Izzard’s Comedy Amnesty
Updated: 03 Apr 2001 From BBC.co.uk

Eddie Izzard was riding around London on a double decker bus today (Tuesday) promoting a massive comedy gig he's hosting for Amnesty International.

It'll be at Wembley Arena on June 3rd. There's no line up as yet - but he promises big names in comedy and music.

Meanwhile, Eddie's just finished filming with 'Friends' star Matt Le Blanc for the movie 'All The Queens Men'.

Eddie told Radio 1 he was amazed that Matt gets stopped everywhere he goes: "He was recognised even in Hungary - lots of fans coming up saying 'You're in 'Friends' - you're Joey!' I pretended to be his manager just to give him a bit of space." 

Audio interview

Sunday Mirror, 1^st April 2001 Thanks to Claire for typing this up

Eddie Izzard saunters towards me looking macho. Yes, macho. At the very least I had expected a mattering of eyeliner, a hint of mascara and a touch of lip gloss from Britain’s most famous transvestite.

Instead I am faced with a man, who, quite simply, screams sex appeal.

He is dressed in a plain black T-shirt and jeans. His trendy black shoes show no sign of a high heel and his angular features are very male indeed. He is even sporting a copper-coloured goatee beard.

I fix him with my steadiest gaze as I reach over to shake his hand (yes, that  grip is very masculine indeed)

We meet for lunch at the exclusive Chateau Marmont Hotel, which towers over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angles. Eddie chooses a shady spot under a parasol and lights up the first of many cigarettes. He smokes like a man too.

At first he seems serious, almost shy, but it isn’t long before he has me howling with laughter as he launches into his trademark rapid-fire observations on life as a straight transvestite.

‘I’m in blokey mode at the moment’, he announces. ‘I’m quite comfortable as a man and equally at home as a woman. Having said that, I will admit that I have always suffered from breast envy. I thought about changing sex and then thought  I would just look like a man who had changed sex, soI didn’t have implants.

‘If I had been born a woman I would have been happy, but I wasn’t, and now I see myself as a male tomboy. I seem to have the gift of being given chromosomes that are saying ‘ we are neither XX or XY, but something like XP’. Maybe there are some Z chromosomes in there as well’.

This is the kind of quick-fire, lateral-thinking delivery we have come to expect from our favourite cross-dressing comedian. And there’s plenty more where that came from.

‘I am a male lesbian but the butch   part of me still wants to drive fast cars and leap out of aeroplanes in a parachute. When I was a kid, although I enjoyed dressing up, I also wanted to join the army. Part of me just wants to run around and climb trees and things’.

Once I have stopped laughing, I want to know if Eddie is actually happy being this bloke who sees himself as part femme-fatale, part action hero.

‘I don’t  know the answer to that’ he muses. ’ I kind of had to invent a place where I ‘m happy. This action-transvestite place. This is  a place which exists and you’d better get used to it because in the future there will be way more guys wearing make-up’

Eddie, 39, is in LA because he has just finished filming two movies he hopes will mark him out as an actor as well as a comedian.

He’s riding high following his success at the American Emmys last year for his TV show Dress to Kill, and he is full of news of his latest role as Artistic Director of Amnesty International, a baton he is clearly proud tohave been handed by John Cleese.

He switches suddenly into serious mode as he talks at full throttle about the importance of Amnesty and his anger at human rights violations committed across the world.

Eddie, an ardent Labour supporter and avid pro-European, says, ‘I have to be serious about this. I can’t talk crap. It’s a major job for me’

He will be fronting a top live event entitled We Know Where You Live at Wembley Arena on June 3^rd to celebrate 40 years of Amnesty’s achievements. It’s the successor to the famous Secret Policeman’s Ball, and Eddie is hoping to recruit a star-studded cast.

He says, ‘ I pushed for renaming it. We Know Where You Live is a phrase used by gangsters against ordinary people. This is ordinary people using the phrase against gangsters. We know where they are at exactly   the right time to do something about it’.

With the political stuff out of the way – for now – I endeavour to get to know Eddie better. He was born in Yemen in 1962. His father John was then an accountant for petroleum giant BP and his mother Dorothy was a midwife. Tragically his mother died of cancer when Eddie was six – an event he believes led him to crave the public affection he now enjoys. His father later married his  stepmother Kate.

Soon after his mother’s death, Eddie was sent to boarding school and set about becoming the class clown. He like wearing frocks from the age of four but kept his passion to himself. At 15 he was caught stealing lipstick but lied and said it was for a girl.

At 21 he came out to an ex-girlfriend but waited until he was 29 to tell his father – who barely batted an eyelid. A 30 he performed his fist gig in a dress.

These days Eddie is entirely at ease with himself. He divides his time between his home in London’s Notting Hill and Los Angeles, where he is seen as King of the Cross-dressers.

He is fiercely protective of his private life and on the subject of his private life on and on the subject of his   long-term girlfriend, he is infuriatingly vague.

‘I  don’t like talking about her’, he says, ‘She is a human being. She is a member of this planet. She is mercurial’.

How long has he been seeing her? ‘A while Do they live together? ‘Sort of, kind of’. In England? ‘I dunno, maybe’.

How often do they see each other? ‘I’m not sure’. Is she in  showbusiness? ‘I can’t say’  Will they marry? ‘I’m not really into marriage. Maybe one day we will go public and end up as another showbiz relationship to be shot down in flames ‘ he adds caustically.

‘I don’t talk about her and everyone thinks she doesn’t exist or she is a front for me being gay. There will be a point when we talk about this. I can’t go there now, he says pleadingly.

Then there is the question of Eddie and children.

His super-quick response restores our previous humour. I would be the perfect one-person family’ he announces. ‘I couldn’t give birth, but I could give make-ups tips and football tips’.

‘Having children is in my mind as something I would like to do at some point in the future. The male part of my psyche tells me I’ve got a bit of time. Otherwise, I could adopt’.

‘Having children is the genetic continuation of the human species which on the whole I think should be saved’ he adds, once more diverting attention from himself.

I am desperate to know what kind of woman he fancies. Not just for my own reasons, of course. His legions of female admirers want to know too.

He takes a manly drag (no pun intended) of his cigarette and a long sip of coffee. ‘I fancy a lot of women but I have to admit I am a breast man’ he whispers.

‘I love vampy, vavoomy women’ he says. ‘I like curves as opposed to that strange needle shape’.

I suppress a sudden urge to hug him close to my own curvy self as he continues ‘ I don’t have a preference over hair colour but I do like blondes’. Damn. ‘Then again brunettes are nice and sometimes you  look at redheads and you think that’s nice.

OK, the odds are looking better.

Eddie will be 40 next February, an age at which most people take a long, hard look at their lives. Or have a mid-life crisis.

‘What kind of mid-life crisis could I possibly have’ he says, laughing. ‘I’m a straight male transvestite so I had my crisis in my twenties. I didn’t have a  30 problem and I don’t have a 40 problem. I’m sorted really’.

‘Telling my dad I was a  transvestite was difficult, but he’s fine about it. Right now I’m content. Turning a certain age is irrelevant to me’.

Eddie is adamant that he has never fancied another man, despite confessing to be ‘very open’  to the idea.

‘The only times I have ever snogged a guy have been on stage and I thought to myself can I deal with this? I just did it and it was OK’.

In his new film, All the Queen’s Men, due out in the autumn, Eddie plays a bisexual transvestite. ‘My character likes men and women and his ex-wife has a relationship  with a guy he had an affair with and it becomes a big, weird ménage-a-trois..

But in real life men are just not for me.

He once boasted that he would do a gig on the moon. Eddie runs his fingers through his copper-streaked cropped hair when I ask him if it’s still an ambition? ‘I grew up with this ‘you can’t do this and you can’t do that’ stuff. When I came to America, people said my work would not translate. It did. When I started out people said I wouldn’t make it and I did. You have to keep going.

‘I still have lots of ambitions. I’ve got to do gigs in Spanish, Russian and German.’

I ask him why. ‘Because I can’ he responds.’ If I do it some other crazy person might do it as well’.

‘I speak French to the standard of a 10 year old. I can ask for a lot of biscuits or a helicopter with jam on. I German I can just ask for a car with jam on. To do stand up I will have o go to school for a month and then do it.

In this business you have to stay on your toes and stay original. I won’t do stand up for three years. I’ll do films and then I’ll do stand up again’.

Asked if he is a workaholic, Eddie ponders hard. ‘I’m a very lazy person with a huge drive. I would rather do nothing, but  I hate myself when I’m doing nothing. I’m a momentum beast.

If I stop, I just like to stop like an ocean liner. Once it stops you can’t  get the thing moving. Once it’s moving you can’t stop it and that’s me – although I’d rather just watch telly and sit in bed’ he adds confusingly.

‘I’m fairly content with how things are going. I want to do good dramatic acting parts. It’s quite difficult to get parts when you’re this tranvestite straight guy.

Being blokey I’m getting to do more straight parts, which is great.

I ask him if he ever tires of touring, if he craves a more settled existence? ‘No way’ he says emphatically. ‘If you’re born in Yemen, move to Northern Ireland and then to Wales and are then sent to all these boarding schools and move around a lot, then you just don’t want to settle in the usual way.

‘I like to have a base to come back to but I think the bases are always going to move.

Eddie makes no secret of the fact that he wants to get to the very top of his profession and has previously gone on record as saying that the British view of ambition is on a par with murdering babies.

He laughs as he recalls the hoo-ha he caused at the time. He says ‘This is part of the reason why I want Britain to become part of a federal Europe. Britain is the size of one state of America.

‘I have a hugely supportive spirit and if we become part of Europe then so much more is possible. Take the Olympics, for example. America won the most medals but if you put all the European countries together as one, we trounced everyone.

‘Ambition is frowned upon in Britain. I like to think I’m like my dad and mum. They both went to Yemen, which in the fifties was like going to the moon.’

The loss of his mother remains a huge driving force in Eddie’s life and he admits to using audiences as a replacement for her affectionate presence in his life. ‘That’s my analysis of things anyway’, he says with sadness. ‘She is a real presence. She’s out there in the ether’.

Eddie seems to have fallen in love with America – and the feeling is mutual. ‘They believe anything’s possible. That’s why I think Britain should join Europe. We are suffering from post-Empire thinking. We were on the winning team after the Second World War but our influence dwindled. America came along thinking they’ve got tons of cash – let’s build loads of planes and become a superpower.

‘I like to think on a global scale. In England our internet sites are dot.co.uk. Why do we do that? Why aren’t we dot.com? Why aren’t we thinking worldwide?

I tentatively ask Eddie why his quintessentially English accent  seems to be laced with an American accent these days.

He throws up his hands in horror. ‘No, no, I don’t think it is’ he says. ‘On telly when I’m doing stand up I will move through different voices. My voice wanders and moves about a bit, but I will have to check this American twang out immediately. I can’t hear it.

In an hilarious attempt to prove his point Eddie suddenly bursts into French. It’s all I can do to shut him up and get him back to having a sensible discussion.

Eddie returns to the subject of politics and I ask him how he views New Labour and the trouble in which it currently finds itself.

Last year he was revealed as one of the many celebrities who had given over £5,000 to Labour.

He also accompanied controversial minister Keith Vaz on a pro-European trip from Paris to London, but he denies they are friends. They only met that once.

He says, ‘There may be allegations of sleaze. I don’t like it but stuff happens. It I was working for the Conservative Party I would be looking for whatever stuff I could.

‘I met Keith Vaz during the tour and I met Peter Mandelson before the last election. I am being honest when I say that I don’t know any politicians in a friendly way.’

He happily admits he has donated £10,000 to the Labour cause and will be glad to give more in the future.

‘I haven’t got anything from the money I gave in the past. There are no knighthoods on the way as far as I know’.

‘I remain very positive about the Labour Party. I’m a realist and my dream is Europe coming together.

‘I believe it is important for Europe to be unified. We are at peace at the moment and that is a good thing. There is a strong middle-income   group which is good for society because it means there is less extremism.

‘If there is poverty and enormous wealth and nothing in between it breeds terrorism.

‘Britain joined the EEC behind everyone else and we should not do that again with the European currency. We need to be there at the beginning when the key decisions are being made.’

That’s quite enough serious talk. As we leave the hotel and make our way along Sunset Boulevard I ask him that all-important question – is he a Rimmel or a Clinique man?

Apparently he swears by MAC make-up and his favourite nail varnish is Chanel. He shaves his legs because waxing is painful and creams are ‘too messy’.

I point out my newly painted toenails and he dismisses the pink nail polish as ‘suspiciously Miss Selfridge’.

I laugh and proffer him my cheek in farewell. Instead he plants a smacker on my lips. Well, he did say he liked his women vavoomy.

EDDIE IZZARD’s brand of left-field whimsy and his droll, amicable personality shining out from everything that he does have made him an undisputed national favourite. His comedy treads surreal and delightful paths creating worlds in which crafty pets prospect for oil behind living room sofas — but it never strays into malice or cheap crudity

The easy charm of the 39-year-old has won over people who might, with another public figure, have been uncomfortable with his penchant for wearing make-up.

It is this winning mixture of determination and levity which he is bringing to bear on wbat he sees as a deeply important responsibility hosting and organising the sequel to the most famous fund-raising comedy events of the past three decades, The Secret Policeman’s Ball.

The responsibility he feels lies not in the event per se — although for comedy fans it will have a great deal to live up to but for the cause that it champions, the human rights charity Amnesty International. A spectacular one-night festival of stand-up comedy and music at Wembley Arena on June 3, it marks the 40th anniversary of the crusading organisation.

Although laughter and earnestness can be uncomfortable bedfellows take the disconcerting and sobering pictures of poverty-stricken children that are often interspersed into the annual Comic Relief nights on the BBC —Izzard believes profoundly in the event.

“John Cleese recommended me to do it, fool that he is,” he says.

“He did it originally so it’s a handing on of the baton. It’s a big undertaking, but I’ve played Wembley before and so it should be a wild, crazy hectic night. Comedy in this situation is to raise money and raise awareness.

“This is human politics. I deal with them more and more in my stand up.

“I talk a lot of garbage of course and I don’t deal with party politics. I’m not so interested in that because it soon disappears,

“Comedy has a certain amount of force, but I don’t know how much it actually changes things, People get entertained by it, that’s the first thing, so with people coming to Wembley it will raise money and we can sell the television rights around the world,” he explains.

The line-up for the concert, titled We Know Where You Live, is being kept a closely guarded secret although “huge” names from here and the United States are being promised. The original concerts in 1979 and 1982, which were recorded and released as two films, featured Peter Cook, Billy Connolly John Cleese, Michael Palm, Victoria Wood, Alan Bennett and Rowan Atkinson and are seen as snap shots of the best comedy of the period.

ALTHOUGH the first two concerts featured several famous sketches and skits, Izzard says that the emphasis this time will be slightly different, mainly because the original Balls were filmed in the more intimate surroundings of a theatre.

“I think it’s going to be more stand-up based,” he says.

“It’s kind of weird in Wembley because it feels more logical to do stand-up. I think you could do sketches — with a lot of cameras and huge screens it might be possible. Still, it will probably be mainly stand-up. You lose on intimacy but you gain on event,”

The drive which Izzard is displaying in promoting the Amnesty concert is entirely characteristic, in his own way he has long been a campaigner but without ever displaying the slightly irritating political didacticism of someone like Ben Elton.

Izzard’s causes are the political movement towards a more integrated and mutually understanding Europe and what he calls the “transgender community”. He describes himself as a “male lesbian”, someone who feels at home as a woman but who is sexually exclusively attracted to women. He has a girlfriend, but adamantly refuses to reveal her identity or discuss the relationship.

He was born in Yemen in 1962. His father John worked for petroleum firm BP as an accountant and his mother Dorothy was a midwife.

When Izzard was six, his mother died of cancer. Soon after this, he was sent to boarding school where, like so many other comics, his talent for laughter surfaced in the classroom. He says that he liked wearing frocks from the age of four, but kept that fact to himself, At 15, he was caught stealing lipstick but lied and said it was for a girl. At 30, he performed his first comedy gig in a dress.

“It wasn’t a drama at all,” he says. “The way I do it is to go on to talk a lot of garbage. My career is talking rubbish, or doing films and being creative, and I just happen to be transgender. It’s a lot more cool and groovy now. You separate sexuality and what you do for a living.”

It’s not just with this personal issue that Izzard practises what he preaches. As an ardent believer in closer ties between us and our European neighbours, he has taken the brave step of performing comedy gigs in as many countries as he can — and in their native languages irrespective of whether he can already speak them or not.

“I want to do a gig in Germany in German, by the end of 2002 that’s my next plan,” says Izzard, who has donated £10,000 to the Labour Party

“Spain, Italy Russia, Japan. I just keep mentioning it so people say ‘Hey you said you were going to do this’ and then you can’t get away from it. I’m a tenacious b*****d and if I get it in my head to go and do something, I’ll keep battering away

“The early French gigs I did were quite awful, they were not entertaining, they were just me stammering and having a bad time. By the end of the last ones I did, two weeks of playing in Paris, I was quite entertaining, a decent gig. My French is like a 14-year-old trying to do stand-up. I can ask for a helicopter with jam on it, so it sounds a bit off, but the only way you can get on is to keep pushing at it.

“The thing is, 1 have this relentless dogged approach for things and it seems the only way of doing it. I’m into the idea of a melting pot in Europe and Britain should be a part of it. We’ve never adjusted to the loss of the Empire, but we need to think on a big scale again as part of a bigger entity So if we just talk to each other, get a hit more trust going on, we will get somewhere.”

IZZARD, who divides his time between a home in London’s Notting Hill and a pad in Los Angeles, anD who says he is unashamedly ambitious, is also increasingly turning his concentration to films. His celluloid career so far has been bumpy He has acquitted himself well in some not very good films, such as the Avengers movie with Ralph Fiennes, but he is showing characteristic grit.

“Film is something I’ve always wanted to do,” he says. “I’ve always been a movie nut, so almost every thing I ye done has been to try to get into the films even though I now love doing stand up and lye always loved doing comedy But I don’t think I’ve done really good work up to now. That’s OK because I have to learn the technique and I dido t really know what I was doing.’

However the parts or’ still being offered. “I’ve just played Charlie Chaplin in a film called The Cat’s Meow. Peter Bogdanovich directed that, ‘ he says. ‘I think that’s going to be good. The vibe on it’s good It’s about William Randolf Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies. In 1924, they did a boat trip party Charlie Chaplin was on board, Louella Parsons the American gossip columnist was on board and someone got shot on the yacht and it was all covered up.

“I play Chaplin aged about 35 and at that time just about the most famous person in the world. Its not about the public Chaplin, it’s about the private Chaplin chasing after Marion Davies. It will be interesting to see what people think.

“There is another film as well called All The Queen’s Men which is about four soldiers going into (Germany to pick up yet another Enigma machine, but they have In dress up as women.

“It’s a bit like Some Like It Hot meets The Great Escape and it’s got the Second World War as a kind of backdrop. It’s all about sex and sexuality and women working in men's jobs and men dressing up as women and it has a comedy element.”

Given Izzard’s own background, it seems at last Hollywood has come up with a part tailor’ made for him.

We Know Where You Live. Live! June 3. 2001, Wembley Arena

www.weknowwhereyoulive.net

Tickets available from Wembley Arena Telephone: 0870 7311050 or www.wembleyticket.com. Ticket prices. £25-£35.

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