First names first. What does the artist formerly known as Eddie Izzard, who recently announced she was adding “Suzy” to her name, wish to be called in print? “I think stay with ‘Eddie’ because that’s my public name,” she says when we meet at her manager’s office in London. “And I am gender-fluid. I don’t want to lose Eddie. What I don’t want is ‘Suzy Eddie’. But no one can make a mistake unless they call me ‘Kenneth’ or ‘Sabrina’.”
The Suzy news broke last month but Izzard adopted the name nearly a year ago, and will soon have it added to her passport. For now, she’s been using it on Deliveroo. “They don’t say anything when they give you your order except: ‘There you go.’ But you can see it on your phone: ‘Suzy, your food is on its way …’”
Her jauntiness about the subject hides a serious point. “The new fascism tries to put a wedge between us but trans people exist and have done so since the dawn of time. I knew when I was five. I’ve been honest. In this world of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, that’s got to be better than all the hatred and lying of the right wing.”
Izzard, who is 61, arrives this morning clutching a pink mobile phone and a Harlan Coben hardback. Her hair is punky and platinum with black roots, her lips painted bright red, her long burgundy nails click-clacking against the glass table. We are here to discuss her new one-woman show, which she tells me was born out of fear: whenever she is frightened of something, she makes a point of running towards it. Her aversion to flying is what prompted her to train as a pilot, and it is a fear of literature that will now find her alone on stage each night performing Great Expectations.
Distilled by her brother, Mark, into a 15,000-word script, the adaptation gives Izzard 19 roles to play including the enterprising Pip, his icy, beloved Estella, the convict Magwitch and the cobwebbed Miss Havisham. As if that isn’t enough – and why would it be for a woman who has performed trilingual standup sets, run 32 marathons in 31 days and campaigned valiantly if unsuccessfully to be the Labour candidate for Sheffield Central? – she will also be giving the solo treatment to Hamlet before the year is out. “I’m very serious about being a dramatic actor,” she says. “Which is not great timing as I’m giving it all up next spring to go into politics, but anyway …” So she’s doing the full Glenda Jackson? “Yes. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
It was in 2017 that Izzard realised she had never read a classic novel, and sought to rectify the omission. “I’ve always been intimidated by literature,” she says. “I’m severely atypically dyslexic. My spelling’s all over the place: cat with a ‘k’, ceiling with an ‘s’. I-Spy games went on for ever as a kid.” Noticing that audiobooks were on the rise, she let it be known that she was in the market to record one. A coincidence of birth (she was born 150 years to the day after Dickens) helped whittle down the choices. “He’s very grabbable – he writes great comic characters. After three weeks in a studio, I thought: I could do this as a live performance.”
Each character in the show is differentiated by voice and posture as well as by those delicate half-turns that Izzard uses in her standup to dramatise, say, the conversation between a nonchalant cat and the owner who suspects it of drilling behind the sofa. “I’ve always had crazy characters talking to one another,” she says. “It’s something I picked up from Richard Pryor. In Great Ex, these are people talking about love and fighting and death. I’m in there being all of them, and I lose myself in it.” When Pip is rebuffed by Estella, for instance, Izzard summons a real memory of rejection. “I relive a time in my life when I expressed my love for someone and they weren’t bothered about it. It really is the most tragic thing to hear someone say, ‘Well, no. I prefer this other person.’ I totally live that on stage. It’s a killer moment.”
I first saw Izzard perform Great Expectations at Cadogan Hall in London in January 2020, where you could feel the penny drop as the audience realised her take on the material was sincere. Drilling cats were conspicuous by their absence. “I do feel Dickens-lovers will warm to this,” she says. “It’s not a comedy version. When I did it in New York, they’d sometimes laugh too much at the start and I’d think, ‘Why are they laughing? There’s no joke there.’” Fidelity hasn’t stopped her giving Dickens the odd polish. “He didn’t hit punchlines so often. There’s one line about ‘hair that stood up on his head in tufts’. I’ve made it ‘hair that had obviously been arranged by a dying relative’. Which kills. And hopefully still sounds Dickensian.”
Izzard’s most profound sense of accomplishment lies in being recognised at last as an actor. Three times during our morning together she quotes the reviews she received for the recent sell-out run of Great Expectations in New York. “It was a ridiculous abundance. ‘Tour de force’ and ‘prepare to be transfixed’ and ‘performance of the year’ and so on. They really got it.” Is that how she judges her achievements? “It shouldn’t be,” she sighs. “But it’s taken 30 years to land those reviews. Though there was the Tony nomination.” That was for playing the father of a girl with disabilities in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 2003. “I know some people think: ‘Oh, you dabble at this.’ But no. I’m going for it like crazy. I’ve been playing a long game.”
Her acting ambitions emerged around the age of seven, shortly after her mother’s death. “At 13, I felt I didn’t have the skills to say ‘I love you’ so that the audience would believe it. I could do the silliness. I could do ‘I love you like trees and helicopters and bits of water …’ But I didn’t know how to do the rest, so I dumped the idea of being an actor.” Comedy took over, fuelled by a passion for the Goons and Monty Python. “Then we cut to my career finally taking off at the beginning of the 1990s and that’s when I decided to go for it.”
She found a separate agent for drama and played a treacherous family friend in the 1994 London premiere of David Mamet’s The Cryptogram, a part for which Alan Rickman recommended her after turning it down himself. (“Eddie seems to be glowing with the challenge,” wrote Rickman in his diary.) Movies followed, including two instalments of the Ocean’s capers with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, as well as idiosyncratic TV roles: the head of a family of con artists in The Riches, a serial killer in Hannibal.
If the open rehearsals of Hamlet that I attended a year ago are any indication, that next show will only build on the acclaim for her Dickens performance. Is it significant that she has taken on these stories of young men discovering their true selves just as she has entered the Suzy era? “Yes! And there are also some important women in there. I’m more able to access the female or feminine side of myself, more relaxed in my skin than when I came out at 23. I grew up with a block around it.”
Playing a woman at boarding school hadn’t gone well. “After Mum died, it was just me and my brother and my dad, so even to throw on a dress was impossible. I’d been caught stealing makeup when I was 15. Suddenly I’m 16 and being cast as a gangster’s moll in this revue. I got psychosomatically ill, and they had to get someone else to do it. From the room I was in, I could hear his performance. By the time it was over, I was well again. I probably thought, ‘This is what I really want – but won’t I just sound like a boy?’”
No such worries today. “When I came out I realised I didn’t look terribly … well, I kind of look like a trans person but I think the world is more relaxed about that now, and I am too. We’ve gone through a unicorn phase but we’ve just got to be people. When we hit boring, that’s when we’ve made it. ‘You’re lesbian or gay or bi or trans, yes, but what do you do?’ ‘Oh, I’m a librarian.’ ‘Are you a good librarian or a bad librarian?’ ‘I’m a good librarian. I can find you all the books.’ Or an astronaut. ‘Are you a good astronaut or a bad astronaut?’ ‘Ah, a bad one, I’m afraid. I landed on the wrong planet …’”
Great Expectations is at the Garrick theatre, London, from 24 May to 1 July.
