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[from hour.ca]

There’s something quite fetching about Eddie Izzard when he applies ruby-red lipstick, mascara and black eyeliner and wears hosiery, sequins and pumps.

Just don’t call him a drag queen.

“It’s not drag!” Izzard says. “It’s a costume! For me, I’m just wearing a dress. Women don’t say, ‘I’m wearing drag today.'”

Then, the British comedian John Cleese once dubbed the “Lost Python” and who mainstream American audiences think is just a little bit queer said, “Whether you are gay, bisexual, trans – you don’t choose it. Me, I’m a straight girl-boy. I realized the girly thing when I was four years old. And that’s my gift.”

Izzard may be famed for his transvestism on and off the stage, but you won’t find him dolled up and working the boards on his current month-long cross-Canada Stripped Too tour that brings the stream-of-consciousness surrealist to Montreal next week.

“This tour is all about going back to basics,” Izzard says. “I’m not playing Madison Square Garden.”

And thank God for that. But if you still really want to see Izzard on a video screen, then check out his acting chops in the FX television series The Riches (in which he and Minnie Driver head a travelling family of con artists and thieves) or in such big-budget Hollywood flicks as Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen.

Personally, with his mug, I always thought Izzard looked more like a manager for a ’60s British rock group, kind of like an Andrew Loog Oldham, or Runaways’ svengali Kim Fowley.
Of course, Izzard’s played one too, the manipulative Jerry Divine in Todd Haynes’ magnificent glittery 1998 film Velvet Goldmine with the drop-dead gorgeous Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.

“I always wanted to act,” says Izzard, who made his West End drama debut as the lead in the world premiere of David Mamet’s The Cryptogram in 1994.

Still, Izzard, now 48, remains best known for his stand-up act in which he really rambles and segues and doubles back again. It’s pretty surreal stuff. Much like the man, whose life has also just been captured – warts and all – in the new documentary film Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story.

“Nothing was off-limits,” Izzard says. “I didn’t want a puff piece. Though there were times I said, ‘I would like that to be shown.’ But that’s pure vanity. I look like a complete mess in some scenes.”

Kind of like the day back in 1990 when a then-mostly unknown Izzard (he was a street performer in Europe in the 1980s and honed his act in the comedy clubs of Britain in the early-1990s) was hired to warm up a TV audience at a London studio taping. “I wanted to be on TV. And warm-up looks like hosting a show and I was used to doing that. But my material is too surreal. I just died on stage.”

Not that he regrets it.

So I tell Izzard the only thing I regret about my past is the length of it.

He laughs. “Good point! Regret is a useless emotion. You can’t change anything. I have learned from mistakes but I have no regrets.”

Still, there is one thing more that Izzard would love to do in Montreal one day.

“I’d really like to do a show up there in French,” Izzard says. “But I think I’d have to be sober.”

Eddie Izzard headlines Théâtre St-Denis on May 25.

[from straight.com]

If Eddie Izzard ever wants to quit standup comedy and acting, he could make a handsome living as a motivational speaker. The podgy Brit doesn’t quit. And he obviously has never heard the old saw about teaching old dogs new tricks. The 48-year-old comedy icon should be an inspiration to slothful middle-aged men and women everywhere.

He speaks conversational French and functional German, and wants to learn Russian and Arabic, too. “It’s good to have things to do, so I know which way I’m going,” he tells the Straight by phone from Toronto, where he started his nine-city, 13-show Stripped tour of Canada, reaching Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Friday and Saturday (May 21 and 22).

And when not exercising the agile mind he’s known for, he has become a born-again jock. Last July, with only five weeks’ training, Izzard took off on the experience of a lifetime, running north from London through to Scotland, then through Northern Ireland, then back over to Scotland and south through England and Wales back to London all in the space of 53 days. That’s over 1,100 miles, or to put it another way, 43 marathons. Wrap your head around that.

“You’re not supposed to be able to do that at 47,” he says. “I do think that we put our own restrictions on ourselves.” His goal is to be at the peak of everything by the age of 100. And he’s not being facetious. He really believes it. “I think as soon as you start thinking you’re slowing down, you start slowing down. I think there’s a psychological thing to it. I just think you’ve got to be on an adventure. I saw a guy who’s 80 doing the Hawaiian Iron Man. And that’s the way to live. One life, live it. Keep planning things. When you’re 90 you should think, ‘Now I’ve got to do this and that and the other.’ If you keep forging your way upwards, then I think everything will stay alert.”

Izzard ran for the charity Sport Relief, but one gets the impression he’d have done it anyway, just because. He claims he didn’t even get any material for his famously rambling act on the long, lone journeys.

“There’s nothing particularly about the run that has got into my material,” he says. “I like talking about the world and how it fits together. I think at some point it will come up as a diagonal. It will feed into the thing as a diagonal, the fact of how I discovered how people were and what they were like and how they behaved and how people are all the same in a good way. That I think will come out of it. But I haven’t noticed anything in particular that’s jumped into the material.”

Rather, he just soaked it all in.

“When you’re running on an adventure, a big sort of Lord of the Rings without any hawks, you really get at one with the landscape, with the road, with the towns, with some people asking you what you’re doing or waving to people that know what you’re doing,” he says. “I never got bored. And in fact, I really liked it when I was on my own. If you meet someone, that’s great, because they come running with you and you can talk with them and the miles do zip by. It takes your mind off things. But if not, if you’ve got a good vista to look out at, if you got to a place where you’d look down over the countryside—I like that because of the thousands or millions of years the countryside’s been developing. I ran past the place where the Battle of Naseby happened, which was this English Civil War battle site. I was imagining Cromwell and Roundheads clip-clopping up that street with the cavalry and cavaliers coming down the other way. I like history. I’m interested and fascinated, so it all fed my imagination. It was like running through a documentary about the country that is mine, the United Kingdom.”

So if we can’t expect tales from the trek on this Stripped tour, what then? A bit of everything else, it turns out. “It’s God and Darwin and the Romans and Greeks, ancient Egyptians, and Moses and giraffes and tigers and everything in between,” he says. Trying to weigh in on meatier subjects, Izzard has made his musings on religion a major chunk of the act. “I’ve decided I don’t think God exists. I was an agnostic. I think a lot of people are agnostics but they don’t go to atheist just in case God does turn up and go, ‘It was me all the time and now you can’t come.’ So I’ve decided, no, I’m fed up with this. I don’t think there’s anyone there. So I thought, let’s talk about it, let’s look at it.…I’m happy for there to be a God, but I’ve just decided there isn’t. So that’s, like, a heavier subject to go into. And that’s what I should do. I should talk about that, about human politics, about where the world has come from. That’s what I do, hopefully, just to try to up my game and make it better.”

[from NYTimes.com]

Apparently the theater gods and goddesses were listening when we noted earlier today that there was still one more gavel yet to fall in the re-casting of the Broadway play “Race”: When James Spader leaves that David Mamet drama after June 20, he will be replaced by Eddie Izzard, its producers said. Mr. Izzard, the comedian and actor who will take over in the role of the lawyer Jack Lawson, made his Broadway debut in the 2003 revival of “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,” the Peter Nichols comedy; he’s also an Emmy Award winner for his comedy special “Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill,” and looks smashing in drag (which he won’t be doing for “Race,” alas). “Race” is slated to run through Aug. 21 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater with a cast that will include Dennis Haysbert and Afton C. Williamson, as well as Richard Thomas, who has been in the play since its opening.

[from canada.com]

Will he perform in girl mode? Or will it be boy mode?

“For the tour, Stripped, I’m doing it in boy mode,” Eddie Izzard said from Toronto. “The Sexy tour was very much in girl mode. I’m going to keep changing it around now.”

If you’re a fan, you know exactly what he’s on about. For the uninitiated, Izzard is a celebrated U.K. comic and actor who happens to be a transvestite. So the 48-year-old sometimes dresses onstage as a woman: skirts, heels, lipstick … the whole she-bang.

This might seem more British eccentricity than anything else, although Izzard (who identifies himself as straight) says transvestism is an urge he has harboured since the age of four. In any case, his outfits – be they masculine or feminine – are almost forgotten after he starts speaking.

The New York Times deems Izzard the most brilliant standup comedian of his generation. John Cleese calls him the “Lost Python.” No surprise: Izzard’s whimsical, sophisticated and often bizarre monologues do delve deeply into Monty-Python-like absurdity.

In one routine, Izzard pretends to be a smooth-talking bee-keeper who makes advances on women – unsuccessfully, as it turns out, because, “I’m covered in bees!” In another, he postulates Britain did well as a colonizing country, simply because of its “cunning use of flags.” And elsewhere: “They went to the moon and they brought back rock. Trouble is, we’ve got rock. That was the one thing we didn’t need, wasn’t it?”

During his current Stripped tour, taking him across Canada, Izzard promises to cover the waterfront.

“I talk about everything that ever happened, with gaps,” he said in a phone interview. “Everything in the world, from God to Darwin to the Romans to the Greeks to the Egyptians to Moses to giraffes and cave men.”

Izzard is less known in Canada than in the U.S., where he sold out Madison Square Garden in January. If you’re unfamiliar with his standup, you might know him from the TV series The Riches, about a couple of con artists who assume the identities of an affluent American family. Izzard has also acted in such films as Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen and Valkyrie (in the latter, he’s a German officer running Hitler’s communications network). His best role was starring as Charlie Chaplin in the 2001 movie, The Cat’s Meow.

If they ever decide on a remake of Marathon Man, Izzard might be a good choice – or, at least, a literal-minded one. In September 2009, he ran 43 marathons (1,770 kilometres) in 51 days. This remarkable feat raised more than $2.8 million for the charity, Sports Relief. Izzard trained only five weeks before undertaking the runs in Britain.

Not surprisingly, Izzard identified tenacity as one of his defining characteristics – something that has stood him in good stead over his showbiz trajectory. It took a decade of woodshedding, from 1981 to 1991, before his career truly began to take off. Izzard honed his skills in comedy clubs, live sketch shows and busking the streets of London.

“I don’t think I have the gift of anything creative.” he said. “But I did want to do creative stuff. I do have the gift of determination. If there’s anything I’ve been given, it’s that.”

Born in Yemen, Izzard spent his early years in Northern Ireland and Wales.

He recalls being thrilled as a 12-year-old when, during a class skit, he made someone laugh. “I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds pretty good.’ ”

Izzard became a class clown at age 16. A chemistry teacher used to write on the blackboard, then, after a long pause, repeat aloud what he had just written. Young Izzard would fill these silences with funny quips.

“I just used, quite consciously, two years of chemistry lessons to increase my ability to ad lib into these gaps.”

As a young man, he dreamt of stardom. And he wanted it fast. Izzard’s early goal was to land a recurring role in a Monty Python-style television series by the time he was 25 years old. When this didn’t happen, he re-thought his priorities.

“I realized speed wasn’t important. No one’s ever going to say, ‘This guy, his creative stuff was rubbish. But look how fast he did it.’ ”

Complicating the issue was Izzard’s transvestism. Relatively early on, after becoming a performer in Britain, he leaked his secret to the press. Although there has been the occasional ugly incident (he was once beaten by thugs in Cambridge), Izzard’s proclivity is mostly accepted by audiences.

Whether it’s understood is another matter. For instance, some believed he was dressing “in drag” as comedy shtick. Others wondered if Izzard was gay, bisexual or transsexual. He said he’s none of those. And the women’s clothing is no gimmick. It’s just who he is.

“It has nothing to do with comedy,” Izzard said. “It’s like a woman turning up wearing a dress or wearing trousers. No one would bat a eyelid over that.”

For the neophyte, the notion of a straight transvestite might be confusing. Izzard counters by suggesting heterosexuality can be equally complex and befuddling. For instance, what about the woman with a preference for the “bad boy” who’s “a bit of a bastard?”

“It does get very confusing. So I think that all sexuality is confusing,” he said. “I’ve got all the boy stuff. Plus this extra girlie bit. I don’t know why. I’ve just been given those genetics.”

Thanks Just Jean for the latest batch of fan photos from Toronto.

If you have any photos of Eddie you’d like to share, send them here!

[from mirror.co.uk]

by Eddie Izzard

Last year I ran 43 marathons through the United Kingdom – through England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland – and I had a good chance to take a look at our country.

Normally, doing comedy gigs around the UK, I don’t get a lot of opportunity to see our towns and cities in great detail, but running, you see things differently. You get a chance to see things up close.

The run, which was for Sport Relief, made me think about a lot about Britain.

What I found was that wherever I ran, whether through rural Yorkshire, remote Wales, or the busy streets of Edinburgh or Leeds, there was a definitely a British character. But it was also the character of human beings you might meet running or travelling anywhere in the world.

Britishness, it seemed to me, wasn’t some fixed, static thing. It wasn’t about doing things the way they’d always been done.

I saw some communities that had barely changed since my grandparents’ day, and others they wouldn’t have recognised. But all of them were British in their own way.

Immigrants have changed the landscape of Britain, but they have also become a crucial part of our country. Bristol, Liverpool and Nottingham may be multi-racial cities but they are all still distinctly British.

The roads I ran on might look British, but miles and miles of them are

actually Roman and many others are tracks built by the Celts.

Our country, after all, has been massively diverse for most of its history – a blend of Angles, Saxons, Romans, Vikings, Celts.

While I was running, I met people of all different colours and backgrounds, with all different regional accents, in all different shapes and sizes, but wherever I ran, I always knew I was here in Britain.

I was born in Yemen, in the Middle East, and grew up in Bangor in

Northern Ireland, and Skewen in South Wales. I went to school in East Sussex and university in Sheffield, so I suppose that makes me a typical example of our diverse nation.

We never have been a purebred nation – no nation is. The strength and vitality of our country is in the strength of the blend of our genes. The purebred race that Hitler and the BNP desire is doomed to failure by in-breeding – basic biology tells us that.

I am proud to campaign for Hope not Hate. This year, even more is at stake. The BNP could win their first seats as MPs – or control of their first council.

All I saw while running my marathons told me that Britain isn’t a racist country, and that people don’t want to be represented by racists in our country.

It confirmed my faith in Britain. It showed me that it’s in the nature of the British people to be hopeful. It showed me that Britain is brilliant.

I hope you’ll join me and vote for Hope in the general and local elections.

Surely no-one really wants Hate over Hope?

Watch the entire episode here courtesy of Hulu.com (thanks Rob)

[from lezgetreal.com]

Every Day is most likely going to be the breakout film of the festival. Luckily, it is also LGBT friendly. The plot focuses around Ned (Liev Schreiber) who is struggling with his crotchety father in-law (Brian Dennehy) moving in, his overwhelmed wife (Helen Hunt) and his two sons, one of which is an out gay teenager (Ezra Miller) and his crazy gay boss (Eddie Izzard).

Director and writer Richard Levine based the movie on his own life. Levine was a writer for Nip/Tuck He said at the festival that it “spun into fiction,” but the relationships are real and his son is gay. One scene in the film takes place at a gay bar, his son described the scene more as “being every parent’s nightmare of what a gay bar is” than the reality. Even so, parents of gays and potential parents of gays (basically, everyone) should see this movie. The relationship between Ned and his son plays a huge part in Ned’s redemptive arc. Ned loves his son and is struggling with his son’s safety, but each time he opens his mouth, his words come across attack on his son for being gay. Levine deftly shows the daily communication breakdowns and misunderstandings we have with the people we love the most. In the end, Ned is able to express to his son just how much he loves him and how proud he is of him.

The actors all give solid performances, Ezra Miller really shines as a beautiful gay teen and Izzard is flamboyant and makes the most of his short screen time. Dennehy performs back flips to make his character sympathetic and he and Hunt have chemistry as father and daughter. The only “off” relationship is between Schreiber and Hunt. She seems a lot older than him and there is no chemistry between the characters. However, don’t let this deter you from seeing the movie. It is by turns funny and touching; it captures the essence of what a family is and exposes the vulnerability and love that we have for those closest to us.

[from eyeweekly.com]

Touch a conversational nerve and suddenly the other Eddie Izzard is talking. Not the befuddled, off-the-cuff comic prone to getting lost in the maze of his own material, but the ardent Labour Party activist who rails (quietly, but rails nonetheless) against the evils of “Thatcher’s children” and the anti-EU forces back home in the UK — “xenophobes, racists and Nazis,” he says firmly, partway through listing the Iron Lady’s misdeeds and shadowy friends.

“Look at what she did with her slash-and-burn policies in the early ’80s,” he says, “and what they did in Chile with Pinochet — the mass murderer Pinochet.”

Then, seemingly catching himself, he stops and adds with an easy laugh, “I linked that together quite nicely didn’t I? With the ‘mass murderer’ bit?”

A few minutes later, another nerve touched, and I’m listening to Eddie Izzard the athlete, who got into long-distance running (and now, swimming) after a 2009 fund-raising stunt that saw the largely untrained stand-up run 43 marathons in 51 days.

“We are designed to run,” he says emphatically, citing “five million years of development” as he slips into another speech. “Do antelope run? Yes. Do tigers run? Yes. Do squirrels run? Yes.”

And so on, through rats, dogs, cats and an aside about the Kalahari bushmen.

“We are not designed for this,” he says, pointing to our table and chairs in the bar of the Four Seasons. “We are not designed for cake. We are not designed for lattes. We are not designed for PlayStations, televisions, cars,” and so on.

Point taken but… antelope? Kalahari bushmen? Maybe this stream-of-consciousness performer is never entirely off duty, after all. Which would make sense — Izzard’s muted and all-over-the-map delivery has become his trademark. (Well, that and the dresses. But more on those in a minute.) His routines morph from show to show more than those of a word-for-word guy like Chris Rock because, he notes, words lose their meaning when delivered strictly from memory.

“Religion is my big example,” he says. “People get these prayers but don’t listen to the words when they say them.” He rattles off the first few lines of the Lord’s Prayer as an example. “In church they should say, ‘I want you to improvise the Lord’s Prayer and make the words up.’ Then you’d actually get something that has real meaning.”

Izzard and I are speaking during a press stop in advance of his current tour, his biggest ever in Canada: nine cities with five shows in Toronto — the first three and last two are separated by a month because he’s needed back home for the British election.

When he first started speaking on behalf of Labour, “they used to put me on the soft couch,” he says. He was treated like a comedian, thrown slow-pitch questions and expected to perform. Now he calls the prime minister “Gordon” and spars with the best of them like a British Jon Stewart in a dress.

Or rather, sometimes in a dress. But not this time, not this tour, and not this interview, for which he wore a dapper charcoal suit. Izzard’s trademark cross-dressing is on hold in part because folks on this side of the Atlantic sometimes mistook him as just a drag act. And he’d rather not end up as the Boy George of comedy.

“People consistently got the wrong end of the stick,” he says. “So now I’m trying to unpick that. Then I can go back to girl mode when I want to.”

[from thisisbristol.co.uk]

HE is used to having comedy audiences eating out of his hand but Eddie Izzard had a trickier crowd to deal with when he visited Keynsham.

The transvestite comedian, actor and long-distance runner is the second celebrity campaigner to join the bid to help Labour junior minister Dan Norris hold on to his highly marginal seat.

For 90 minutes at the Trout Tavern on Temple Street yesterday, he regaled a packed pub garden with the reasons why they should vote for North East Somerset candidate Dan Norris – and announced his own political aspirations.

The 48-year-old star will be wowing Canadians on stage in Toronto come Friday night, but yesterday he was on his 22nd stop out of 25 across the country to muster votes for Labour in the General Election.

“I was in Gloucester this morning…” said the indefatigable performer, before reeling off every town and city he has graced wearing a rosette before then.

“The sun is shining in Keynsham and that’s because of the Labour Party.

“As a street performer I’m used to talking to people a lot and I want to point out that Britain is not broken, like the Tories will tell you. It’s brilliant. And that’s the Britain I believe in.”

Izzard’s appearance was the second from a household name to back Mr Norris, a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Legendary Queen guitarist Brian May joined Mr Norris last week to back his stance against fox hunting.

Izzard spent an hour fielding questions on child tax credits, what Labour has done for pensioners and the most inspirational person in his life alongside Mr Norris, who has represented the Wansdyke constituency – now redrawn and renamed North East Somerset – for the last 13 years.

Karen Perry, 51, from Winterbourne, was impressed with his impromptu performance.

She said: “It is great for a comedy actor to have a serious side. He put things across in layman’s terms and probably helped Dan Norris reach a few more people today.”

Izzard saved the photos and the press quotes until after the Q&A, marginally longer than Tory warhorse Ken Clark did on Monday, but he was soon swept away off to his next stop, Bournemouth.

Before he went he was quick to answer scepticism over celebrities being put up to support candidates.

“I’m not wheeled out here,” he said. “I’m self-propelled. I volunteered for this. Judge the celebrities on what they’ve done with their lives and if you like it, listen. If you don’t like it, don’t listen.

“The public are intelligent enough that if they don’t agree with what I say then they won’t listen.”

And that’s where Izzard is a valuable commodity after capturing the nation’s imagination running 43 marathons in 51 days around the UK, raising money for Sport Relief.

And his boundless enthusiasm is bound for politics – but not for a decade.

He said: “My own aspirations are for 10 years’ time. I’ve worked my backside off to get my career going so I’m not going to drop it. It would need to go into deep hibernation if I stand (as an MP).”

Pub landlord Jim McCarthy told the Post: “I’m just waiting for Bruce Springsteen to come here now.

“Could do with a bit of that here. They bring out the celebrities in America to support politicians all the time, so why not here?”