stand-ups to emerge from the British comedy scene of the 1990s – identifies as gender fluid, uses she/her pronouns and sometimes goes by the name of Suzy. But she seems less wedded to any of these labels (“He, she – it doesn’t matter!”) than she is to a good manicure. “Anyway,” she adds, “they are not only my nails now; they are Gertrude’s and Ophelia’s nails, too.”
Izzard, 62, who for three decades has combined an international comedy career making jokes about jazz chickens with a quieter one as an actor both on stage and screen, has wanted to play Hamlet for years – yet the offer never came. “I’ve pushed all my life to play Shakespeare, but no producer is going to build a Hamlet around me,” says Izzard, whose 2003 Broadway -performance in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg was nominated for a Tony Award. “People think of me only as a comedian. So I decided to do it myself.”
Izzard’s brother (and frequent collaborator) Mark has adapted Shakespeare’s longest tragedy into a two-and-a-half-hour solo show in which Izzard plays not only the Dane, but also his mother, his lover and every other role, too. Earlier this year, the production ran in Chicago and New York, and next week begins a five-week run at the Riverside -Studios in west London.
Even for a master of the extended monologue such as Izzard, the role of Hamlet is surely enough of a challenge: so why take on the entire play? “Mark and I did the same thing with Great Expectations,” she says, referring to their solo Dickens adaptation, which received a warm reception in the West End last year. “I love living inside a piece, and honouring the female and male characters equally.” What’s more, she adds, “I have this theory that Hamlet is actually Shakespeare himself… all that self-analysing he does about God and conscience and how to square the two.”
Izzard has never believed in God, but she’s subjected herself to a fair amount of self-analysis over the decades: she first came out as a transvestite in 1985, just as she was taking her first steps as a stand-up at the Comedy Store in London.
“It took a lot of psychological -preparation,” she says. “I was scared of my brain. I had to let the secret out, but I also had to keep my career from exploding at the same time. So I had to analyse every-thing very carefully, very deeply.”
One -complicating factor was that the available terminology of the era didn’t really fit with how Izzard thought of herself. For example, the word “transgender” wasn’t yet in common usage, so she would say “Just call me TV” instead. “Some people actually thought I meant a tele-vision. Others would go, ‘Oh, so you wear women’s clothes?’ I’d say, ‘No, they are my clothes, I bought them. This is me being me, as opposed to me trying to be -something other.’”
Izzard had known she wanted to be a girl since she was four, but didn’t tell her father until just before she went public. “We were having sausage and chips in Croydon after watching Crystal Palace play. I remember thinking, I can’t tell him at the game that I like wearing lipstick, in case anyone hears. Afterwards, he wrote me a letter saying, ‘It’s OK, I’m fine with it, and if mum were alive, she’d be OK with it, too.’ So that meant a lot.”
We’re sitting in the offices of Izzard’s management in Soho. She is wearing a short skirt and a women’s leather jacket, not because she considers them “signifiers of femininity – they mean something quite different to how I feel inside – but I like catching myself in the mirror and thinking, ‘Hey, looking good.’
“My legs are in quite good shape,” she adds, placing a foot on the table. It is true, they are – as one might expect of someone who, in 2021, ran 31 marathons in 31 days. “And, yes, I’m wearing high heels; but, again, this is my choice, because if I had worn them as a teenager, then I would have been shot at dawn.”
These choices were hard won: at school, Izzard would walk more aggressively and deliberately deepen her voice to hide any trace of femininity. “Fortunately, I was very good at football,” she says. I say it sounds like a lonely childhood. “Yes. But at least I always fancied girls. It was harder for the gay kids. Anyway, I’ve always been very good at being on my own.”
Izzard was born in 1962 in Aden, in what is now Yemen, although by the time she was seven, the family had settled in Bexhill, on the East Sussex coast. She wanted to become an actor after seeing a school play at the age of seven, the year after her mother died from cancer. “I saw in the love the audience had for the lead actor, the love my mum had had for me,” she says. “I think in my mind they became the same thing.”
Izzard’s father (an accountant, who died in 2018) was a big fan of The Goon Show and, coupled with her own love for Monty Python, she says, “I basically grew up with British surrealism in -stereophonic.” Izzard started a degree course in accounting and financial manage-ment at the University of -Sheffield, but dropped out after a year and drifted into comedy, honing a whimsical, stream-of--consciousness-style absurdism, first as a street performer, then in small-scale stand-up clubs. By the mid-1980s, Izzard had moved to the capital, where she gained a toehold in a burgeoning alternative-comedy scene that also included Jo Brand and Patrick Marber, the future playwright. “What Hamburg was for the Beatles, London was for stand-up back then,” she says. “There was a room above every pub. You don’t get that now.”
Always ambitious, she realised she had to move up a level: “Steve Martin told me it was essential to get your name on the outside of a building” – and by the 1990s she was appearing in major theatres, setting a world record in 1997 for playing to the largest comedy crowd ever assembled: 8,700 at London’s Docklands Arena. Her 2015 tour visited 26 countries on five continents, making the most of her talents as a linguist; she can perform her stand-up routines fluently in Arabic, French, Russian, German and Spanish.
But whatever success comedy brought, Izzard never lost the desire to do theatre. “I’d stopped doing drama completely in my teenage years. I didn’t feel very sexually self-confident. I’d completely let it go.” In about 1992, she got a theatre agent, and in 1994 appeared in a West End production of David Mamet’s play The Cryptogram, following it the next year with Marlowe’s Edward II in Leicester and then, a few years after that, with Joe Egg in New York.
Film roles also came Izzard’s way: in the 1996 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, opposite Bob Hoskins; alongside Tom Cruise in Valkyrie (2008); with Judi Dench in Victoria & Abdul (2017). Still, it’s been a struggle.
“It’s always hard to get people to see you as more than one thing,” she says. “It comes down to money: producers, particularly in America, always think, how much money can I make off this person? If they have a comedy audience, will they find a drama audience? I’ve tried to train my audience to come across.”
Talking to Izzard sometimes feels like getting trapped in one of her freewheeling comic riffs – a question about gender can quite quickly lead to a story about a tiger – and she is open, entertaining company. Does her experience of being trans, a “lesbian trapped in a man’s body” as she once put it, make it easier for her to access other personas, both as an actor and a comedian? “It certainly helps me inhabit characters such as Gertrude, or Miss Hav-i-sham,” Izzard says. “As a trans person, I try to find the female characters inside me and the male characters. I am Hamlet and Ophelia. But the more you think about what makes someone particularly male or female, the more the idea of gender characteristics disappears. I used to think being a good footballer was masculine, but we know now that’s -bull----, that’s not masculine, it’s just being a good footballer.”
One line she’d be reluctant to cross (beyond the context of a solo production) would be to take on the role of a biologically female character in a straight play, since, “there’s too much politics around that to do it at the moment. So I will play trans roles or straight male roles, but I won’t play a straight female role, because that would be seen as taking a role from someone else.”
Otherwise, she’s pretty relaxed about gender, showing no sign of the fury that seems to -characterise so much recent debate about the subject. What does she think of the younger generation who take a more militant approach to pronouns and “misgendering”? Izzard shrugs. “People today say, ‘It’s really tough being trans because of the things people say.’ But when I came out, there were no conversations at all. To some people, I was just a toxic, disgusting, horrible person.”
She has spoken in the past in defence of J K Rowling and other gender-critical feminists who argue that sex is biologically determined. But today Izzard tells me, “My line on all of this is that women’s rights are human rights, and trans rights are human rights and we have to live together. I’d fight like crazy for women’s rights, but I don’t want to get into the -biological-determinism argument, because it’s a minefield. I just keep sailing on. I don’t think I’m doing any harm to anyone.” Where does she stand on the question of whether trans women should be allowed to compete in female sports? “I think it needs to be judged on an individual basis. But I don’t have a magic answer to all these things just because I’m trans.”
Izzard’s non-adversarial attitude reflects her approach to stand-up – a glorious, ad--libbing, physical style that arguably reached its acme in a still irresistible 1994 skit in which the comedian attempts to persuade you that the sound you’d always assumed was your cat purring is, in fact, the noise of a pneumatic drill, operated by that cat, to tunnel through your living room floor.
In this respect, she stands apart from the socially engaged comedy of contemporaries such as Ben Elton, or the open-provocation approach favoured by Ricky Gervais or Dave Chappelle. Izzard’s jokes are rarely made at the expense of other people. “Except Hitler,” she says, “I’m quite happy to be cruel about him. But I don’t want to do comedy that makes people feel uncomfortable. I hate this bunfight of ‘I hate you and I hate you’ that so many comics these days seem to thrive on. I’m trying to pull people together; there’s enough pushing apart in the world. I do think I have an ability to find the common ground.”
It is partly this that drives her towards politics. She has twice stood, unsuccessfully, for selection as a Labour candidate – first for Sheffield Central in 2022, then for Brighton Pavilion last year. But she’s not giving up. “God, no, I never give up. I’m still very keen to get a seat at the next election, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll fight a by-election.” What does she think of Keir Starmer? “I don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s definitely heading in the right direction.”
As for Izzard’s own future direction, she says she’d quite like to have a family. “I know trans relationships are tricky. I would love to adopt, or even have children myself. But I’m not actively going around worrying about it.” For the moment, though, her focus remains on her ever-evolving career. “I’ve always been very driven. But I don’t see the things I want to do as a series of challenges,” Izzard says. “It’s not like, ‘How many elephants can you fit into a Mini?’ Instead, it’s always been about pushing back against the fear.”
Hamlet is at Riverside Studios, London W6 (riversidestudios.co.uk), May 23-June 30
