NO, BUT SERIOUSLY...
by Steve Rose
Having conquered the
stage with his stand-up shows, cross-dressing comic Eddie Izzard is now
seeking big-screen success, and a mastery of European languages
The Guardian 6th January
2001
When you're a famous
stand-up comic renowned for spontaneous wit and generous make-up, the
prospects for being taken seriously as a film actor are slim from the
outset. Having registered in the American market, winning two Emmys last
year for his Dress To Kill video, and even performed successfully in
French, it's a surprise that Eddie Izzard bothered. But the 38-year-old
former street performer is due to crop up on the big screen a great deal
over the coming year, starting with his role as a forensic scientist in
British conspiracy thriller The Criminal.
Your acting career in
general seems to be going very well these days.
I've still got a lot to
learn, especially technique, I'm taking lessons. Then again I couldn't
do stand-up when started out, not to save my life, so that doesn't put
me off. But I've wanted to be an actor since I was seven. So it was part
of the plan I guess.
Have you found it hard to
be taken seriously?
Well I totally expected
that. That's why I chose never to do sitcom on TV. When stand-up was
taking off I decided to stay off TV for the prime reason that I didn't
want to get too well known, which has made it easier to do something
else now. In Britain a lot of people still don't really know who I am.
It's like, "Oh yeah, he's that guy on some chat show, I don't know
what he does, he puts on lipstick doesn't he?" I think America's
like that as well - so not that many people associate me with stand-up
here either.
Your look in The Criminal
seems a long way from your stage image.
Yeah, that's how my dad
looked when he was 30. I'm nicking his look.
Did you enjoy playing
against your established persona?
I don't really see it
like that because offstage, comedians are really solemn bastards anyway.
They develop comedy as a social tool at school, then you go professional
and you do it all the time on stage, and you become less and less funny
off stage, so you become a solemn bastard. My natural "me" is
sort of fairly serious. So playing a solemn bastard on film is sort of a
change, it's easier.
Were you attracted by the
conspiracy-thriller elements?
Oh yeah. I love film
thrillers and it was fun to get in there and play a lie - hopefully I've
got away with it. I'm sort of fascinated by real-life conspiracies, but
I don't get totally into them because it just takes too much time. There
are people who seem to spend their whole life locked around what's going
on with UFOs in Area 51, or whatever. It's just an area! There's more to
life!
What are you doing next?
You've still got Shadow
Of The Vampire to come out here, about the making of Nosferatu. I play
the big-assed guy who's a bad actor. And I'm in Berlin at the moment
shooting a film called The Cat's Meow directed by Peter Bogdanovich. I'm
playing Charlie Chaplin. It's based on the story of William Randolph
Hearst shooting someone on his boat trip. Supposedly it had something to
do with Chaplin dallying with Marion Davies, who was Hearst's mistress.
No one really knows what happened.
What does all this acting
mean for your comedy career?
Nothing at all really.
I'm stopping touring for two or three years and so I've got an open
period if great roles come in. I want Kevin Spacey's cast-offs - after
several other actors have turned them down. I could do stand-up till I
drop though. I'm learning German so I can do gigs in Berlin.
So how is it going?
Er, mein is sehr gut, er.
Just say, "he spoke very good German", will you?
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Are You
Ready for Eddie?
He may be the funniest stand-up you've never seen
The record for drawing
the largest audience to a live comedy show does
not belong to whom you would expect. Not Jerry Seinfeld. Not Monty
Python. Not Bill Cosby. And no, not Eddie Izzard, a manic British comic
who, according to John Cleese, is the "funniest stand-up
around." The owner of this proud record is Victor Borge, but Izzard
did draw the second largest audience in history. So there you are. And
anyway, who the hell remembers Victor Borge?
Remembering Izzard is an
easier task, since his skewed, brainy material burrows into your head
and remains there, buzzing, long after his two-hour-plus shows have
ended. He's not afraid to begin with "All right you fuckers,"
in his best side-mouthed cockney, before moving on to imagine the Stoned
Olympics, in which athletes are forced to ingest
performance-debilitating drugs. Oh yes, and he's a transvestite -- both
onstage and off, he often wears makeup and high heels. It's no surprise,
then, that Izzard, despite an acclaimed HBO special in 1998, has always
moved beneath the radar of most of America, although that appears to be
changing. Before the Aspen Comedy Arts Festival tribute to Monty Python
last year, Cleese secretly invited Izzard to pretend to be a member of
the legendary troupe. He played the impostor brilliantly, proving he
could hold his own with the de facto gold standard of comedy. More
recently, the Harvard Lampoon conferred upon Izzard the title of
"Best Purveyor of Surreal Bollocks," admitting him to a club
that includes Cosby and Robin Williams. Izzard's increasing fame should
be solidified by his latest project -- a furiously funny one-man show
titled Circle, which opens in Seattle in late May before moving
to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City, where it will run
through June.
"It circles a bunch
of weird shit together," Izzard says by way of explaining the
show's title, "and I sort of ramble wherever I need to." In
April, during a short run at New York's Westbeth Theater, Izzard often
turns to history, seizing its oddities for his own pointed comedic use.
He renames Nazi-sympathizer Pope Pius XII "Shithead Coward Bastard
the Twelfth" and plays a scene in which Jesus hosts the Last
Breakfast, and his disciples are served Rice Krispies ("These are
my corpuscles") and orange juice that doubles as plasma. At one
point, he rips into Margaret Thatcher, who he suggests should be
strapped to Celine Dion and dragged down to the Titanic for an
underwater duet. "And if they drown," he states grandly,
"that means they're innocent!"
For someone whose own
history is slightly twisted (Izzard is a former Eagle Scout who was born
in Yemen, and then there's that whole thing with women's clothing), such
jugular bits throw off a tinge of catharsis. "It's all so honed,
really," he says of his comedic attacks, as he sits down to get
made up before a performance. "You can really tear into people.
It's like you're trained as a bloody commando." Then he turns and
gets his face powdered.
By: Mark Healy
Photograph by: Danny Clinch
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| Drag
King 1st
Feb 2001 New Times LA
Actor-comic Eddie Izzard
just wants to be loved.
Eddie Izzard is both
action transvestite and the funniest man in or out of a gown.
By Robert Wilonsky
photo - Randee St. Nicholas
Eddie Izzard knows
precisely why he wanted to become a performer, be it an actor or
stand-up comedian or, for that matter, a street performer entertaining
passers-by for spare change. When he was 6 years old, Izzard was living
in South Wales with his parents and older brother. Before that, the
family had lived in Yemen (so exotic) and Northern Ireland (so green),
but in 1968, they were based out of grimy, industrial South Wales. It
was, however, a rather lovely existence. Izzard's dad, an accountant,
had been a hippie and would-be Communist in the 1950s; his mother the
nurse took care of people for a living, and he and his brother were just
two happy little kids gorging themselves on ice cream and innocent
trouble.
But in March 1968,
Izzard's mother died of cancer, and that "rejiggered
everything." Soon enough, Izzard and his brother would be sent to
boarding school. They were children forced quickly into adulthood, and
Izzard would spend the better part of 1968 in tears. Later, after
discovering the thrill of an audience's applause and affection, he would
often say he ended up making people laugh for a living because only as
an adult did he realize how much of the child in him he had left behind.
"Initially, I got
onstage purely for the attention, love, affection, and it was to do with
my mum dying, I'm pretty sure," he says through the crackle
and hiss of a cellular phone. "I did a play before she died, and I
can remember not being that bothered. I played a raven, and I was a
pretty good raven as ravens go. I didn't want to get typecast, maybe
that was it. But then she died, and it was not long after I saw
this..." He pauses, as he often does when talking about his mom.
"Actually, it was a couple of years after, and I remember seeing
this play and thinking, "Oh, I really want to do that.' I remember
the audience's affection and my mother's affection, because she was a
very giving and loving mother."
It may have taken him
some 20 years to realize his ambition--so many years of studying
accounting, acting in school theater productions, practicing his
"cutting-edge shit" on street corners--but Izzard now basks in
adulation. Last September, this 38-year-old, dyslexic,
lipstick-and-skirts-sporting self-proclaimed "action
transvestite" bested Chris Rock, David Letterman, Billy Crystal,
and Conan O'Brien when the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
handed out its Emmy Awards. For his stand-up special Dress to Kill,
which aired on HBO, Izzard won two golden statues: for writing and
performance in a comedy special or variety show. It was akin to the
National Football League handing out its Most Valuable Player award to a
place-kicker. Like the man says in his 1998 autobiography Dress to
Kill, published only in the U.K., he ain't exactly a household name,
especially not in this country. Not yet.
"I used to be--not a
household name, but a garden-shed name," he insisted.
"Trowel."
Trying to summarize one
of Eddie Izzard's stand-up routines is like trying to describe a dream
four days after it happened. It makes sense to no one, not even the
person trying to recount the story. And then, uh, he talked about how
cats aren't really meowing, but they're actually, uh, drilling for oil
behind the couch. Uh, get it? No? How about this? Eddie said that bees
make honey, so do spiders make gravy? That's funny, isn't it? C'mon.
Wait till you get to the part about how Hitler clearly never played Risk
as a kid. Adolph should have known: "You could never hold
Asia." One can no more condense Izzard's routine into an edible
morsel than one can shorten a John Coltrane solo. Brilliance can't be
reduced to sound bites.
But it is now his desire
to abandon the stage, for a moment, and leap onto the screen. He dreamed
of making movies from the time he was a child, though he thought only
the special and blessed were allowed to glimmer in the cinema. Fact is,
he never really wanted to do stand-up, an endeavor at which he's made a
quite decent living for nearly a decade. He wanted to be Steve McQueen,
Sean Connery, Michael Caine...or, at the very least, Oliver Reed. He
wanted to star in The Great Escape, jumping his motorbike over
Nazi barbed wire. He wanted to stumble onto the set of Local Hero
or sprint along the beach like the lads in Chariots of Fire. He
wanted to be a star--or, barring that, "a lead character
actor," a familiar face.
Earlier this very
morning, Izzard had auditioned for a part in a film he describes as
being a cross between The Usual Suspects and The Thomas Crown
Affair, though he's not sure how the audition went. The material was
so complex, rife with flashbacks and flashforwards, that it took him
three read-throughs to get into the part. "We'll see what
happens," he says, sounding like a man expecting the worst.
"I am a film nut who
wanted to do films from the age of 10, and I would have earlier if I had
realized that films were something you could do," he says. "I
just thought they were there and that gods do them."
Since 1996 he has
appeared in a handful of films, usually in roles so small one needs a
magnifying glass to see them. He showed up in Christopher Hampton's 1996
adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, played Sean
Connery's mute henchman in The Avengers, appeared as rock-star
agent Jerry Divine in Velvet Goldmine, and swaggered as a disco
baddie in Mystery Men--all of which amounted to mere minutes of
screen time.
Slightly larger is his
role as "bad, hammy actor" Gustav von Wangenheim in E. Elias
Merhige's just-released Shadow of the Vampire. But it's a role
nearly lost in the showdown between John Malkovich as director F.W.
Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, a vampire slumming it as a
Method actor in Murnau's film Nosferatu. Though Izzard is
larger-than-life onstage--like a jazz musician riffing about, tossing
out a thousand setups till he stumbles across the perfect punch line--he
fades into the background in Shadow, but such a fate is to be
expected. With Malkovich chewing the scenery and Dafoe chomping on bats
and beauties, even giants are bound to be devoured.
"People keep saying
nice things to me about Shadow of the Vampire, but I don't feel I
really did anything," Izzard says. "I wandered around."
But he's just finished
shooting two films in which he has rather large roles: In All the
Queen's Men, he appears as a cross-dressing lounge singer who
teaches a group of British special forces officers (led by an American, Friends'
Matt LeBlanc) how to dress and act like women in order to infiltrate
a female-run Berlin factory. In Peter Bogdanovich's forthcoming The
Cat's Meow, about the murder of Hollywood mogul Thomas Ince aboard
William Randolph Hearst's yacht, Izzard portrays Charlie
Chaplin--ostensibly the original target of the bullet, as Chaplin was
rumored to be carrying on an affair with Hearst's mistress.
Had Izzard sought out
comedic roles from the very beginning, perhaps he'd be more than a
garden-shed name in this country already. But his is a muted sort of
ambition. He craves success, especially in the States, but has long
insisted upon taking a circuitous route to achieve fame. In England, he
resisted doing too much television in fear of becoming overexposed; here
and abroad, he's taken small parts in oddball films (some of which
haven't even made it into theaters), wanting to pay his dues before
cashing in. For fans of his stand-up, watching him creep around the
edges of the movies in which he's appeared is frustrating. Where he
explodes onstage, he seems to disappear on film.
"If I said, "I
want to do comedy roles,' I think I might have gotten bigger roles
quicker, but I said I didn't want to do comedy roles," he says.
"I wanted to really pay my dues and get under the skin of a
dramatic role so that another actor might say, "Well, that was good
work.' The comedy thing hits really big, but people want to see you do
only that. When Jim Carrey or Robin Williams or Steve Martin moves into
a serious role, there's a reluctance from the producers and studios and
marketing people.
"If you do that
extreme comedy--comedy that is very druggy--people want to see more of
it. The beats of a dramatic role are much slower, and the bottom line of
comedy, especially in stand-up, is to be funny every 30 seconds or
whatever it is, and you have no structure. You're totally relying on
just hitting the funny, so you get excessively funny. It's a bit
like rock and roll: You have three-minute songs that grab, as opposed to
a symphony that might have high points and low points and take you
through moods. The reason I didn't want to do a sitcom and wanted to bag
the stand-up as much as possible is because you end up with this place
where people are reluctant to see you in a straight role. Hopefully,
there are a lot of people who might have heard of me but really don't
know what I do. They're like, "Didn't I see you on a chat show?'
They don't know what I do, which is great. It leaves you a blank
sheet."
Izzard first arrived on
U.S. shores as the ultimate oddity: a straight man from Britain who
liked to wear women's clothing and was in possession of more makeup than
a crazy aunt. But the clothes never made the man: His sexuality was and
remains a moot point to the audience; he's funny, but not to look at.
His father recalls that even at a young age, Izzard was fascinated with
his mother's stocking tops. The kid was 4, but he knew: He was a
woman trapped in a bloke's boxy body, and he fancied women, so he must
be a, well, male lesbian. (For a while, Izzard even thought of having
Little Eddie chopped off, but he decided to skip the knife and head
straight for the Versace.) He was stealing lipstick at the age of 15,
and finally came out in 1985, at the age of 23; he would tell a British
newspaper of his lifestyle six years later. Izzard told his dad he was a
trannie during a soccer game, and the old man said it was fine by him.
In his first comedy
special--Live at the Ambassadors, recorded in February
1993--Izzard is nearly unrecognizable, sporting a blue blazer, blue
jeans, and brown cowboy boots. He looks very much like a man who should
be standing in front of a comedy club's brick wall, albeit a man wearing
blood-red nail polish. And he sounds very much like a man struggling to
make up his bits on the spot; it's less stand-up act than rambling,
freeform monologue.
His 1994 show, Unrepeatable,
is a bit more in focus but long on familiar topics: advertising
("Wash your clothes..or no one will shag you"), laundry
("You always have to sacrifice a few socks and a pair of pants to
the God of Laundry"), food labels ("This jam was made by
groovy people out of fruit that agreed to be in the jam in the first
place--free-range fruit"), and politics ("I'm a revolutionary
liberal...I think, storm the House of Parliament, kick the fuckin' doors
in, get in there, and say, "Look, we'll pay for the damage'").
Watching those early tapes is like looking at old childhood photos; he's
still soft at the edges, still covered in the comedian's baby fat.
"I've worked it up
into a thing now, but stand-up was not easy," Izzard says.
"It took me a year and a half between the first two gigs. I never
thought I was gonna do stand-up. I liked being funny, but I think I can
have a germ of creativity and just work it and work it and work it and
get it into shape. I must have had a sense of humor--I think my family
has a sense of humor--but being able to be funny now, like just trusting
I can work something into funny, I sort of take that for granted."
He hit his stride with
his fourth special, 1997's Glorious: As he likes to say, the
surreal had given way to the surreal and observational, which, at last,
had given way to the surreal and observational and historical. A bit
about the death of Princess Diana morphs into a protracted bit about The
X-Files, which leads to a mention of his mother's death, and somehow
it all ties together. He begins talking about Noah's Ark and the Siege
of Troy, gets around to insisting that Achilles should have put his
vulnerable heel "in a fuck-off block of concrete," then
somehow ends up on a long discussion of vacuum-cleaning. By the time of Dress
to Kill, Izzard had become James Mason narrating a History Channel
documentary starring Monty Python, only with Izzard as John Cleese and
Michael Palin and Graham Chapman and so on.
In the end, Izzard has
hit upon the great secret of stand-up: For the audience to be
entertained, so too must be the man delivering the goods. Izzard is the
rare comic who looks to be having a better time than his audience; he
nearly levitates on the stage, bouncing about in shiny finery. There is
no rage in his humor; he has no demons to exorcise, unlike, say, one of
his idols, Richard Pryor. The anger was vanquished when he came out as a
transvestite. Now, beneath the makeup and Versace, there is only a
brilliant little boy in search of the ultimate giggle.
"The child of 6 got
locked up and lost to the world when my mum died," he says. "I
worked out how to open the lid on the kid who can come out and play, but
with all the knowledge of my life. The idea of playing in the head is
almost like opening out your brain, and my brain tends to move quite
fast. That's why I have difficulty writing. I can't type as fast as my
brain can move, which is really nice. I'm very pleased that my brain
does that, and I suppose if you think about it too much, you begin
worrying it might go away. It zips around, and I think because of my
dyslexia, I think laterally instead of vertically, which makes for
interesting sideways connections. It's fun jumping around, and it's also
fun when it starts happening, and I am not controlling it.
"You just let go.
It's either a Star Wars or Buddhistic thing. You just let go, and
the brain and mouth link up, and I'm not really controlling it, but I'm
trusting it. I know you can let go, and pretty often you'll hit
something funny. I can almost see the synapses of the brain spinning
around. In Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger has this scene where
he's beginning to decay, and the guy who runs this seedy motel is
knocking on his door, saying, "Hey, what happened, buddy? Cat die?'
And Arnold has all these answers in his brain, and he chooses,
"Fuck you, asshole.' That happens in comedy, too. You have this
mass of options, and you make this choice in the split of a second. You
can get a really fantastic one out, and you don't know where it comes
from. You haven't been actively working on it. You just...let go."
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