Interview with Eddie Izzard

I meet Eddie Izzard on a sunny January morning in a hotel lounge in the Raval. He has been living mostly between Barcelona and Madrid since November, performing his Force Majeure tour in which, over the course of three months, he gradually transitions from performing two minutes of the show in Spanish to doing the entire show in Spanish. Even in Barcelona’s most diverse neighbourhood Izzard cuts a striking figure, in tight jeans, high heels and bright red lipstick. Later on, he tells me about a recent episode in Barcelona where two middle-aged couples were giggling at him in the street. “I went back and stood looking at a shop window near them. They stopped giggling when they realised I was right there. Like schoolkids.” He goes on to describe the different ways he deals with hostile attitudes, finding a middle path which is neither aggressive nor victim-like. “I’m not a fighter but I stand my ground. Sometimes I’ll get my phone out and start texting or I’ll look in the direction of the person. I have a way of looking around their faces but never directly at them.” 

Since 2013, Izzard has taken his Force Majeure tour to 29 countries, performed it in four languages and filled venues from Wembley Stadium to Madison Square Garden. Yet, here he is explaining how he negotiates walking in the street peacefully, exercising his “right to be there”. Coming out as transgender over 30 years ago was clearly the challenge that eclipses everything. “Coming out took all my mental walls down. It’s such a hard thing to do and I had to do it all on my own. That has given me everything else, all my confidence, because that was going into a wall of shit in the streets.”

The evening before we meet, Izzard has performed at the Llantiol theatre to an audience of around 100 people, mostly native English speakers delighted to see the comedy legend up close. He is over two months into his Spanish tour and performs about 50 percent of the show in Spanish. He introduces some new lines, but transitions too quickly from English and can’t remember his words. The audience doesn’t mind a bit as he nips offstage to find his iPad, stumbles good naturedly through his new lines then visibly relaxes as he moves on to more fluent territory. This is a little window into Izzard’s approach to learning Spanish. Aided by his linguist brother Marcus, Izzard is learning the script line by line, “just like a play”. 

On this bright Barcelona day, Izzard is friendly, focused and passionate about what is close to his heart. He glides easily into his comedy routines, often treating me to some hilarious insights into his material in Spanish. While he orders his coffee fairly confidently, he is happy to admit that he can’t really speak Spanish. He delivers a line from the evening before and points out the individual words that he does understand, which are “most of the nouns and adjectives”. Does he want to be able to speak Spanish? He is optimistic that by the end of it all he will learn Spanish. He describes the experience like developing a “living dictionary” in his head which slowly drips down into his consciousness. But for now, his days are spent memorising lines. He’s sorry not to have any language-learning tips for Metropolitan readers. “People assume that I’m actually learning Spanish to this level. I try to persuade them otherwise but they don’t actually believe it even if I talk them through it.”

For the German show, he recorded his entire show in English then had it translated. “It was the first time I had ever had a script of my show. We went through it, cutting out what wasn’t essential and keeping lines that really got a laugh, and it improved a lot.” It’s a relief to him when he has it all memorised and he can lean into it and perform it with the right pauses and intonation. He offers an example that got a big laugh the evening before—a long pause followed by an impeccably pronounced ni puta idea. “That pause is key and I have to hope that no one shouts out something silly.” Swearing is part of his performance and he invests time in getting it right. “Slang and swearing are two good things to get into a show because everyone says, ‘oh look, he’s one of us’.” He’s impressed by the liberal attitude to swearing in Spain and notes that even on the daytime sitcoms they say joder. 

My radical view on this is that this is our last century. This is the one. We either make the whole thing work or we forget it, because we will tear ourselves apart. 

Izzard is keen to know how the audience was reacting to his previous night’s show and whether I had noticed different responses from English speakers and Spanish speakers. He guesses, probably correctly, that the general “chit chat” during the Spanish part was Spanish people explaining the meaning to their English-speaking friends. He has just three weeks left to learn the remaining 50 percent of his script, but he is unfazed. He simply applies what he refers to later as his “logic” and surmises that, “If you give humans certain circumstances and say that things have to happen like this then they get it done. People just adjust.”

Izzard was performing in foreign languages long before Brexit (or “Brexhate” as he calls it) became part of our lives, and he has been a vocal pro-Europe campaigner for many years. A member of the Labour Party for over 20 years, he is planning to run for Mayor of London in 2020. He rails against Brexit and the ideology behind it. “The vast majority of the electorate do not want to be going through the minutiae of political arguments. So, extremists have this beguiling way of making things simplistic. Hate these people and everything will be fine. Leave Europe and everything will be fine. Of course, it never works. It can never work because it really is that complicated.” He talks at length about the power of hatred and you know that this is something he has given a lot of thought to. “Hatred is a strong thing. As Hitler worked out, you just have to blame someone. But it never, ever, ever, in the history of humanity has worked. It is bullshit.”

So what is Izzard’s approach to politics? The same as his approach to life. “I do radical things with a moderate message,” he states. One of his most radical challenges must surely be his marathon running. In 2009, he completed 43 marathons in 47 days to raise money for Sport Relief. And, in March 2016 he raised over a million pounds for the same charity, running 27 marathons in 27 days across Africa. I am curious as to whether this man who pulls off such staggering feats ever feels doubt and fear and, if so, does he have a way to channel it. “Yes,” he answers emphatically, “that’s exactly what I do. I use logic and common sense. What I’m doing are things that are not on the list. I analyse a lot and I think whether something is a better thing to do than not do. He returns to his coming out in 1985. “I saw the logic of my sexuality. I thought that telling the truth about that and coming out was better than lying and running away.” 

Izzard’s mantra is that everyone should have an equal chance, and he comes back to this several times during the interview. “You have to get an entire world where everyone has a fair chance, or we’ll blow ourselves up. My radical view on this is that this is our last century. This is the one. We either make the whole thing work or we forget it, because we will tear ourselves apart.” He can sound idealistic, but though his comedy is surreal and rambling, Izzard is a thinker. The formidable logic he applies to life must surely leave him despairing of more ordinary folk. From sexuality and comedy, to politics and marathon running, his personal experiences and his views on the wider political arena are interwoven.

He describes how it took him 18 years from his first gig in France to touring to audiences of 5,000 people in French. “That was a long journey but no one believed in it. I can just see these things out there. So now there are kids performing in different languages all over, particularly in Europe. That wasn’t there before and now it is there.” 

We return to Brexit/Trump terrain and the power of logic. “Should we head toward a world where everyone has a fair chance or not? Yes, absolutely. No one can disagree with that argument. The world has got to move forward. And if you think like that, everything just falls into place. It’s not actually that hard to work out what to do.”

It’s time for Izzard to go home to work on his lines. We say our goodbyes and he heads back out into the Raval, ready once more to exercise his right to be there.