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[from the bbc]

British comedian Eddie Izzard says hosting this year’s Independent Spirit Awards will be his first and last Hollywood awards show gig.
They recognise the best independent films, with Precious, (500) Days of Summer, The Last Station, Amreeka and Sin Nombre all in the running for Best Picture.
Eddie’s also the subject of new documentary Believe, which covers his comedy, cross-dressing and childhood and features George Clooney.

>> VIDEO

[thanks Beth! | from straight.com]

Eddie Izzard
(May 21 and 22 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre)
The cross-dressing Brit brings his Stripped tour to Vancouver, seven years after his last appearance. No word yet on whether Izzard, who ran 43 marathons in 51 days last year, will make his way across the Dominion on foot.

The Draw: Izzard’s comedy is a marathon in itself. He takes long meandering journeys with tangents aplenty. Will he talk about his runs through England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland? Did he wear sensible shoes? Inquiring minds want to know.

Target Audience: Transvestite athletic anglophiles. And anyone else who likes absurdist humour.

NOTE: Ticket info not yet available

[from Vanity Fair]

Very little in life came easily for the British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard. When he was six, his mother died of cancer, and shortly thereafter he was sent away to boarding school. He suffered from dyslexia and had an incurable penchant for cross-dressing. After spending years struggling to make ends meet as a street performer, he began to get noticed in London’s comedy clubs and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Izzard’s breakthrough in the U.S. came in the late 1990s with his Dress to Kill comedy tour (broadcast on HBO in 1999). More recently, he delivered a tour de force performance as Charlie Chaplin in Peter Bogdanovich’s Old-Hollywood mystery The Cat’s Meow, was part of the ensemble cast of Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, and starred in the FX Network original series The Riches. A documentary about his life, Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, is out now on DVD.

I met Izzard, who was looking very smart in a jacket and tie (no eyeliner), at the Downtown Standard hotel in Los Angeles. He was in town preparing to host the Independent Spirit Awards, which will be broadcast this Friday—live and unedited—on the IFC Channel.

>> READ MORE

[from MediaWeek.com]

Eddie Izzard is by no means a traditional stand-up comic.

So when IFC announced that the British-bred performer would host the cable channel’s broadcast of the 25th Annual Independent Spirit Awards on Friday, March 5, some eyebrows were raised. After all, how would Izzard meld his iconoclastic brand of humor with the traditional awards-show format?

Correspondent Alan Frutkin sat down with Izzard to talk about the comic’s hosting strategy, his view of Hollywood’s acting community and cursing on live television.

>>View the video here

[from USA Today]

Steve Coogan dressed in a Batman costume last year when he hosted the Independent Spirit Awards, so the die has been cast for fellow British comedian Eddie Izzard, this year’s emcee.

“I’m going to come out in my suit, just wearing ordinary clothes. I’m going to try and outdo Steve by underdoing what he did,” says Izzard, who’s waiting until the last minute to pick out an outfit for the big event, which airs live on IFC at 11 ET Friday night.

Unfortunately for fans who have long followed his career as a stand-up comedian often clad in women’s fashions, Izzard won’t be wearing a dress.

“I am an action transvestite — not a transvestite transvestite,” he says. “Wearing dresses and fighting people is my main thing, but I’m not going to be in girly mode at all. This is about giving away bits of metal you can kill people with, and I think that’s what we all want. We all want to come away with a weapon.”

The Independent Spirit Awards honor the independent-film community. Oscar front-runners such as Precious and its supporting-actress favorite, Mo’Nique, will share the stage as nominees with other filmmakers and performers who embrace the same DIY sensibility.

It’s something Izzard can relate to. The comedian, 48, who follows the likes of Coogan, Sarah Silverman, Samuel L. Jackson and John Waters in hosting the awards, says the independent films he has been a part of —The Cat’s Meow, Circus, Shadow of the Vampire, etc. — have a special place in his heart.

“I love that work, and the people putting it together on a wing and a prayer and changing in a dustbin. I’m a transvestite with a career — I have independence written through my spine! You can’t really be corporate if you’re me.”

Even so, Izzard also has found success on stage and television. He was nominated for a 2003 best-actor Tony for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. And he co-starred with Minnie Driver in the 2007-2008 FX series The Riches.

Izzard embraced his own independent spirit recently by running 43 marathons in 51 days and circling the United Kingdom — or, as he calls it, “a charity version of Lord of the Rings, where I was taking the ring back but all the orcs were cheering me on: ‘Come on! Good luck, lad!’ ”

Now he’s setting his sights on doing an Iron Man triathlon, with the bonus of swimming and biking. “I’m just going to measure out the distance and do it. I don’t have to do the organized ones. I just do the disorganized ones,” he says. “We’re supposed to be running, hunting and attacking the next tribe to us. We’re not designed for PlayStations and cake.”

Even though this is his first awards-hosting gig, Izzard does have experience on his side: “I’ve talked to aircraft hangars full of people, so that’s not a problem. It’s going to be a lot of people with headphones going, ‘3, 2, 1, go!’ ”

But he does promise that this is the only one you’ll ever see him do.

“I just want to do one shot, leave it all out there on the pitch. I have no idea what I’m going to do, and I haven’t watched any of the films, and I don’t know who’s going to be there, and I don’t want to meet anyone.

“That’s the shot I’m taking,” Izzard jokes. “It’s just about our desperation for love and winning — we want to win and you want to beat the other guys down so that they have a bad rest of their life.”

[from tonic.com]

The irreverent star opens up about hosting Friday’s anti-Oscars (known as the Independent Spirit Awards) — and what it’s like to run 43 marathons in 51 days for charity: “I think we can all do way more than we think we can do.”

The Independent Spirit Awards have always enjoyed a level of outsider status. Smart, irreverent, and free of the burden of Hollywood politics, these film awards represent a refreshing antithesis to the Oscars. And this year will be no different.

While other award shows scramble to boost their sagging ratings by throwing some recognizable mainstream stars into tuxedos and pointing them in the direction of a teleprompter, the Spirit Awards turn to a man who can pull off a cocktail gown as well as a black tie.

On Friday March 5, actor/comedian Eddie Izzard will join the ranks of past Spirit Awards hosts such as Rainn Wilson, Sarah Silverman and Samuel L. Jackson when he takes the stage for the show’s 25th Anniversary (broadcast live and uncut on IFC, starting at 8 p.m. PT/11 p.m. EST).

The man who describes himself as an “executive” transvestite sits down with Tonic to explain why this should be his only shot at hosting an award show — and to talk about his charitable work for Sports Relief, including the remarkable feat of running 43 marathons in 51 days.

What are you going to bring to hosting the Independent Spirit Awards that previous hosts have not?

I’m going to bring a duffel bag…. I have no idea. I’m not hankering to host award shows. I’m going to do this one for them, but then I won’t do any ever again. So this will be it.

Why do the ISA’a get your only attempt at hosting an award show? What if the Oscars called tomorrow and asked you to fill in?

This awards show seems interesting to me. I don’t want to do the Oscars, they could offer me anything they want, but I don’t want to do award shows at all. I’m doing this for them because the guy that they had doing it, his head fell off, but they sewed it back on, and he’s fine, but I thought I’d come in and lend a hand.

Is this the only award show that fits your personality enough for you to host it?

It’s the Independent Awards! I like Independence. I like 1776, America, the Declaration of Independence. Not the Declaration of let’s make cash, or not have a health system for anyone in the country, or the declaration of believing in God so much that he gets in the way of
babies and chickens … but it’s the Independence thing, that beginning bit — that’s why I’m doing it. I’m a transvestite with a career. If that hasn’t got independence written all over it, I don’t know what the fuck has!

If this is your only stab at hosting, does that ad extra pressure to perform?

I actually think they just want someone who can host it, and point to people from the stage, and say “Hey, you there …” I suppose that I have to try and be amusing in some shape or form, but I’m not going to do that thing where you point at people and are like, ‘Hey, there’s Stevie Jim Jams! He’s named after pajamas, and he does very good pajama work.’ I’m not going to do that; I’m not going to take the piss out of the films, that’s not my thing. I just want to put the thing on, and talk about how desperate we are for people to give us recognition. The fact that we’ve done good films, that should be enough, but now we want this extra thing where you can take home metal that you can kill people with. That is what is really important.

Are there any films, or actors in particular that are nominated that you are pulling for?

I haven’t seen any of them yet, but I’m sure they’re all great. It makes me even-handed, and I’m not voting on them. I don’t even know who does vote … Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and they’re going to vote on the Independence, which they did in their wills. It’s a numerology thing, and that’s how it’s decided.

Last year you did a seven-week marathon run through the United Kingdom for charity. What would posses a man to wake up one day and decide that he wants to run 43 marathons in 51 days?

Sports Relief. There was Comic Relief, much like the one here, and there is one in Britain, and they’re not really the same, but both use comedy to raise money for Africa, and they started a sister charity called Sports Relief, where they encourage people to do sporting challenges, usually from non-sporting backgrounds. That’s what gets the biggest interest. If an Olympian does sporting stuff, you go,
‘Yeah, well, okay …’

How did your involvement come about?

They said, ‘Do you want to do anything?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll run around the country.’ Actually, I had wanted to do a big adventure for some time, and I got the impression that I was designed for running. I was going to do a different challenge, but then I thought if I was going to run around the country, maybe I could just do it for them, and they would have doctors. They had no doctors that could plug you in and say, ‘Actually, you’re going to die in three minutes …’ or, ‘No, you’re good. Do this.’ So, I said, ‘I’m going to do it anyway, do you want to come down and do it together?’ And so it sort of came to be, and it happened.

I have to go back to it, because it seems like such an undertaking. Anyone who has done even one marathon knows how grueling it can be, and you did 43 in a row. How did you get your body to go along with the idea?

I think anyone could do it. I don’t think it’s actually that interesting that I did it … (laughs) Actually, I think it’s quite interesting, I just don’t think that it’s that special that I did it. Before you do a marathon, you don’t think you can do a marathon, and then you do a marathon and you think, ‘Hey, I can do a marathon!’ and you prove yourself wrong. It’s what we think that we can do. Going to the moon. We didn’t think we could go to the moon, and we did. Driving a car, when you’re a kid you think, ‘How do my parents drive a car? That’s insane!’ and then one day you’re driving cars. I think we can all do way more than we think we can do.

How do you top something like that? What’s your next “big adventure”?

I don’t like talking about it because I don’t want to curse myself. (laughs) I’m going to do other stuff. Just bigger, better … and another something that begins with the letter ‘B’.

Most people would be happy running the London Marathon for charity once in their life. Others may enter it multiple years. Running 43 marathons? In the space of 51 days? That’s crazy. But that’s just what Eddie Izzard did to raise money for Sports Relief. This first part of a three-episode documentary covers Izzard’s training regime (a dizzyingly breif two weeks) and his first few marathons.

[from eonline.com]

Just because cross-dressing comic Eddie Izzard is hosting the upcoming Independent Spirit Awards, you shouldn’t assume he’ll do so in a skirt and killer heels.

“Manly clothes,” he says when asked what he’ll be wearing at the March 5 show. “I’m in boy mode, so if you thought I was in a girly mode, I am not.”

And he’s not exactly happy to be hosting the awards. He’s got some mixed feelings about it…

How did hosting the Spirit Awards come about?
I was persuaded with a gun to my head.

Is that how you get Eddie Izzard to do something—you threaten to shoot him?
I’d only do it for the Spirit Awards. I think this will be my first and last awards show hosting. I don’t like doing these things. I’m happy to give them away, but I just don’t want to host them.

You’ve really never hosted an awards show before?
Nope!

Have you been asked?
Yeah, yeah, quite a few times. I told everyone, “No.”

So how are you preparing for it?
I’m not. I don’t know what you should do for something like this. I improvise. I never write any of my standups…We’ll see on the day. It could be fun. It’s just not something I want to do.

When you hear the words “independent film,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
People changing in toilets. Like when I was doing early standups, we used to change in stairwells and kitchens. I was a street performer before. Talk about independence! We would change in the snow outside. We would all just change our clothes outdoors in the snow or rain or whatever. It’s that kind of thing.

The DVD of the documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story just came out.
I’m very excited about that. It’s six years in the making.

I loved The Riches. I thought it was great. Will you be doing anymore television?
I loved it to death, and absolutely, I plan to do another TV series.

Any particular project in mind?
I can’t really talk about it. I think that would slightly jinx it. But there are things floating around that they are offering, and then there’s something that I want to do. So, we will see.

The 25th Film Independent Spirit Awards air live March 5 on IFC.

Read more: http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/marc_malkin/b168871_eddie_izzard_hosting_spirit_awards_does.html#ixzz0gkHXngK9

>> IF YOU MISSED IT, HERE’S THE VIDEO

Chris Rock and Ray Romano have signed on for this Saturday’s edition of “The Wanda Sykes Show.”

With “Saturday Night Live” still pre-empted by the Olympics, Fox’s still-young late-night show has put together its most star-studded panel discussion yet. In addition to Rock and Romano, Cheryl Hines (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) and Colin Quinn will also be on “Wanda” this Saturday as part of the show’s regular roundtable segment.

Sykes will also do a one-on-one interview with Eddie Izzard, who’s hosting next week’s Independent Spirit Awards.

“Wanda” airs Saturdays at 11 p.m. on Fox.

[from walesonline.co.uk]

COMEDIAN Eddie Izzard’s visit to Cardiff during his gruelling 1,166-mile run for Sport Relief will be televised as part of a three-part documentary next week.

The flamboyant funnyman visited Cardiff in the summer during his challenge to run 43 marathons in 51 days.

The 48-year-old comic, who once went to St John boarding school in Porthcawl, used the Welsh leg of his journey to go back to his roots.

At the time he said: “Everyone’s been fantastic, from the minute I came over the Severn Bridge there have been people cheering me on, leaning out of windows and hooting their horns.”

The Hollywood star, who has starred in big budget movies including Ocean’s 12 and 13 alongside George Clooney and Brad Pitt, was only six when he lost his midwife mother.

The documentary will follow Izzard from his five-week preparation through to the completion of his challenge.

The comedian, who endured crippling injuries, painful stomach problems from his diet of more than 6,000 calories a day and a routine of nightly ice baths, said: “It’s been hell, 26 miles a day is a lot.

“At first the last six miles were agony. Then it changed to the first six miles. Then it was the middle chunk. Then it was pretty much all the same.”

Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man will air on BBC Three on Sunday, March 4.