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Eddie Is Odd
------------------------------------------------------------------------ From being raised by wolves to the new Avengers movie, it's been a funny life... (story by Michael Holden, photos by Antony Medley) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eddie Izzard has just been dying for days now, at last, it's almost over. "Me and Shaun Ryder have been leaning out of Minis, shooting people with Uzis," laughs the comedian, with no sign of any remorse. Izzard, once the people's champion of surreal thought and the male hemline, has turned big screen villain and street-fighting man, and I don't think he's coming back. And in the context of his current film, at least, he has to pay the price. later today, he will be thrown to his death by Uma Thurman. Except he won't. thanks to the miracle of technology, she doesn't have to be there at all. So, on a late summer's day at Shepperton studios, the slow death of Eddie Izzard is a lonely one too. Well, that's showbusiness. It's tough at the top. Like rolling hot tar up a staircase on a cold day, time on a film set can be a slow process. Eddie's demise at the end of the new Avengers movie will take up the best part of two days. Production of the film, in which he stars as a bad guy (complete with 'evil'-style sideburns) alongside Sean Connery and Shaun Ryder, versus the good guys, Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, is finishing just as his latest stand-up tour begins. He is as busy as a wasp in a fat child's lunch box and shows no sign of slowing down for the winter. A proven success on the comedy scene, the self-confessed "film nut" has found himself making movies with Sean Connery. How has the "bloke in a dress" from Bexhill-On-Sea who wouldn't "do telly" taken to life in the wide-screen premiership? "You don't get into huge in-depth conversations with people," reflects Eddie in his trailer (approximately the same size as Bob and Terry's caravan in The Likely Lads film). "No one seems to have a big attitude. I've heard about people with big attitudes on film but not on the films I've done. The, er, 'huge coterie' of films I've done. Is 'coterie' a word? What does it mean? Anyway, Ralph's quite quiet and Sean Connery was Sean Connery. I don't think he knew I used to do an impression of him, he never asked about it. I used to do James Mason and then I used to get confused and do 10 Sean Connerys and five James Masons - another coterie of bad impressions. And now I've got Michael Caine to add to them. They're all impressions with no work put in - sitting down and renting some videos or something - I'm too lazy for that. I almost had Alec Guinness the other day," says Eddie, as though Guinness were a rare stamp. "Let's see if I can get him again. He comes to me, occasionally, Alec Guinness..." he makes some strange vowel noises. "No, can't do it." All this flows forth from Eddie Izzard more or less uninterrupted. In person, and onstage, he's an old-school raconteur possessed of a free-falling logic and the ability to pursue his own confusion like a stoned infant with a degree in philosophy. With only the slightest prompting, he's off again: "it was weird working with Sean Connery. Though someone said to me, 'You're not working with him, you're just standing next to him.' I said 'Alright, I'm standing next to him...' Then he goes back to his trailer - and it's vast! He's in the Ark Royal and I'm in some kind of PT boat. It's OK, but you get trailer envy. 'Cos you think this is great,' he indicates his caravanette, "and then you see someone else's and think, 'That bit that goes out on the side - have they got a bath in there?' It's all in the contracts." Trailer envy apart though, it sounds like he's been having a right laugh. "When I was out with Shaun Ryder in the Mini with the Uzis, it's a mixture of cowboys and Indians, war games, a big train set and camping. It's just bonkers. And then dying. I have to die, which is a bit crap. I have to re-shoot it today. I have to go, 'Oh bum.' And then die." Sounds like an easy ride? "Well, you don't have to learn your lines. I had lines but I took them out because that's what Steve McQueen used to do. Steve used to take 'em out, so I took 'em out. I'm just staring at people, chewing gum and hitting people.' No change there then. "I'm also in command of a swarm of radio-controlled killer bees. So I'm trying to control them, get my Uzi out, shoot a lot of people and control more bees." And converse with Shaun Ryder. It can't have been easy. "Exactly. He was fine. He'd come in and say, 'I've been bad' and look totally wrecked. He was perfect for the part." In addition to his success in the cinema, Eddie also found himself invited to sniff the carpets of the corridors of power, along with Noel Gallagher, Kevin Spacey, Su Pollard and Mike Yarwood at Tony Blair's legendary showbiz house-warming. "It was great," he says without hesitation. "When you go in, you have to do the Number 10 photo." Blair's not retreating down the hall picking up his old pants and apologising in a vest, then? "No. That would be good, though. Everyone went kind of kid-like, going, 'Can I have a look in there and what does that do?' I phoned my dad up. That was quite good 30p's worth of taxpayers' money." Was there music, decks and so on? "There was a big rave going on. No there wasn't. Lots of small pork pies came round, baby and bonsai food all piled up high. There wasn't any music and we couldn't get into the personal quarters. I looked out into the back garden bit where the rocket landed." And he showed up in make-up. "I wasn't gonna wear it,' he admits, reaching for a smoke. "I thought it would be too difficult a spin for Downing Street, but then the Daily Mail made such a fuckin' noise about me going, that they made it easy." Time was when Eddie Izzard was the most famous unseen performer in the country. Although he remained loyal to the stage, that success led to him washing up in the mainstream, doing the rounds of Have I Got News For You? and Shooting Stars, and then movie parts and Downing Street. Surely it must feel different, to be a household name rather than a fashionable buzz? "I like the work," he answers. "The fame side of it - if you aim at that as the main thing, I think you're a hit lost. It's nice if people are saying nice things. But I have fights in the street now." He does, too. Earlier this year, after receiving some "verbal" on the "street", the "bloke in the dress" started fighting like some cider-mad scaffolder on a Saturday night. "It was mostly reported true," says Eddie with a hint of amazement. "I came out of Cambridge Corn Exchange. Waiting for a taxi, this bloke comes up and starts giving me stick. I go into a Michacl Caine type thing 'You-do-not-need. To do that. On-the-street. Do you Understand?' - for some reason. I was doing this and he just kept going on, so I got really fucked off and vented my spleen at him with a selection of swear-words. So he went for me. I was doing really well, parrying and blocking, but he had four friends there, so it was five of them against the one transvestite. I got several thumps to the face, though there were two women there trying to pull them off, so to speak. But I didn't go down! Like Cool Hand Luke. I was really fucking furious. Why do you have to keep taking this shit? Even though you do generally, I just thought, 'Fuck it.' Anyway they walked off into a pub - just casually wandered off. So I went to try and pull them out of there about half an hour later. I'd also called the police but they couldn't find him - he was pretending to dance, dodging and hiding. Eventually, he was taken to court for assault. It was good to go through the legal process and have it work. And I got 100 quid. I thought that was a satisfactory return." Indeed. No shortage of new material for the new tour, then? "Oh yeah. My thing's on a constant roll. There's this thing where people respond to a story or an arc. But in stand up, you don't really have that. It's like a concept album; it's not really what they're after. But I have characters that come back in. I start in the Old Testament version of the beginning of time and go through to the end of the world taking in toasters and lawn mowers, the grim reaper, the siege of Troy, and all kinds of other weird shit that comes out." Including, bravely, Princess Di: "My mum died when I was a kid - nobody gave a fuck" - though he says this strictly as observation, not accusation. What he refuses to do, though, is employ his experiences as a top-flight celeb in his routine. "People just think, 'This is fucking nothing to with us.'" Not that he wouldn't have a perfect right to talk about making movies. He's come a long way from his days of street performing - "I was shit at it" - and working as a waiter. But then perhaps it's as a consequence that he takes the tricky business of being abstract so seriously. "You've gotta keep pushing it out, changing it round and going somewhere else with it, but you can't lose the central thing of it," he explains. "And that balance is a little tricky, 'cos you might think you wanna tear it all up and do stuff in a different way and then you've lost the centre of it. I'd like it so people came away thinking, 'What the fuck was all that?' Some weird buzzy event where a load of bollocks is talked and you're not really sure where it's going." At that moment a woman from the film crew comes in and tells him, "Mark's just started doing your fall. Will you be screaming at all when you come down from that wire?" "No," says Eddie, flatly, "I don't scream." As talk drifts back to the movie game, Eddie relays with evident glee the way the "SFX" boys detonate Evian bottles on location when they're at a loose end, and, on one occasion, let him drive round a quarry in a fast car doing wheelspins. Could it be that, underneath all the surrealism and the make-up, there was part of him born to do wheelspins and have street fights? "Absolutely!" he responds, enthusiastically. "I was a real footballing kid. You've gotta understand that I'm a male tomboy. I love all that climbing trees stuff - but make-up, too. So I'm Emma Peel, you see? I'm a male version of Emma Peel, and that's where I wanna get to. That'll confuse the fuck out of loaded readers, won't it?" |