“If they shout at me, I’ll shout back”: Eddie Izzard talks comedy, transphobia and taking a stand

“I’m trying to stay on the edge forever,” says Eddie Izzard. And in a career that’s encompassed multiple stand-up specials, numerous television and film roles, a Tony Award and seemingly indefatigable activism, fundraising and political campaigning, she’s doing a healthy job of it. Now, she’s once again trying something new — by trying something a little older. 

In her current comedy tour The Remix, launching in Nashville in September, Izzard revisits and reimagines the classic routines from her 35 year career. “In stand-up, we quite often don’t ever go to the old hits,” she told me on “Salon Talks.” “It’s almost a little bit biographical. This is me going back and doing some of the things that people may not know so well, but also remixing them.” For example, she explained, “Death Star Canteen” will be in there, but Darth Vader has to say different things. Otherwise, I just lose it.”

Izzard also opened about what it was like coming out in the mid-’80s, recalling, “It was tough then. I had realized that being trans, we didn’t even have the word. It was just like, if you were trans, you were a non-person, you were a toxic person.” Today, Izzard told me she remains a hopeful, “glass is two thirds full” person. Watch the “Salon Talks” episode with Eddie Izzard here, where she discussed why she also now answers to Suzy and how as she’s journeying through our politically divided country, “I’m not fighting any wars. They’re fighting wars. I’m just doing gigs.” 

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

This tour that you’re doing is very Taylor Swift with the Eras Tour. You’re doing the hits. 

Most bands do this. From the [Rolling] Stones and the Beatles on, they do go to the old hits when they tour. In stand-up, we quite often don’t ever go to the old hits, so this is me going back and doing some of the things that people may not know so well, but also remixing them. Remember when Madonna did “Like a Virgin,” and she did it very much in a Berlin kind of style, slowed the speed right down? Just remixing the stuff, that makes it more interesting for me.

I’m coming out of drama, Tony-nominated. “Great Expectations,” the show that I’ve been doing most recently in New York and London, to very good reviews, I must say. I’m very happy with those from New York and London. That was drama, and now it’s back to comedy. Politics looms in the future. It’s a busy last two years. 

Yes, you did a one-person show where you played 21 characters. You ran for office. You’ve said you’re going to keep running until you win.

Yeah. It’s selection as opposed to office. Running for office in America, you would say that you went for election, and it didn’t happen. This is just selection, like your primaries. I did one primary, and that didn’t happen. I came second in that, but that was good. Good to do that, get that into your bones. Now I’m running for Brighton Pavilion, which is in the south of our country and a very groovy seat. I’m going for selection in that, and if I win that, then I can run for election. Then I can run for office, or become a member of Parliament for that. But that’s later. That’s next year. Right now it’s the tour.

One big theme in your life and your career is things that come around again. It feels like this is really about a dialogue with your fans and with your audiences. I’ve never heard of anyone doing something quite like this in comedy. 

I think I articulated it more like, the humanity goes circle, the world, the eternity, the universe. That’s the big thing of the circular nature. We start off as small children and we end up as older people and the actions of both are kind of similar, and then they return to the earth and become stardust. And then it goes back round again and comes out as a different view. I don’t believe in reincarnation. Maybe that happens. I had a show called “Circle” that was supposed to be all about that, but in the end it didn’t quite end up articulating that. 

I always go back to my roots. Mum died when I was six, and I’m always trying to go back and maybe restart, have another life where Mum didn’t disappear from the earth, and that’s never going to happen. But I do find myself going back. In that way, that’s circling around. 

Some of these pieces that I’ve done before, these scenes, these sketches, have become sort of beloved by people that know them. I will be going through them and going through the earliest jokes I ever did. It’s almost a little bit biographical what I’m doing. That’s what I found interesting. It wasn’t designed as that way, but here’s I think the first joke and the second gig I ever did; this was the first one that got laughs. I can show things as they developed. It’s quite curious.

I hope the people will like it, because one thing I’ve refused to do, is do old material. This is a whole. Bands are doing it, they’re taking albums they love, saying, “This is just this album.” I could have done just “Dress To Kill,” but decided to go through the first 35 years of my career. That’s what I’m trawling through. And I can go anywhere and I might change it night to night, as well.

It’s returning to this person you were 35 years ago.

I don’t think I’ve changed much. It’s interesting, this thing of, “Can you stay on the edge as you get older?” There’s this thing, particularly with bands, that they do their best work in their 20s and then that’s it. But Picasso was doing great stuff late in his life. There are some scientists, creative people doing stuff as they get older. You don’t have to have lost it all in your early years.

I’ve been doing “Great Expectations,” and I’ve got “Hamlet” coming up later in January in New York, so I’m trying to stay on the edge forever so that I’m never going, “Ah, let’s just do some beer commercials and phone this stuff in.” That’s why I’m remixing all the early stuff instead of just saying, “This is how I did it exactly, back then.” I’m trying to refine new stuff.

“Death Star Canteen” will be in there, but Darth Vader has to say different things. Otherwise, I just lose it. Otherwise it becomes a prayer. I’m not a religious person and I know America’s more wrapped up in religion, but we aren’t in Europe because we had that second World War on our landmass. I think that’s the difference.

I find that prayers in religion, people say them, but they don’t mean them. They don’t think about what they’re saying. You have to actually take the words apart and say it in your own words, and then you’d mean it. I find this even with stand-up, or with music, if you’re singing the same thing or if you’re saying the same sketch, the same piece that you did before, you can just go through the motion as opposed to the delight of when you first found it, so that’s why I have to remix it.

You’ve also remixed your name this year.

Yeah.

You’ve added something else to your identity, Suzy. You’ve said this was something that you’d been thinking about since you were a child.

When I was 10 there was a great Sidney Poitier film called “To Sir, with Love.” It’s a great film of teaching people to find their own self-respect. One of the other teachers is played by Suzy Kendall, and I just liked the name, the spelling of it, because Suzy could be spelt in about four or five different ways. I thought that was a name that I liked, and I knew I was trans. I didn’t have the word for trans or transgender back then when I was 10, so I’d already worked it out when I was four or five that something was different with me. 

I thought, I’d like to have that name if I could be a girl, but I’m not a girl it seems. Later on, I adjusted my pronouns. I prefer she/her, but I don’t mind being him, so no one can make a mistake with me. I thought, well, I’ll just add in this name into my name, so that it’ll be Suzy or Eddie. My brother’s staying with Eddie, my director, she wants to stay with Eddie. Other people are going with Suzy, and some people are delighting. I get an extra Z as well. I’ve got all these Z’s, as you would say in America. I have three Z’s, and it’s Suzy Izzard.

I experienced this in Britain, I could experience this on tour in America as well, people shouting, “Eddie, Suzy, Suzy, Eddie,” shouting both names at me, which is fun. I’m trying to avoid the mistake thing, the problem thing. “Oh, have I gone wrong there?” No one can go wrong with me, unless they call me Arthur or Sabrina or something, and then that’s when it’s going wrong. 

The public name is saying Eddie Izzard. I thought I’d do that, and I’m trying to take some of the problems out of being open and being positive about yourself and simply, “Oh, I shouldn’t say this, I should say this.” With me, I am gender-fluid. I’ve always said I’m gender-fluid, and I’ve been out almost 40 years now, so it’s a long time.

You came out, in the mid-’80s when there was a lot of conversation about gender and what it looked like artistically. What was it like coming out then?

It was tough then. I had realized that being trans, we didn’t even have the word. Transgender was obviously a word, but no one was really using it. TV and TS were the letters for transverse and transsexual. But the identity, the language has changed as it has. For a number of different communities over the years, they’ve changed their language, time has moved on, but there were no discussions. It was just like, if you were trans, you were a non-person, you were a toxic person. 

Even though there’s a lot of discussions, heated discussions, it’s in a better place. There were no discussions before, so now more and more trans people have said, “Actually, that is me.” As anyone knows who’s got a sensible mind, there have been many LGBTQ+ people over millennia who have not come out because they felt or they knew that the society that they were in were just going to frown upon it, be very aggressive against it, and they would be treated as a non-person or a toxic person. So I will just lie about this.

In this world of Trump lies, the right-wing lies, they just found they could lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and get a long way on that one. Trump particularly, and Boris Johnson in our country, just make stuff up. That’s a crazy thing. Actually coming out and being honest about your situation, it must be very scary to the right wing.

Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, they were happy to lie about the things. And then they had to pay, was it half a billion fine, for the lying? And then just they didn’t apologize. They just carried on. They’re happy to lie, and we’re happy to tell the truth. I think that’s the difference.

I think also what’s threatening to certain people on the right is the idea that there can be more than one truth, or that truth can evolve. You’ve said that sometimes you lean more into the masculine and at other times you’ve leaned more into the feminine, that who you are truthfully can be fluid.

I wouldn’t say that the truth has moved, it’s just that I try to articulate it more clearly for myself. It seems that the truth is that everyone’s somewhere on the spectrum. If you’re dealing with the right wing, you’re dealing out-and-out made up stuff if you go through what Trump said. Lie after lie, piles of lies. Huge pile of lies. We’re just trying to express the truth as openly and as clearly as possible.

Instead of leaning one way, I’d say more that sometimes I feel I wanted to express one side more than the other side. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to get to a place where it’s really not going to matter. People, if they came from another planet, they’d say, well, you’re just humans, aren’t you? You’d say, “No, some of us are straight, some of us are gay. Some of these are men; these are women.”

We know that everyone’s a girl in the fetus. Then some get coded men, some get coded women, or boys or girls. There’s a lot of things in an XX and XY already with the chromosomes, already mixed. As we go more towards the more enlightened center and left, we say, “Just live and let live. It’s my own personal life.”

These are right-wing culture wars. They want people hating each other. That’s what they feed off because then people get scared and they say, “Wow, we’ll vote right wing and we will clamp down on everything.” This is the thing that the right wing tends to do. There is no war going on. It’s just people trying to be truthful, trying to be open and honest.

You are starting this tour in the American South, in a place in the world where rights for trans people have been rolled back, where the divisiveness is really front and center in a unique way. Was that intentional about starting the conversation there, about starting this new phase?

No, I’m not fighting any wars. They’re fighting wars. I’m just doing gigs. I realize that it’s been politicized and the right wing wants to have a war because it works for them, gets people scared. They’ll only be scared. I’m just doing my comedy. I’m talking about existence and humanity in 38 billion years. I talk about from the beginning of the Big Bang and whether that’s endless. I think time is circular. 

Nashville was chosen and that’s just where we’re starting. It was availability. A lot of people are touring after COVID, so the actual where to start, where to go, it’s much simpler than that. It’s just like, “That one’s free. We’ll start there, then we’ll go there and then we’ll go there.”

I have played all 50 states in America. I’ve played 45 countries, and I’m performing in four languages. I’m just trying to be myself, open, honest, upfront, talk about things. The comedy, it’s not political really. The politics is political, that I do. The comedy is more surreal, humanist, talking about life and how we get on, and haircuts and anything I want to talk about. Darth Vader going into the Death Star Cantina. These are just observations I have made.

I heard you say in an interview that you like challenging yourself and you like amazing yourself. That is a really interesting bar when so many of us are trying to seek validation from strangers on the internet. How do you that? How do you keep amazing, challenging and impressing yourself?

It might seem that I just want to do challenges, but in fact I’m raising money for Make Humanity Great Again, which is the fund that I raise money for. It’s humanity as opposed to just America, so it’s slightly more inclusive to the 8 billion people. I just try and do things which punch above their weight so that people go, “Oh, that’s weird.” You have to be kind of audacious. You have to do stuff that’s unusual. 

In lockdown I was running a marathon on a treadmill, and talking to people because it was so boring on the treadmill. Then I was doing a virtual gig that anyone in the world could link up with, and we were selling tickets for that. All the profits went to charities in the UK and around the world, so that was just a nice thing to do. I keep trying to do that. Doing a one woman show of “Great Expectations,” that was the chance to play all those characters. That’s great, using technique that came from Richard Pryor that I use in my stand-up. “Hamlet” is going to be like that when that happens.

And then politics. Brighton Pavilion where I’m standing in down the south coast, it’s a very positive city. I just want to be there, try and help, use my energy. I seem to have energy. I seem to be able to see a more positive future than a negative future. I just look at it that way.

I’m a “glass is two-thirds full” person, which is even better than being a glass is half full person. I’d better be. Coming out back 38 years ago was tough. It’s easier now, even though a number of states in America are trying to pass legislation and be very transphobic. They’re against them being honest, against positivity, and that is not a great thing for them to do in Europe or in America or anywhere in the world. We’ve got to be live and let live in this world, otherwise we’re not going to make it a species. 

You’re always thinking about those challenges and about the things that might scare you. What is the thing that’s scaring you now, that you want to do next?

It’s not really that I find scary things to do. It’s that I will, if I think it’s positive, like coming out as being trans. That was honest. That’s true. I’ve known since I was a kid. I don’t want to lie for the rest of my life. I now look back at it and think it was very positive for my mental health to be honest rather than to lie. That scared me, but I thought, “Go out.” Even if in the streets, if people are trying to punch me, I will punch back. If they shout at me, I’ll shout back. I will stand up for myself, and that’s what I want to do. It’s not particularly looking for things that scare me, but if something seems positive but it scares me, I’ll go towards it.

There’s a book, “Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway.” As long as it’s positive, I think that’s great. Some people head in a negative direction. That doesn’t work because sometimes great ideas can be recycled and go in a negative direction. But I’m positive. I’m a live and let live person. I can get on with most people in the world except for the people that encourage people to hate and to fear, and that tends to be the right wing. I always worried about them, because without the right wing, we’d all get on fine, it seems.