In the early Nineties, before Izzard had really taken off, those who had heard of him would clutch your knee with zeal. “Eddie Izzard!” they would say. “I genuinely think he's the future! Not since Richard Pryor has anyone owned a stage in that way. He kinds of falls to pieces on stage and then pulls it all back again! It's like watching the smoke visions from the Caterpillar's hookah in Alice in Wonderland!”
Two years later, when Izzard was huge - selling out a seven-week run at the Albery Theatre in London, and then doing a 56-date tour - reactions were even more fevered.
“Oh my God, Eddie Izzard!” they would say, clutching both your knees. “He's so hot. Look at him! He's a dyslexic transvestite with a mind like a gin-trap! He improvises half his show every night, manages himself, and does nine minutes of his show in French, in heels! I need to have sex with him, right now!”
These days though, it's a little different. Since the late Nineties, the double Emmy award-winning career of Channel 4's No3 in The 100 Greatest Comedians... Ever has been sidelined - in favour of acting in not terribly well-received roles in films such as Ocean's Twelve and Mystery Men. The current reaction to saying you're interviewing Eddie Izzard is more muted.
“I don't know why he keeps on doing those awful films instead of amazing stand-up,” they say, sulkily. “And he seems to have stopped wearing a dress. I bet the Americans made him do that.”
“Do you know why I think that is - why that reaction happens?” Izzard says, leaning across the table. We're in a café in Soho, at 10am on a Monday morning. Izzard is in a sharp suit and negotiating marmalade on toast and coffee.
“If you do comedy - if you make people laugh - it releases serotonin in your brain,” he says, taking a bite and then talking with his mouth full. “People get addicted to that. Comedians become dealers. Audiences become junkies.” He pauses. “It's like salivating before a meal - there's an expectation of a certain taste. When people see me, they are expecting that high.”
Spending more than ten years provoking a mild disappointment in his public suggests that, unlike most entertainers, Izzard isn't doing all this to make people like him. Your career isn't a convoluted way of saying “Love me, world, love me!”, is it?
“No, no - God no!” Izzard says, firmly. “You'd go crazy if you did that. You can't live your life to please people. You have to move to the beat of your own drum! Dance to the sound of your own disco in your mind!”
And it's not as if Izzard's preferred disco is a wholly unsuccessful one. After 14 years of multitasking political activism (he is an ardent supporter of the EU), multilingual comedy (he has done stand-up shows in English, French and German) and acting, Izzard finally has something that might be worth trading in that “third-best comedian of all time” for.
We're here to talk about the DVD release of Season One of The Riches, the show in which Izzard finally got his lead; and one of the best leads of the year, to boot. In The Riches, a critically acclaimed comedy/drama for the American channel FX, Izzard plays a traveller/conman in the American South.
“For years journalists had been asking me, what role are you looking for? And I never knew the answer. But I do now,” he says. “It was that one.”
As Wayne Molloy - a bullshitting, upbeat antihero with an American accent that Izzard just manages to pull off - he plays opposite Minnie Driver's Dahlia, a cough-medicine-addicted “hot plastic” expert who has just been released from jail. Having stolen a dead man's identity and moved themselves and their three children into the corpse's Louisiana mansion, their motto is “The American Dream - we're going to steal it”. Or, as it says on the DVD cover, “It's a Wonderful Lie”.
The whole Molloy family make a watchable, unusually clever show, but it's the chemistry between Driver and Izzard that's the most notable aspect. Like Homer and Marge before them, Driver and Izzard play heads of a supposedly dysfunctional family who are still crazy about each other, and there's a palpable on-screen sex-hiss between them.
“We're both ambitious - very ambitious,” Izzard says, nodding - as if to encompass just how fast two British actors playing Deep South gypsies would have had to hit the ground running. “You can't fake chemistry. There has to be a fire going on, doesn't there? The writers are very good at... writing out of us, if you know what I mean.”
Commissioned to make a second series, Izzard ideally sees The Riches running to seven seasons, and with average US viewing figures of 5.9 million and critical acclaim - Time had it as one of the Top Ten New Shows of 2007 - there's no reason why it shouldn't.
“Each episode, I get better. I learn,” Izzard says. “Like, you've got to keep [your actions] small, just in the eyes on the close-ups. But then you have to go big for a wide shot. Don't get the two confused, or you'll end up watching back the wide shot and going: ‘Why am I not doing anything here, except subtly blinking?'”
It has to be said here that Izzard is a complete, ocean-going acting nerd. He won't ever open up about his personal life - even an inquiry as general as “Where do you live in LA?” is met with a cagey: “In LA. In a bungalow”. And “What do you spend your money on?” elicits little more than “iPhones. And DVDs of Dancing with Wolves. I just fucking love that film.” But he will talk all night about acting. He is a thespian trainspotter. In the last two interviews that I've done with him, he has - in an informative and impassioned manner - instructed me on classic death scenes, how to take the ideal “intense” publicity shot, the “267 Golden Rules of Acting” and how, for “acting truth”, you have to “kill the funny”.
Today, his amusing mini-lectures are on the wardrobe anomalies in The Great Escape - “All the British actors escaping in the national costume of Switzerland, or wherever. But Steve McQueen's in chinos and a T-shirt. He's escaping into the Alps in the disguise of an American man” - and how best to just “fuck off” after telling one of your heroes that you admire them. At the Baftas, Izzard went up to the film director Ridley Scott and said: “I really admire you,” and then “just fucked the fuck away”.
This nerdiness feeds into one of Izzard's most notable traits - constant analysis. Unlike most creative people, Izzard is constantly analysing what he - as a pro-EU multilingual dyslexic transvestite and stand-up - means, what the world means, and how he can then play the former off the latter to continue a life where he keeps “widening it out, but keep my edge”.
And this penchant for analysis brings good news for those still pining for Izzard's return as the “third greatest comedian of all time”. While, as an actor, he feels around “seven out of ten successful”, he acknowledges that the period he felt “ten out of ten successful” was as a stand-up. “Around the time of the Definite Article show,” he says, “when all ten national newspapers were reviewing it and saying it was, you know...”
Izzard recently turned his mind to working out just why this was his comedic peak, and why subsequent shows, such as Sexie (2003) and Circle (2002), have met with distinctly lukewarm reviews.
“I think it's because at that time - Definite Article and Unrepeatable - I was in one place. They were residencies. So I'm doing an experiment now. I'm going to bed in somewhere for a bit.”
And indeed, having concluded that this is the scientifically proven thing to do, that's what Izzard is off to do - right now. For, in keeping with the ethos of a man who has always chosen the more challenging route, Izzard is using his writers' strike-enforced break from The Riches to do an improvised, stand-up residency. Starting tonight. In New York. On the other side of the Atlantic from this café where we are having breakfast.
“Oh, it'll be easy,” he says breezily, putting on his Second World War-style greatcoat and going off to find a cab to Heathrow. “Try gigging in both Helsinki and LA on the same day, though. Now that one was difficult.”
The Riches - Season One is released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
