Eddie Izzard: ‘Call me she or he – my brain is coded both ways’

Eddie Izzard doesn’t do things by halves. Few comedians appear to think bigger when it comes to artistic possibility, ambitious career moves and sheer human potential.

When he emerged in the late 1980s, before shooting to fame in the 1990s, it was as if he single-handedly established a parallel universe for British stand-up comedy to occupy. Inspired as a child by the Goons and Monty Python – hailed, in fact, by John Cleese as “the lost Python” – and having cut his teeth as a street entertainer, he made burbling, conversational surrealism his stock in trade.

It was the antithesis of the Ben Elton-ish, Thatcher-bashing template that then dominated alternative comedy. Whether conjuring Darth Vader in the Death Star canteen (“Give me penne all’arrabiata or you shall die!”), the thoughts of a busily munching squirrel (“Did I leave the gas on?”) or God as James Mason, Izzard didn’t just riff off recognisable reference points but spun big existential questions into hallucinogenic gold.

That imaginative freedom was of a piece with his sexual identity: he was gender-fluid avant la lettre – and way before Grayson Perry took the limelight. With supreme confidence and poise – glamour and grit – he was able to deliver the goods as mesmerically in make-up and a frock as more blokey garb.

Other comics fell by the wayside; Izzard, now 58, not only stayed the course but kept going off piste – building a stage and screen acting career, making waves in arenas, and heading overseas to be a “world comedian”. In the US, he sold out Madison Square Garden, and was the first solo comedy act to play the Hollywood Bowl. This pronounced Europhile did a long stint in Paris, performing in French, and has gigged in Germany, in German.

In February last year, building on a gasp-inducing sideline as a marathon runner (for charity), he pounded the pavements of 28 European cities (throwing in London at the end). This month, mid-pandemic, he not only repeats and exceeds the feat – running a marathon every day of the month on a treadmill (a project called Make Humanity Great Again) but is going the extra mile, metaphorically, by doing a show straight after. It will all be live-streamed, like a sweaty version of Big Brother.

Yet when we speak over the phone, it is amid a social media explosion of interest in him that has nothing to do with his act, and everything to do with his pronouns. While posing for the finalists of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, he was referred to (with his happy consent) as “she/her”. Congratulations erupted on Twitter. Izzard’s personal pronouns were swiftly feminised on Wikipedia. He sounds faintly bemused at the perception this was a landmark moment of asserting his trans identity, or settling on a gender.

“I didn’t push for it [on the programme]. This isn’t the big thing. I’ve been out for 35 years. When I was called ‘she’ on getting my honorary degree at Swansea [in 2019], no one gave a monkey’s. Why didn’t anyone pick up on it before? It’s whatever people want – if they call me she and her, that’s great – or he and him, I don’t mind. I prefer to be called Eddie, that covers everything.”

Izzard talks about switching between boy-mode and girl-mode: “I’m gender fluid. Your brain gets coded male or female when you’re young. Mine got coded both ways. I have the gift of both, although it doesn’t feel like a gift at first.” He’s proactively in “girl-mode” at the moment, and hopes the running “makes people look at trans in a different way”.

He owes some of the robust mindset required for marathons to the struggles he has had to go through. He waited until 1985, when he was 23, before braving a London street in a dress and heels. He did his first gig in make-up, heels and a skirt in a pub in 1991.

“Coming out was so hard – I couldn’t talk to anyone. I knew I was going to get abuse in the streets – and I have had that. It made me very mentally tough.”

He’s tough, then, but not combative. He tries to steer the course of least hysteria through the furore over JK Rowling’s stance on trans issues, and how they impact on the definition, and protection, of women. “I don’t think JK Rowling is transphobic. I think we need to look at the things she has written about in her blog. Women have been through such hell over history. Trans people have been invisible, too. I hate the idea we are fighting between ourselves, but it’s not going to be sorted with the wave of a wand. I don’t have all the answers. If people disagree with me, fine – but why are we going through hell on this?”

Has he contemplated transitioning? “I don’t have an answer to that. I do feel female, but if I was only expressing the female side of me, the boy side wouldn’t be represented. Whichever way, I’m slightly under-represented.”

He adopts a measured tone, too, when I ask him about Cleese’s comments – in the wake of the temporary withdrawal of a Fawlty Towers episode (“The Germans”) from UKTV in the summer – to wit: “I don’t think we should organise a society around the sensibilities of the most easily upset people.”

“I don’t want to get into a fight with John. He’s a hero of mine,” says Izzard. “But if you’re making jokes at minority or powerless groups, that doesn’t show a strong character. If you’re taking the p--- out of people of colour, or who have less money, that’s not a great way to do comedy. I won’t censor people, but I’m not going to do that.” He disdains the term “woke”. “I’m a radical moderate. That’s enough definition for me.”

This calorie-burning burst of stand-up may prove part of a comedy wind-down. He remains intent on standing as a Labour MP: “To effect real change, you have to enter politics”. Was he disappointed by the collapse of the Corbyn project? “If Jeremy was running the party, I was going to support him. Now Keir is running the party, I’m going to support him. I want the party to win, that’s what I want. I’m a fighter. I fight on.”

Onwards, then, he pounds. Of this new-year running adventure, he admits: “I know I’m doing something weird and extraordinary. But it’s good to do things so out-there that people notice them and go: ‘I didn’t know that was possible. Did he really do that?’ ”

What drives him to keep moving, outstripping the rest? Partly it’s his nature, and a genuine, grand passion to bring humanity together and turn negatives on their head. He concedes his mother’s death from cancer when he was six haunts him still. “There is an underlying thing that if I do enough good and positive things, mum will come back, which I know is not true. But my subconscious would want it to be true.” It takes guts to acknowledge something as painful as that, to a stranger. Izzard, let’s agree, has guts in spades.

Make Humanity Great Again: A Run for Hope and Still Standing are on until Jan 31; eddieizzard.com