Interview: Eddie Izzard

Captain transvestite rides again

Smartly dressed & with a zest for words, Eddie Izzard is the consummate comedian transvestite about town. Victoria Nangle talks to the stand-up, writer and politcal activist

Do you have a specific writing process when you’re putting new shows together?
“Yes I do, it just doesn’t involve writing, that’s the weird thing. I write down little ideas when I know a show is coming up, so I’m just scribbling that all down, and sometimes they really don’t work. There was one which I was sure was going to be a big hit but I haven’t managed to get working yet. I still might try again.

So of the ideas I write down about half of them turn into ideas in the show, and that ends up being about a third of the show. The other ideas just come out of talking about something else, so the show develops the show. It’s like a culture, it just comes down to saying something and you think: ‘Oh yeah, what about this?’.

I started talking about human sacrifice and I said: ‘Well, they were killing people, so they cut someone’s head off’. Then I said: ‘Charles I’. And then I started saying: ‘Well Charles I was an English king and we cut his head off, you see, because he was a d***head that God had appointed on Earth, he kept on starting civil wars and so we cut his head off and, you know – death’s never great but that’s what you do to a d***head king’.

And then I started talking about 450 years after the Magna Carta so I got back into the medieval period and talking about Robin Hood because that’s when King John was around who signed the Magna Carta and then Richard The Lionheart… It all keeps leading from one to another!”

Do you read lots of historical books or are they things you’ve picked up throughout your life?
“It’s things I’ve picked up. I’m getting to the point where I’m trying to say ‘I should research this, I should research that’, but I’m also a lazy bastard. I’m the hardest working lazy bastard you’ve ever met. So I tend to go: ‘Hey! Ridley Scott’s done that film called Kingdom Of Heaven. Let’s go and see that. That’s about the Crusades and Ridley’s put in this historical stuff’, so I’ll learn from that or I’ll see a documentary on the Crusades. The fact that the Crusades came out of Pope Urban II, I think it was, and the guy in charge of Eastern Constantinople/The Eastern Roman Empire. I don’t know if you know this, but most crusades started because of this guy. He said: ‘I need 300 knights to help me I’m in a bit of a pickle over here’, and Urban said: ‘Alright I’ll send out a call’. He said: ‘Anyone who goes and helps with the Crusades, no matter what you’ve done with your life, you’ll be free and you’ll go to Heaven forever and you’ll have a great time’, so instead of about 300 knights turning up, about 50,000 people turned up. So it was just completely wrong and it all went crazy so that’s how that happened.”

You were essentially a storyteller at the time of Homer where you’re telling your own stories but putting your own spin on them all as histories…
“I try to take real facts and try not to spin them in a way which is untrue. Like I said: Hannibal, he came with 60 elephants and went over the alps and we all know this story so we go: ‘Yeah, he came with 60 elephants’. It’s f****** insane man, but insane in a good way because he was making a point – ‘Look what I can do, I can travel with 60 war elephants and crossed the bloody Alps’. And imagine someone coming on 60 pandas, what the hell! It’s that kind of emotional thing. So, I try and put in those things that people say: ‘Yeah, that would be a bit bonkers’.”

After so many marathons, so much political activity, your ironman training, and of course your comedic influence, have you ever considered which superhero you might be training to be?
“Yeah, Captain Transvestite.”

You moved away from transvestism to concentrate more on comedy though…
“No, I didn’t. I’m sitting here talking to you wearing eye-liner, painted nails and high heels so there you go. It’s a genetic thing and some people go ‘stop that’ and I go: ‘Well, I’m mainly boy but I got the extra girl bit, the girly bit, girl bit is what I have. That’s how it works but Captain Transvestite will obviously be my superhero’.”

“I’m the hardest working lazy bastard you’ve ever met”

Do you have particular policies that you have to make London more European when you run for London Mayor in 2020?
“I think London is pretty European actually, but I’m not coming up with policies seven years before the election. A week is a long time in politics, so seven years is an eternity in politics. But I do say get ready to vote. But I have to get a nomination first from the Labour Party so you know, stranger things have happened. But I do want to encourage people to be entrepreneurs and creative, that’s what we want. To use their brains and get themselves to a good place and then look behind them and see if they can help someone up. I do think there need to be regulations in the city of London and I know Boris Johnson is against that. If you don’t have that, then that means the things that happened last time will happen again, and no one wants that except the uber rich, the ultra rich and the people who don’t like putting anything back. And the vast majority of London and the world and the country is all centre centre right, centre left. That’s where most people are. Most people are live and let live. Most people are treat other people as you like to be treated.”

What keeps bringing you back to writing and performing comedy?
“I like making myself laugh! I am the one person sitting there front and centre at every gig, I am trying to actually impress myself, I’m trying to make myself say: ‘Oh that’s a crazy idea, I like that!’. At the moment I’m doing jokes about smoking a pipe. It used to be a wise thing, you smoked a pipe you said wise stuff. You didn’t say silly stuff with a pipe. And then it led into Lord Of The Rings being a pipe smoking film, and can you imagine Lord Of The Rings if they all smoked cigarettes? It would be a totally different film. Then I act out the whole scene, the meeting at Elrond’s house where they say ‘F****** hell, what are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I am not taking this ring into Mordor, are you out of your f****** mind?’. And it’s a whole sort of East end of London cigarette-smoking Lord Of The Rings version. Which is beautiful! It’s very silly and it changes every night because I’m not quite sure where it’s going.

I did a remix or a sequel to the Darth Vader at the canteen thing last night. God came down from Heaven and he got in the queue and ordered penne al’arrabiata and then Jeff Vader turned up. And that just happened last night.”

Is that going to come back again?
“I think it might, because people are saying – do the Death Star canteen and I can’t do it because I know it, and I can’t do it when everyone knows the punchline. I was trying to look to a sequel to it, and I was trying to do Darth Vader in a dry cleaners on the Death Star, which I still might do. He’s got some blood on his cape – I’ve got one other cape – I haven’t quite got that one, no. But last night, speaking a bit like Darth Vader, I got into the canteen and ordered penne al’arrabiata. Which I had had recently – I kind of stopped having it – and I had one recently, a celebratory penne al’arrabiata – which was great.

And you’re in Brighton, yeah? It’ll be good to get back to Brighton. My brother was at university there so I used to hang out in Brighton. Early gigs. I did one thing, I just played this place called Menton which is like the Hastings of France. Right down the south, near Nice. But, the one thing about playing Menton was the sea was right behind me and it was just like playing Concorde like I did in Brighton – actually it was more like the Zap Club which was right on the seafront. So I played the Zap Club and I had the English Channel there, and I played Menton and I had the Mediterreanean there, and it was almost the same feeling but like 20 years on. It was beautiful.”

Eddie Izzard – Force Majeure, Brighton Centre,
Tuesday 7 May–Wednesday 8 May and Saturday
1 June–Sunday 2 June 2013, 6.30pm £35,
0844 847 1515, www.brightoncentre.co.uk