Eddie Izzard is a person of many talents, known for her comedy chops and stand-up tours, alongside acting roles, incredible marathon feats for charity and more .
Currently, one of the busiest performers in showbiz is lighting up the Garrick Theatre in the West End , in which she plays 19 roles herself.
Adapted by her brother Mark Izzard, down from 20 hours of audio recording after she read an audiobook version of the Charles Dickens classic in 2018 to a two-hour version for the stage, the 61-year-old performs every show without the safety net of a prompt.
The star is proud to point out that she has received some of the best reviews of her career for the production, which transferred over from Broadway after a limited run and a previous UK tour.
However, one small stumbling block is her managing, well, expectations among potential audience members as to the nature of her Great Expectations, which is not done for laughs, as some are assuming of the popular comic.
‘It’s not a comedy version, it’s a very honourable interpretation of Great Expectations,’ she tells Metro.co.uk.
‘But as it’s Dickens, there are elements of comedy that do come in – but it’s also quite serious and it’s emotional and I have to track through my life to make it work, and it is the summation of all my skills that I’ve learned my entire life coming into one production.’
This leads in well to our discussion over what Izzard – who but remains Eddie professionally – feels is the biggest misconception about her, after a career that spans over 30 years – ‘That all I do is comedy!’
She in fact confirms that drama and films are her ‘first love’ over stand-up – and an avenue that she hopes to continue travelling down.
‘Comedy is something that I can do but drama is something that I have pulled out of me – I wanted to pull it out of me – and it is a separate thing. I’ve trained myself in two separate creative performance mediums: the bottom line in comedy is to be funny and the bottom line in drama is to be truthful. And they are different bottom lines, and you can get them wrong.
‘The number of comedy people when they go into drama, that have no dramatic muscles developed and so they will lean into their comedic muscles.’
She admits: ‘When I started my film career, and my dramatic career, I switched all my comedy muscles off, and so my early work was not very good, because I really had not developed dramatic muscles, but you have to go through this bit. People might look back at my early work and go, “That wasn’t very good” – and it wasn’t very good, apologies.’
Her earlier movie roles include films like 1996’s The Secret Agent, with Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette, Velvet Goldmine and 1998’s satirical spy action comedy The Avengers, opposite Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman.
Having said she was ‘learning in real time’ with her movie roles and acting, Eddie then praises John Landgraf, head of FX Networks, for giving her a chance with a co-lead role on The Riches from 2007 with Minnie Driver.
‘That was my drama school and my film school all in one. We did 45 minutes of cut drama in seven days of filming, which is unbelievable. Because if you put it together, 45 minutes doubled is 90 minutes and that’s like a feature-length film. And that was like shooting that in 14 days, which is kind of unheard of – but that’s what kind of what we were doing.’
She remembers that they were moving very fast, so ‘you had to learn very quick’, calling it a ‘wonderful way to learn, but tough.’
‘So this misconception that I am this funny person because my comedy is kind of beguiling – it’s Monty Python and The Goons, all linked together, I’m very influenced by them, and then me on top of that – but the dramatic side is different, and that’s what people sometimes get confused on,’ she adds.
Returning to Great Expectations, recalls a meeting with a person in Battersea Park who had reluctantly been taken to seen it on Broadway, who told her the show had ‘really worked for him and he really enjoyed it – and he was not expecting to enjoy it’.
‘I think that’s a beautiful reaction to get out of someone, who’d come along wondering, “What exactly are you going to do here? Oh wow!” And that’s kind of wonderful, because that’s Dickens channelling through me, with my brother’s help and my director [Selina Cadell]’s help. All of that coming out and people enjoying it – and they can enjoy it forever.
‘I can do it [again], it’s a perennial. You can do different versions of it, you can do different adaptations as is happening right now – but this is our classic interpretation, and it will live forever.’
Izzard muses on the warm reception to, and the success of, the production, which she also gives sone credit to the audience for.
‘I encourage the audience’s imagination to fill in the backgrounds of what is not there, and it seems to work in an unusually good way’.
Which is her favourite character of the 19 to portray? Herbert Pocket, protagonist Pip’s eventual best friend. However, she most identifies with Pip ‘and the unrequited love of Pip, that is most of us’.
She references being ‘crushed’ by rejections, just like Estella’s dismissal of Pip.
‘Having been through those moments, I can channel that into the production. It makes it real life, I think people want to see in real life where the desperation and the fragility of human characters can be portrayed, and it’s good if you’ve lived a real life to do that – if you’ve been through real life, you can bring that to a production and any roles you act.’
Comedy is something that I can do but drama is something that I have pulled out of me – I wanted to pull it out of me – and it is a separate thing.
Izzard has achieved plenty in her career, including two Emmys, a Tony nomination and personally raising more than £1.6million for Comic Relief in 2017 by completing 27 marathons in 27 days. She has since attracted several hundred thousand pounds once more in 2021 after .
A member of the Labour Party since 1995, in 2022 she launched a campaign to stand for the Labour MP seat in Sheffield Central, however she came second in the members’ vote.
When it comes to what else she still hopes to do the answer is ‘all of politics’ after her failure to win a seat.
However, she also plans to – which is her real ‘first love’.
‘There’s a lot more films I want to do, after politics it will probably have to be. Films is my first love – it may look to some people that I’ve just going from this challenge and that challenge, and it isn’t, I’m not doing that.
‘If everyone casts their mind back to when they were teenagers, where you may have had five things you might like to do – and I’ve just decided to do them. And it’s actually only about three: acting was my first love, comedy I went into because I couldn’t get any roles of school – probably because I couldn’t audition, how can you sight-read when you’re dyslexic, and I wasn’t terribly tall. If you’re not tall and you’re growing up a boy, and you’re trying to sight-read stuff, it’s never going to happen. So acting was my first love, I went to comedy, came back to acting and do both of them now.’
Her marathons came from a love of football and ‘running about’ when she was younger, but she credits it now with ‘regaining my health’ as well as a sense of purpose in helping charities. She also touches on coming out as trans as ‘just a very positive thing to do when you’re 23, [and] good for my mental health’, which was a benefit she wasn’t even anticipating.
Izzard says it ‘looks like it’s a lot of things’, but it’s more that she ‘tried to bring them all up at the same time rather than go up one and then try and parachute into another one’.
‘I’ve always gone to the bottom of the mountain and tried to climb up each mountain separately. You have one life, we all have one life – live it well.
‘We might have two lives or nine lives – we’ll have to talk to cats about that – but no one’s proved this yet. No one’s come back and said, “Yeah, you’re coming back. Everyone comes back as their nextdoor neighbour!” No one’s got that going, but we know we’ve got this one. So just try and do it good and lIzzeave it all out there.’
The performer in an appearance on Sky’s Portrait Artist of the Year programme at the end of 2020, which (although she saysbut prefers she/her). However, there are of course some who decided to have contrary opinions on it.
Does Izzard ever feel pressure ahead of sharing changes – such as her name – publicly, to ?
‘I try to be my own role model, and then if I happen to be doing peloton driving like in the Tour de France, where someone up front is taking all the wind pressure… so occasionally I take a bit of wind pressure and if someone wants to slipstream behind, then that’s great,’ she says.
It’s been 38 years since she came out, and although , she points out there were ‘no discussions – not one’ back in the 1980s.
‘We were non-people, we were ex-people, we were outside society. I’m quite a boring person with layers of interestingness on top – I think maybe most humans are naturally boring and just want to sit at home, have a cup of tea and watch a really good black and white movie.
‘So consequently, if people hear me talking hopefully or chatting on a chat show or whatever it is, they realise I’m just a human being and I just was honest about it years ago.’
She doesn’t prescribe to the notion of gender wars though.
‘This is a time we have to go through, and it’s been hellish from before and now it’s better, even if people are saying there are culture wars. I don’t think there are wars, I just think people on the right wing are trying to stir it up into war using hatred, the standard technique.
‘It’s really just people discussing and trying to get things out of it – some people are dead against it, but I think they’re wrong because I do exist.’
Great Expectations is at London’s Garrick Theatre until July 1, .
