Eddie Izzard's master plan

Eddie Izzard has a master plan writes Caryn James in her feature on the eccentric comedian and actor...

Eddie Izzard's metaphors don’t sit still, onstage or off; they leap into the conversation with an almost physical presence, even when he’s simply describing how tough it is for a comic to be accepted as a dramatic actor. “If you arrive in comedy,” he said, “the studios won’t let you get off that horse. You have to shoot it, you have to kill it, you have to Bill Murray kill it, boom!" and he mimes shooting a horse as he explains, “Bill Murray successfully did that so he could get to the dramatic place he wanted to be; he really had to kill that Ghostbusters place.”

The man who chats off-stage is a less frenetic version of the performer whose fans recite lines from his stand-up shows, like Dress to Kill, the HBO special that made him a cult figure 10 years ago. In person, he also does voices and accents, talks about Napoleon and George Washington, drops in bits of songs. (“It’s going to be about cats!” he said, jumping into a spoof Broadway musical and cheerfully singing, “He’s dead, he’s in a box,” all as a quick aside.) He pulls out a phone and shows photos of a recent vacation with his father and brother to Yemen, where he was born before the family returned to Britain when he was 1.

But just as the inspired silliness of Bill Murray shooting the Ghostbusters horse almost obscures a deeper point — Mr. Izzard has analyzed that career for all it’s worth — the surreal wit veils a methodical determination to be taken seriously in drama. The guy who may be the most brilliant stand-up of his generation really wants to act. His ambitions are huge, but when he talks about his step-by-step career path he makes himself sound like some plodding worker ant. That would be complicated enough without adding — and he’s the one who brings it up first — that he’s a transvestite, or an “off-duty transvestite” as he tends to put it now, since he’s been appearing on-stage in jeans and a blue sport jacket in a workshop version of Stripped, the show he’ll take on a four-month national tour starting next month.

That was hardly his look in Dress to Kill or other stand-up shows. Then he appeared in heavy eye shadow, glittery shirts and sometimes skirts and fishnet stockings as he roamed the stage delivering riffs about culture, history and language — routines that are literally loopy as they swoop and circle back on themselves. In his recent New York show he quacked like an evil duck left behind after Noah loaded the ark (because, really, would the ducks have drowned?) and acted out a scene in which Jesus returns to heaven and tells his Father how he messed up on Earth. (How did he die? “Donkey cart accident.”) As he interspersed these pieces with bits about Wikipedia or updating computers, out of nowhere the evil duck quacked again.

But he did all this looking like his character in The Riches, the television series in which he plays Wayne Malloy, the father of a family of “travellers” or con artists who have taken on false identities and settled into a McMansion. Wayne masquerades as a lawyer named Doug Rich, which means that these days Eddie Izzard could pass for a corporate lawyer. (He is also an executive producer of the series, whose second season begins Tuesday on the FX network.) The Riches and his non-femme appearance are part of his bid for the leading roles that have eluded him on-screen. He was most widely seen as the computer genius Roman Nagel in Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen and has another small role in Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise World War II movie coming this summer, but more often he has landed in parts that make you wonder what he was thinking, like the mad scientist in the flop My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

He has had more substantial roles in plays, including David Mamet's Cryptogram in London and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in the West End and on Broadway (where he was nominated for a Tony). During the time of that run he lived in the West Village, and we met at Tavern on Jane, a casual restaurant a block from his old street of brick town houses. “It’s really beautiful,” he said of the neighborhood, and he recalled “going to that corner shop to get as much wood as I could to heat up — the snows of 2003.” As he does on-stage, he sometimes breaks off sentences and zooms ahead, as if his mind were racing too fast to bother finishing; the rest is clear, anyway.

His humour reflects the scattershot lunacy of Monty Python, but with flashes of Robin Williams's manic energy and a sophisticated silliness that is entirely his own. Walk into a room, say “Cake? Or death,” and some people will fall on the floor laughing at the phrase from one of the most uproarious and sharpest parts of Dress to Kill. He imagined what it would have been like if the Church of England, instead of the Romans, had tried to conquer the world. It might have resembled a polite invitation to tea with the vicar, he said in the act. “Cake? Or death?”

Describing Mr. Izzard’s humour, Mr. Williams said by e-mail: “It sounds like a contradiction, but his comedy is gentle cutting edge. Kind of like a velvet razor.” Part of this edge comes from walking onstage not knowing exactly where he’ll begin, in performances that have a sense of direction rather than a script. I saw two workshop shows a few nights apart at the Union Square Theater, and the second began with a completely fresh, high-energy rush of material, a dazzling little prologue: he danced out as though he were on Broadway, raced through a snippet about “Hamlet” (“Dad is dead?”), did Christopher Walken as George Bush, and said he is clueless about Broadway shows because “I’m a straight transvestite; I know nothing about musicals. He doesn’t always mention being a transvestite in his shows, he said. But he did in the two I saw, and it worked as a disarming strategy: acknowledge it for fans who are wondering what happened, then move on. “I am a transvestite; I’m just off-duty at the moment,” he told the audience, and immediately went on, “I never was a transvestite; it was a tax thing.”

As he explained later: “Some people would heckle me and say ‘Where’s the dress?’ and I’d say ‘Don’t oppress me, you Nazi’ — tends to shut them up. Because I have fought for the right to be able to wear a dress, not that I have to wear a dress. I didn’t jump out of a not-wearing-dress box into a have-to-wear-dress box.” But isn’t he now in a have-to-wear-pants box for career purposes? “Slightly,” he acknowledged. “Socially, politically, the number of out transvestites in the public eye are few.” And in American-accented voices he imagined one studio executive trying to persuade another to hire him: “ ‘Yeah, he’s a transvestite — but he hasn’t been wearing a dress for a while.’ ”
“ ‘Yeah, I suppose that’s O.K.’ ”

Being a transvestite is “still not part of the establishment,” he said. “ ‘Twelve transvestite senators turned up today’ — it hasn’t been said yet. You’re always sort of outside the loop. When he started performing in England, he wore ordinary men’s clothes but worried that the press would learn of his transvestism and run with the news in a lurid way. He told reporters that he was a transvestite; they thought it was a joke. “So I thought, I’ll wear a dress and wear makeup,” he said, “and they wrote, ‘O.K., he is a transvestite, but he looks a mess.’ ”

“By the time I got to America in ’96, I thought, I’m going to bring it to America so I don’t have to do a two-step here,” he said. Eventually people saw him only as the cross-dressing stand-up, though, so he veered again, and here he is as Doug Rich. Sort of. In the poster art for Stripped he is wearing an open lacy shirt, suit and jewelled collar pin, an image he described as rock ’n’ roll. He may be wearing a bit of eye make-up — more than most men but less than Keith Richards. It’s a dandyish, Beau Brummel look that hints at the balance he has to find at this stage of his career.

Like so many performers, he can trace the first impulse of that career to childhood. His father worked for British Petroleum, and after the family moved back to Britain, his mother died of cancer when Eddie was 6. “The acting career is the most important, because that’s what I wanted to do in the first place,” he said. “When I was 7, I wanted to act. I saw a kid up onstage, and I think it was a substitute for Mum dying. The audience was showing affection or admiration for something they saw onstage, and I just thought, I need that.”

He has plenty of adulation now. John Cleese famously called him “the lost Python,” and there is wide opinion that in his generation — he’s 46 — his only competition for sheer comic genius is Chris Rock. But no one is saying, “Wonder who’s better, Izzard or Sean Penn?” Why is he so bent on doing drama? “Because the world stopped me getting anywhere. I was ready at, really, 7. I was ready at 10.” Even now, he said, his attitude is a relentless “I will not stop until I get the thing.”

It’s not as if he was a natural at stand-up. He was more facile at sketch comedy but couldn’t get a job; he tried street performing and was bad at it. And at first, he said: “I could not do stand-up to save my life. Apparently now I’m quite good at it, but I know how I’ve got that good: it’s just by — I will do gig after gig after gig after gig.” He can be an extremely effective actor. His strongest screen role so far has been as Charlie Chaplin in Peter Bogdanovich's underrated 2001 film, The Cat’s Meow, about a 1920s murder on William Randolph Hearst's yacht. His Chaplin is a driven, complex character, self-absorbed yet madly in love with Hearst’s mistress.

Mr. Bogdanovich said he had never heard of Eddie Izzard when his name was mentioned for the role but went to see his stand-up act, then asked him to lunch: “I remember he came in wearing a padded bra, and I thought, ‘O.K., I’m not going to say anything about this.’ ” Mr. Bogdanovich now gives Mr. Izzard huge credit for helping to shape the character by improvising and working on dialogue. “Hollywood and movie producers tend to think in clichés,” Mr. Bogdanovich added, considering why Mr. Izzard’s film career hasn’t taken off. “They just see him as a stand-up who occasionally acts, and they don’t realize the depth of his talent. He can do just about anything. Eddie is very, very gifted, not just as an actor but as a writer and a shaper of material.” The Riches gets him partway to the dramatic place where he wants to be. The Malloys — Wayne, his wife, Dahlia (played by Minnie Driver) and their three children — are acting every minute of their lives, pretending to be the Riches. But the show is deliberately not Wayne-playing-Doug-channeling-Eddie. The series has its dark moments even as it puts a clever, mordant spin on the idea of upward mobility and reinvention in America.

Fun and smart though it is, though, it’s not in ground-breaking Sopranos territory, and Wayne Malloy is not quite a star-making role. Last season’s ratings were good, not spectacular. And as the screenwriters’ strike was ending, FX decided not to go back into production to complete the season, truncating it to the seven episodes already shot. John Landgraf, the president of FX, said it had been a practical and economic decision, because the last episodes would have competed with a flood of returning network series. If the audience grows a bit, he said, the show could return for a third season.

To Mr. Izzard, The Riches is a major step toward other leading roles and a way to leverage himself into even more stand-up. An American series seen in foreign countries, he said, opens the door to doing stand-up there. He has performed in French and says he plans to learn German and Russian well enough to do gigs in those languages too. If he is a worker ant, he’s an ant quietly plotting world domination. And while few people would bet on The Riches returning, he insisted he’s not worried about Season 2, but Season 7. He would not budge from that position; he is relentless. The difficulty of bringing back The Riches was, of all things, the question he would not hear.

The second season of The Riches begins Tuesday on the FX network

Further reading: From drag to Riches

From drag to Riches

Over the past 15 years, Caitlin Morgan has interviewed Eddie Izzard at several junctures in his career. And during that time, she observes, people's reactions have changed quite dramatically...

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