Eddie Izzard - Force Majeure

Full transcript: Eddie Izzard on London Real

9:22 Brian Rose: Eddie, welcome to London Real.

9:24 Eddie Izzard: Thank you very much. It’s nice to have you here.

9:26 Brian Rose: I think your Twitter description says so much when you describe yourself, I’m a British European, I think like an American. I was born in an Arabic country.

9:35 When I look at your schedule, it feels like you work like an American. They said James Brown was the hardest working man in showbiz, but you are touring kind of nonstop. And I was wondering, you said once that you had a 50-year plan, that you like to think like Steve Jobs. Why work that? How do you work so much?

9:55 Eddie Izzard: Well, I couldn’t get anything going. I had my wilderness years in the 80s, sort of along the lines of the same as Margaret Thatcher’s career in politics.

10:05 Brian Rose: Is it her career in politics or the time she was in government?

10:09 Eddie Izzard: I couldn’t get anything going in the 80s. It isn’t linked to Thatcher, but it seemed like it.

10:15 But things took off in 1991. I think that’s when she left government. But since things started going, since I worked out, and I pushed so hard to try and get it going, and I really wanted to act when I was seven. So going through between drama pieces and stand-up comedy, I felt I started trying to get my things at seven, and it took off when I was 30. So I feel there’s 23 years of grafting away.

10:45 So I want to keep it going. And there is a place, I just study things. I’m a student of things, of patterns. A student of humanity, student of history, how human beings repeat in history, student of careers, how do they work. Maybe an analyst would be better.

11:06 I analyze all these things because that’s like a tool. I mean, you’re in finance, the analysts there, these people who work out how the algorithms work, or they can invent the algorithms to watch the numbers and crunch the numbers and see the patterns, but then no one can see everything. I just like to analyze everything. And so my analysis, if you keep pushing and you keep reinventing, if not really, if reinventing isn’t the right word, keep your game high, keep match fit, keep thinking, okay, I’ve done that, now what can I do that’s better?

11:39 How can I change this? Then you’ll probably stay in the game. But there’s a lot of careers that crash and burn, which is a Steve Jobs way of talking about things, or maybe that’s Silicon Valley way of talking about things.

11:54 Brian Rose: The Lost Interview by Steve Jobs.

11:56 Eddie Izzard: I don’t remember saying I think like Steve Jobs.

11:59 I remember saying that I do like Apple stuff and I think there are certain things I do, I think that certain parts of the way I think, which is like Steve Jobs, but I don’t remember actually saying that to anyone or articulating that. But the Lost Interview is the one.

12:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s the one hour interview. It’s before he’s going back to Apple, right?

12:23 Eddie Izzard: Yeah, that’s the key thing.

12:25 It’s 10 years out, he’s burnt and sort of come to a deal with it but as long as he doesn’t talk about it, I don’t want to talk about his sense. And there’s still a defensiveness in his attitude and certain things. But then he went back in a year and a half and then everything that he had planned to do came out because the stuff that he was doing when he got back in, I don’t think that was anything particularly different to what he was doing before in style and things.

12:57 I said let’s invent things that people don’t know that they need yet. Let’s do things that they haven’t asked for yet. But suddenly he hit the payload on, I suppose it was just the music, put the music thing in one little thing, that iPod and people said oh yeah, that seems simple, I’ll have that.

13:16 Brian Rose: So do you like Steve because he gives the customers something they don’t know they want?

13:22 Eddie Izzard: No, I find that an interesting idea.

13:24 I don’t think I’d quite thought of it in those terms. I did buy an iPad thinking I don’t know why I want this. I like it because there’s certain things he says in that. So I don’t quite identify the thing that people don’t know that they want even though I find it an interesting concept. I don’t feel that’s part of my thinking.

13:43 Yeah, I might adopt it as part of my thinking but I hadn’t thought in that way. He said Microsoft was king at that point and Apple was dying on the crash and burn slide slope. And he said I don’t decry them their success, I decry them the lack of taste. That was the thing. He was pushing for taste.

14:14 But also in his analysis of that he said it’s the product and dealing with people who make the product they can be a pain in the ass but it is the product is the thing and they think it’s the process. I think IBM thought it’s the process. They got the process worked out. We could take for this to this, then we do the market, we’ve got this great market, we’ve got this great market. Or the funny thing, is the thing any good?

14:38 The first thing he did was put out machines with color because there was all this off-white plastic. Didn’t know why it had to be this off-white plastic, all of them. He used to design the interiors of the computer. I remember I got an Apple II Plus, an 83, an 84, and the inside looked good. That was always important for him.

14:57 Brian Rose: People say that it’s the why, it’s why we buy Apple. It’s because of the why. Why do they do what they do?

15:02 Eddie Izzard: Because they want to be exceptional. They want to do this, they want to do that.

15:06 And that’s why we fall in love with their products. Whereas you don’t fall in love with the why of Microsoft or IBM. It feels more utilitarian. Well, Microsoft was weird. It was so aggressive, so aggressive.

15:18 And then they were bringing out Windows. But then Apple had come out Windows ages before. And it was almost like the Betamax thing. It was almost like Apple was going to go the way of Betamax and be better than Microsoft, but not got the marketing right. And then Steve Jobs came back in, and then the iPod, and boom.

15:34 Anyway, when I do things, like touring in French, touring France in French, it’s off the list. This is what I think. This isn’t, maybe that is, the French people didn’t know they wanted to go and watch English people do comedy in French. Maybe that is a bit like that. I don’t know if that’s the same thing.

15:55 But I couldn’t sit it off the list. I’ve started doing things which are not on the list. There’s a list of things you’ve got to do in comedy. You get a film and a thing, you get a show, an Edinburgh Festival in Britain, you get a sitcom, or you do a panel game. Maybe a film, if you’re doing very well.

16:11 Try and get America. How can you do that? But I decided I’ll go and tour France. And when I started doing that, no one in France believed it could work. No one in Britain believed it could work.

16:21 No one gave a shit. They still don’t really give a monkeys about it. But I’ve just toured, you know, I’ve sold over 5,000 tickets, 15 cities, 24 shows. I think it’s beautiful. It’s 200 years since Battle of Waterloo.

16:36 That’s what I do. And I’ve toured Germany and played Berlin for two months. I’m ready to tour Germany and Austria. Spanish, I get Central America and South America. Russian, the whole of Russia to tour, and then once I learn Russian, and then Arabic.

16:55 And so doing things which are not on the list, I find that fascinating because I think that’s a vision. And I like doing things that have a few positive things because if I do it in French, there are French acts I know, and I’ve met them, and some of them I’ve pushed and said, you go and do it well. Two of them particularly. I’ve said, go and do it in English. Why not, you know?

17:20 And Gad Elman is one of the top startups in France, and he says he can tour the world now in English using this secondary language, or second language. Second language. He can play in English to all countries of the world because all the kids are learning English because it’s so simple on its basic level. And it’s such a good communication tour. Advancing English is quite tricky, but it’s good on its basic level.

17:44 So just being off the list or off-piste, you know, I find that interesting. It is going to places that no one’s bothered to think about. But it’s got this positive message. And now the French are doing it in English, the Germans are doing it in English, the Russians are doing it in English, the Italians are doing it in English, Scandinavians, Dutch. Soon, every country that I predict, every country of the world is going to be hammering it in English.

18:15 Brian Rose: They love you in France, right? And the Parisians tell the other Parisians to go see you. Are you asking or you know this? Yeah, I think I thought I heard this. This?

18:24 Eddie Izzard: The ones that know, yes. They’re really supportive. They’ve got on television and said, you should go and see this guy. So the ones who know, they absolutely thumbs up. I’d say the French people who know what I’m doing, they are very supportive.

18:37 The French people who don’t know me, don’t know me from Adam. But that’s, like in America, that would be mainstream America. Britain is also, you know, there’s a big chunk of mainstream Britain doesn’t know me. But I have quite a chunk of Americans who will, oh yeah, I never got, and British, but there’s still a large part of France. I’m still on the cult level.

19:00 I’ve got to get into, there’s a level between alternative hit, I’ve got to get to the alternative hit, and I’m still on a cult status. 5,000 tickets, actually my executive assistant, she lives there and she says she can sense that my profile has spiked up because I did a ton of press coming in. And I just have to get, I have to go on things like this, but do it, do the français. I prefer that. And that’s, if you say, très français, but I prefer that.

19:31 I can do this all in French. In fact, I did a round table thing for an hour and a half with other guests who were talking about this and they had prepared pieces of stuff and two well-known actors in there and a moderator who was linking to it, and I could stay with it in French. And that is really kind of high level, but you have to get that good. No one actually gives you points for doing it in the other language. That’s the interesting, you don’t get brownie points.

19:57 You get brownie points pat on the back brownie points, but you don’t get, I’m going to come and see your brownie points. Let’s go see the guy who’s not really that good at our own language. You’ve got to get above a certain level to say, that guy is funny in his language. And then there’s also the ability in the, because I learn the show line by line like a script form, but I keep developing my spoken ability. But my level of learned script is higher than my, it has no faults in it, whereas my spoken, spoken chitchat interview stuff will have faults in it.

20:29 So they will judge me, anyone listening would think, okay, he’s quite good at French. But in the actual show, I’m very good at French. Because I’m going from a script, and I can improvise for a bit when I go slightly down a bit, go a bit off and make a few more mistakes, and I come back on, and it’s perfectly line by line. I’ve decided to move to this before my initial French shows were all a bit scrappy and a bit here, and that line doesn’t really work.

20:52 Brian Rose: And what is he trying to say there?

20:54 Just more attuned to your original comedy was figuring things out, making the observations more on the cuff. In a way, but it was not attuned to the level of English that I was using. My level of English was always high. Obviously, I’m not making any grammatical mistakes. If I do, I say that is a deliberate one.

21:10 Eddie Izzard: So I can say United Kingdomy people. No one says United, it doesn’t exist as a saying, but I can say it, and I say, I’m saying that, you know, and I will just push that through. And I know that United Kingdomy people is going to work rather, United Kingdomy people will not work. Whereas in French, I probably couldn’t work out the best sounding thing to say. Right.

21:30 Brian Rose: And German as well, and now Spanish. I remember I saw you do an interview where you said the joke in German, I think it was the only thing Caesar got was the salad, and you worked on that verb, and so it looks like you’ve got it down to where it’s great comedy in German. The beauty is there. Well, it’s exactly the same as French or anything else. The interesting thing was I thought German was going to be difficult because they have their verbs, they put them at the end of the sentence, which is totally alien to English speakers, unless you do poetry or unless you think of a poem.

21:59 And you say, on the burning deck of the bridge, I did stand. That is a Germanic thing, well, I did stand. And we actually, in poetry, we’re used to that, aren’t we?

22:09 Eddie Izzard: And we can deal with that. But that’s all the Germans do is they go, I did stand.

22:14 They put it right at the end. So to repeat the thing that you mentioned just because I do find it fascinating, Caesar, did he ever think he’d end up as a salad? Is the line? And Caesar had to yegedag to do everything. That’s ein mal, that he one time, a salad end up with him.

22:31 And they laugh at the same point. And I thought, you’d have to take everything into the present. I actually asked German comedians, what do you do? And saying, I don’t know, I don’t analyze it. And they don’t actually change anything.

22:44 The verb comes so close behind the noun that it doesn’t seem to matter. And because you’re a seasoned comedian, when you do it on stage, you know when it works. And you can play with it. Well, you know. If they laugh, then it’s working.

22:55 And if they don’t laugh, it’s just that. But I’ve been taught all my life that every culture has a different sense of humor. That’s bullshit. I did a stand-up comedy course like five years ago when I came to Britain. And everyone was like, okay, you’re the American.

23:08 You’re going to bring this to the table. British has the dry sense of humor, the this and the that. But your jokes are the same in Oklahoma City, Moscow, Melbourne. I don’t believe there is an American sense of humor. Is there an American sense of music?

23:19 No. Is there a British sense of music? No. Can British people, like the Beatles, take black R&B and then put a guitar sound on it that might be more white American guitar sound? Well, the singing would be more of that.

23:33 And then take that back, because their melodies could be the beach voices. I don’t know. They weren’t listening to the beach voice at that time. But jazz invented by Americans, a Chinese kid on sax does jazz. You could be a brilliant Chinese sax player, you know, jazz sax player.

23:52 There are no national senses of humor. And if you analyze it, you’ve got what is an extreme Andrew Dice Clay when he’s stand up against Robin Williams. Are they comparable? Is that the American sense of humor? Or which one are you going to choose?

24:06 Because they are fucking miles apart. The point is, is there are multiple senses of humor in every country? Which of course it is, like there’s multiple senses, multiple tastes of music in every country. So in comedy broadly, there’s a mainstream sense of humor in America. Jokes will be sports starts, political people, people on television, brands and things.

24:27 What was that on the television? All that stuff. Then the more alternative, progressive comedy, which is playing with the form and post-Lenny Bruce America, the alternative, so that way you’re pushing the edges. It can be political, it can be surreal, whatever it is. That is the same in Britain.

24:46 All I’ve got to do is link up with the people who like progressive surreal comedy. And then it’s references. It’s the references that are national. It’s not the sense of humor, it’s the references. So, you know, Patton Oswalt is a great comedian.

24:59 I love his stuff. If I played Patton’s audience, if he played in my audience, we’d both get the same thing. It’s, you know, they’d get it, Jerry Seinfeld’s audience. I could play to them. They could, Jerry could play to my audience.

25:10 Surreal off beat. Not exactly the same, Mike Babiglia. There’s a whole bunch of comedians that can do the same stuff. Python-esque. I just find the Python, people like multi-Python from around the world.

25:21 Brian Rose: And… And you de-anglicized your comedy 15 years ago. You took all the references out. Well, it’s, in fact, it’s even weirder than that. I just made it universal.

25:31 Eddie Izzard: But I talk about medieval kings in this show, Enforce Mejor Reloaded, which we’re doing here in the West End in January and February. And so I talk about Richard the Lionheart. And… Bad King John, as we know. King John Lackland.

25:45 Now, most people in Britain, they’ve probably heard of Richard the Lionheart. And that’s about it. He didn’t speak any English. He spoke any French. So it goes into that.

25:54 Now, but once you’ve introduced those terms, which are English kings and medieval kings, then you can play with them. So you can actually talk about anything. So American could come over and they could have a whole American reference show. But they’d have to keep introducing it. Let me tell you about Hershey’s bars.

26:10 Hershey’s bars. We don’t know what they are. It’s a trouble bar. I grew up with somebody. I have one and somebody stole it.

26:15 And then you could have a whole story about that. Whale Rider, the film, if you’ve ever seen Whale Rider. If you think of any independent film that’s kind of odd, maybe a little bit sunshine, you’ve seen that. Yeah, love it. So pageants, beauty pageants, people don’t necessarily know about that.

26:31 But as you go through, you go, okay, they’re good. So they educate the audience in the first half hour. In the story. They just drop things in. They don’t have to do expositional lumps in there.

26:38 They can just edge it in. Other kids can do some sort of dance. The granddad’s been teaching her dance. What the hell is the dance? Blah, blah, blah.

26:44 That’s the thing. We can lace things in. There’s a thing called a curly whirly, which is a sort of nougat and chocolate thing. And a funny name in Curly Whirly, and they were flat, and they were a lattice shape. And if I talk about Curly Whirly and tell people what it is, I’m like, kill for Curly Whirly.

27:00 It’s like a sword, and you wouldn’t have a good fight with it. But I could do that. And then after that, I could talk about Curly Whirly throughout the entire show because I’ve introduced the thing just like it becomes story logic. Just if you know about writing stories, then that you can put into your stammer. So it’s just the references.

27:20 If you make them universal, it saves time if you talk Kit Kats all around the world, or just say a chocolate bar all around the world. You don’t even have to get brand. If that’s your punchline, then that’s going to be the first time you knock that word out, you better make sure it’s universal. You said you love to analyze things. You’ve obviously thought a lot about this.

27:39 Brian Rose: Do you analyze all strains of comedy from the past, current, and then think about where you want to go with your comedy? I know you played Lenny Bruce on the stage. Do you get really detailed in the analysis, or do you do more with what feels right?

27:51 Eddie Izzard: Only in whatever I want to analyze. Like, I started doing political comedy, but then because I wanted to go to politics, I thought, actually, I’m going to leave that, and I won’t do party political comedy.

28:01 It’s also dates. It dates so terribly, party politics. You could do something. Within a few days, it could be old. It could be a beautiful thing.

28:08 What a great idea. Oh, I’ve got it in the whole shape. Oh, it’s gone. I even know how to reclaim topical material. Make sure anyone watching at home, it’s quite a useful trick.

28:19 If you did, if I did something about, okay, say the last election in Britain, so that was quite recent, so you could have a piece about the election. What? Election, da, da, da, da. As time goes on in 2016, 2017, you talk about the last election, that’s two years ago, but then you can reclaim it by saying, general elections, and you can do a whole piece about all politics in general. It’s about winning and losing and things like that, and you can actually retabulate the title of your piece, and you can take an old piece of what was topical material and slot it in and make it into a historical piece because you’re talking about how elections are won generally, and then you can go back in the past and then back in 1979, there’s elections, there’s World War II, 1945, Churchill lost election, how can you lose an election?

29:11 Then you can just talk about loads of elections, and then you can put your one in, and it doesn’t feel dated because it’s all part of a historical thing. So if you take something topical and it loses its topicality, go back into history, find a whole bunch of that stuff, or try and lace it into a story that has a historical foundation, and then no one says, oh, not the medieval kings. God, come talk to me about medieval kings. That’s not topical. That’s so 1300s, like 1200s.

29:39 So you’re fine, and you can actually hide it in a different place. You can just rebrand it as a historical piece.

29:46 Brian Rose: So you haven’t analyzed that, or is that pretty obvious to you?

29:50 Eddie Izzard: No, that came into, that hit me, and at a certain point I worked that out. So I constantly analyze things, and I work out some things.

29:59 I mean, the Twitter definition, would I say, I’m a British European.

30:05 Brian Rose: So that was, if you’ve got African Americans, Italian Americans, Asian Americans, as America is now some years old, so what are you, 250 now?

30:16 Eddie Izzard: Yeah, 240. 240. All the stuff that in the European Union we’re going through, we’re 50 years old about.

30:25 So we’re going through, you’ve got to look at America in 50 years, and it’s still not the exact comparison, but all the trouble that you were going through back then, we’ve got that, and we’ve got bureaucracy, and people fighting over it, you know, the Federalists, and the, you know, you’ve got Madison and Jefferson against Hamilton, and the Federalists’ essays, all been written by Latin names, everyone under pseudonym, Jefferson saying, I’m not into, everyone had to say, I’m not into power, but please give me the presidency. All this stuff that was going on, we got, it’s a different sensibility now, but there are certain things that are quite similar. So I analyze, I compare, I can trust, I try and, well, it’s because I came out as being transgender 30 years ago, I self-analyzed myself to a certain point.

31:10 I lay on a bed, on my bed with the curtains closed, and tried to take my brain through, why do I think this way? Why do I feel this way? Tell me, brain, what is going on? Because you build barriers over, like a car crash. Like, if you’re LGBT, you have this sexuality thing, which you think, oh, people are saying this is not a positive thing, so therefore you say, I must have had a car crash of sexuality, the equivalent thing.

31:39 I will build blocks over that, so that it doesn’t come out in my conversation, and I just go on and I just keep this big secret. Which kills your creativity. No, no, it’s just a pocket of your brain. You know, if you have a car crash, it wouldn’t kill your creativity. The analogy is that people say they can’t even remember what happened.

31:59 They build a wall, it was such a horrible experience, or maybe some mugged or whatever, and they just, they build, they wall it off. And that’s what I found I had done. My brain wouldn’t let me concentrate on the analysis. But I went through it, I went through it, all I came to the conclusion was that guilt and shame were not my responsibility. Forget those things, I dropped them.

32:20 But I didn’t come to any big conclusions, but I got analysis out of it. I accidentally developed how to do analysis by self-analyzing myself. And that was a scary moment at the time. A lot of people, as your career was arcing, wouldn’t have made the choice to come out. The press could have gone one way or the other.

32:35 Brian Rose: But you just made that decision.

32:37 Eddie Izzard: Well, I’d come out six years before. So I’d actually come out in 1985, and my career was taking off in 1991. So I told friends, and then I sort of put it back in the box in a way. And I went down to give a street performer, and I didn’t tell anyone there that I was transgender, or transvesta, as I called it then.

32:55 The names keep shifting, like… You’re trans now, it was transvesta and TV. It was TV when I first… Well, transvesta, that was a bad word. What a negative word.

33:02 So I was TV, I am TV. And people said, you’re television? It was TV and TS, transsexual TV. That was TS and TV. So I said, I’m TV, I’m TV and TV.

33:12 And people went, huh? And then I thought, actually, I’m going to reclaim the whole big word, and I’ll put action, transvesta, and executive transvesta. I started building these little sound bites that were positive, because I knew if I talked about it endlessly, I could get loose and throw away about it. So that’s what that got to. And then the word moved to transgender and then trans, and so I said, okay, I’m transgender.

33:37 And then someone said, I thought you’re transgender? Well, it’s the same thing, but vesta implies it’s all about the clothes, whereas in fact, it’s genetics. I’m quite sure it’s genetics. They’re going to find the genetic strains in that. And I’ve got…

33:48 Brian Rose: Before you knew. Yeah, I was four.

33:50 Eddie Izzard: I knew that I had these feelings. I didn’t know quite exactly what to do. Right.

33:53 Brian Rose: You wanted…

33:54 Eddie Izzard: Yeah, those boobs were cool. That dress was cool. I want to wear that. You had these feelings.

33:58 Yeah, the girl’s, you know, the boy was wearing a dress, and I heard about this, and I thought, well, and all the other kids thought it was funny, but I thought, no, that sounds… I’d like to wear a dress. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t work out, and I still like girls. So I am this straight transgender, wannabe lesbian.

34:14 Can’t explain my…

34:15 Brian Rose: You said you’re a male lesbian, and I’ve mentioned that to a few people, and my brain does brain tricks with me when I try to think what that means. You describe your version, or your feelings on transgenderism, as it’s 100% male and maybe 50% female, as in you still have a lot of these lad qualities. You like football. You’re hyper-focused.

34:33 Eddie Izzard: I wouldn’t… Yeah, I’d say boy qualities. I’d say lad and play. I never had that. I never…

34:39 Get drunk in the butt. I never could get the drink thing going. But very focused, very… Wanted to be special forces, wanted to do paratroops or marines, and then to go into the SAS. That was a distinct plan that I was obsessing on until I decided to drop it, because I wasn’t sure which war I’d be sent to.

35:00 And I feel, having just met guys from the SAS recently, what I’ve done is like civilian special forces. That’s what my career has been. I’m doing stuff that is off the map or pieced. No one’s guiding me. No one’s helping.

35:15 No backup. Not life-dangerous. Well, I walk around in a dress, you get… I went to the whole of France, and I just had one 16-year-old girl. She had big or less, I mean, disgusting, she said.

35:29 That was it, though. Just one. And I had a fight with some other… It was teenage kids. They give you the hardest time.

35:35 Adults go… And I give off non-victim vibes. I give off non-victim vibes. That’s quite 30 years worth of confidence.

35:43 Brian Rose: Can you describe what that’s like, given the non-victim vibes?

35:47 Eddie Izzard: Non-victim vibes is… It’s probably a bad name. It’s just… It’s the inverse of victim. If someone looks at me, I will look back at them, and I will attempt to out-stare them until they’re going, I don’t know what I’m looking at.

36:08 Maybe not Nazis with knives at whatever, but I will stand my ground. They say when you’re riding a bicycle, claim the road, and it’s better for you to…

36:18 Brian Rose: Have you heard about this theory?

36:20 Eddie Izzard: Yeah. I claim.

36:21 Brian Rose: Right. But you’re not aggressive, but you claim it. Yeah. You’re like, I own this. Yeah.

36:26 Eddie Izzard: I’m not projecting it on you. No. But I am here. I’ve started walking along the street and actually looking at people. And if someone looks at me, I will stare them out.

36:35 And I’m not sure if I should be doing this, because I don’t know that it’s being a bit too overt. Teenagers have the biggest problem. It’s just… It’s teenagers. I don’t want to be with teenagers.

36:44 I had a bit of a contra-ton with, and they were making weird noises at me at a train station in Antibes, where I used to sleep on the bench there when I was about 18. So I’d left the building, and I went back in to confront them and said, yeah, problem, yeah, problem. No, it’s very cool. It’s just be cool, be cool. And this guy’s going…

37:06 This kid’s just going, so you do blow jobs, you do blow jobs. I said, just be cool. Just be cool. It’s all in French, all in French, going on. And they’re giving me negative shit and stuff.

37:15 And I thought, okay, you’ve just got to learn, you know, just live and let live, be cool. Everyone’s got a right to be everywhere, you know. So I walk out the door, and then my… The other performer I was working with, I stand up, Yessine Belous, he’s known for being on comedy on television. And they went, hey, Yessine, Yessine.

37:34 So they knew him. That was interesting. So I said, actually, I’m going to go back and stand up, so Yessine. So Yessine’s going, what’s going on here? Because he’s had something going on.

37:42 You’re giving this guy a hard time because he’s good. He’s good comedian, you know. He’s a friend of mine. So you call with me, then you’ve got to be cool with him. And then…

37:49 So then it was taking sides. And so they said… So he said, are we all cool now? And they said, sort of. And he says, okay, we’ll do a selfie.

37:58 And then the boys were not cool. And all the boys… It’s on the… It’s on the Twitter. They’ve got these three boys sauntering off in the background.

38:08 And the girls decided to stay and they were okay with it. There was one young woman there who was okay with it. But there was this barrage of negativity coming in. So anyway, I just… I will fight this thing.

38:19 I found… Usually they’re not so overt and aggressive. They were going to giggling and whispering. Whispering and giggling. And I found this thing that if I see that happening, I will actually go and stand next to them and get my phone out and just start feeling about and texting next to the group.

38:37 Given the proximity. Yeah, it makes giggling and you can feel that and comfort. So we’re ready to giggle and point and he’s standing right next to us.

38:45 Brian Rose: So you’re starting a conversation, basically, by doing that?

38:48 Eddie Izzard: No, no, no, I’m not talking to them.

38:50 Brian Rose: But I know, but you are. You’re engaging them. I wouldn’t say conversations. I am actually causing… Instead of them causing mild to mid-level humiliation to me, I’m causing their negative output to feed back on themselves.

39:16 It’s almost like they’re getting feedback. So they’re going… And because they’re less aggressive, so it’s kind of safer for me, they’re not going, you’re a fucking wanker, we hate you. They’re just… They’re going, I wish I had…

39:35 Eddie Izzard: I wish he was further away because that’s the bubble coming out of their heads. I wish he stood further away because then we could all point and giggle and we could sort of giggle at the fact that we’re not him and our lives are better because that’s what gossip is essentially about. It’s raising your own social status while lowering someone else’s. So then they tend to move off a bit and then I just sort of glide over to wherever they’re going. Now I did this in America in one place.

40:01 They were going to a restaurant and this guy opened the door and I went in. I went in last with my group of friends. I heard them went into giggling and laughing and pointing and all that kind of stuff. So I turned around and went back out and I stood next to them and did some photos, as if I was about the phone and someone trying to get the signal. So it’s not overt, it’s kind of covert.

40:17 But then they couldn’t get on and they moved over and I moved over again. And then they left. They were going to the restaurant and by doing this they started peeling off in twos and ones and three’s. There’s about ten of them. And they started leaving the restaurant.

40:34 They never even got in the door. They were just holding open the door because they got there slightly first and then they went into the gig which is not a guy wearing makeup. And they started leaving. And there was one guy who was above this. She said, she’s the one guy who’s not that.

40:48 And he’s going, are we going to this restaurant or what? What are we doing? And it had caused that they were so uncomfortable about not being able to giggle. And if they could all just close down and say, let’s just live in that living, not giggle and whisper, then they could have gone in. But they’d already done it and they’d already committed themselves to that and they probably couldn’t backtrack on that weak side of their characters that needed to giggle and whisper and point.

41:13 Brian Rose: Is your goal to open this idea to the world kind of one person at a time if you have to, one group at a time? No, well, I can’t really, they’ve got to work themselves out. The one guy who said, what are we doing?

41:23 Eddie Izzard: He’s probably the one who’s going to be okay. The rest of them just have lower characters.

41:27 It’s lower character people, people who can’t think bigger, can’t think more openly, will want to get together, that that is the negative thing on a world. So I’m not really doing anything. I don’t think that’s necessarily going to change them. I think I could read up with them again in five years and they’d still be giggling and whispering. But it’s actually telling if anyone watching this who’s also LGBT or minority or whatever, just go and if you stand next to the little bubble of this giggly, whispery, humiliation bowl, it just makes them uncomfortable.

42:04 Brian Rose: Instead of you being uncomfortable, they’re uncomfortable. Right. I’ve understood transgenderism, transvestitism for the first time in my entire life, say two days ago, and learning more about you and researching more about you. Because with you, it’s not part of your act and it’s not sexual fetish, it’s just a part of your very rich character. And so I think for so many times, when I ever saw someone that was transgender, it was their act, it was 110% of who they were.

42:33 And I just didn’t find that congruent. But with you, it just seems to be part of your character. And now I’m like, okay, he does a show sometimes dressed as a woman, sometimes he doesn’t, sometimes he doesn’t interview as one, sometimes he doesn’t. But it’s not his craft and it’s not defining him. I wouldn’t say dressed as well.

42:47 Eddie Izzard: I just say wearing a dress. Right. You can wear pants, trousers, and they don’t call it dressed as a man. Right. So we should all be able to wear whatever we want to.

42:56 And Caitlyn Jenner has been quite helpful for me because obviously sporting decathlon, gold medal, then the Kardashians, a different thing and whatever. But being transgender, being trans, that’s not part of sports, not part of the family, not part of the Kardashians. It’s genetics, it’s in there. I’m so sure it’s genetics. Right.

43:22 I’d be very surprised if it’s not genetics.

43:25 Brian Rose: And you said that, you know, guilt and shame is not part of your life. If you have it, you go see a psychiatrist. Yeah. Five thousand years, the LGBT community has been ostracized.

43:35 It’s now time for them to get over it. And they need to really, it’s an education process. I should know better too. I talk to hundreds of people every day about ideas and topics. And yet, for me, it clicked a couple of days ago with you.

43:48 And now I was like, okay, it’s just a part of his character. It doesn’t define you.

43:52 Eddie Izzard: I’d say it’s part of my genetics, rather than my character. Right. You know, because my character rides over it.

43:57 My genetics is, there is a thing I can only call a girly thing. And some women have taken obsessions of that, but I can’t get a better word for it. If anyone can get a better word, please tell me. But it is a thing of heels and makeup and skirts, and it’s kind of fun, and it’s kind of sexy. And a number of women, as you see every day, they do this.

44:19 They’re not doing this because someone’s putting a gun to their head. They’re not doing this because someone’s told them. And when I went and met a tribe in Namibia, they said, I paint their nails because I have my nails painted and I had some nail varnish. So they were, and they’re basically, from 200,000 years ago, essentially, they were still living in that life. So some people, and there’s obviously a number of women, some women don’t know.

44:43 We both have made makeup. How does makeup? But some of us find it fun and sexy and it’s in expressing a side of ourselves, and women have that and some men have that. Right.

44:56 Brian Rose: So I do my nails last night in honor of you.

44:59 And my girls were doing them. And I was like, this is a lot of fun, actually. So people that are listening, I’ve got a British flag on one side, EU flag on the other, a little bit green. Sorry about that. But it was fun.

45:10 And then on the tube today, I was there, and some of the guys here was like, what did they say on the tube? And I was just like, why would I give a shit?

45:17 Eddie Izzard: But they say, it feels good. It feels kind of fun and expressive. Yeah.

45:20 And that’s the way you should feel about wearing anything. Yeah. And, you know, I think gay men took men’s fashions in a place where you could wear different things, different colors. Men’s underpants could only be whites when I was growing up. Only white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white.

45:34 Even black was, oh, that must be gay. They used the negative epithet, queer at that time, which is now being reclaimed. You know, blacky-black, but any other color than that. Now you could, I think any kid could grow up and wear color pants, whatever they wanted to. This is underpants I’m talking about.

45:51 We get, we have got stuck over, if we take 5,000 years of civilization, I don’t know quite where we measure it from, Stonehenge to now, from the pyramids. We’ve been through times where people got very repressive. It’s come back forward. It’s come back forward. It’s come back to the Nazis just, you know, 50, 70 years ago.

46:15 They were murdering people over it. We’ve got to do a live and let live thing. It’s, but there is a thing, the genetics I think is very important when they do find it, because I’m so sure they will. It will, I, there’s potentially a negative thing. Oh, it’s genetics.

46:34 I’m going to make sure my kid doesn’t have his genetics. I’m going to suck it out with a, with a sucking thing. Whereas we will be able to say, look, because the people say, the number of people say, from mainstream world, they say, oh, you people are strange because you choose this to behave in a way that we feel is unusual. And I’m saying, no, my genetics, it was my gift. We all know we get genetic cards when we’re kids.

47:03 And some of them are fun things. Hey, you’re really good at piano. You can earn a living that way or football or something. And some are tougher ones and some are really not good ones and psychotic ones and killer ones or whatever. But I think they’re handed out.

47:19 Some are learnt, but I think some are genetic. But on the sexuality ones, these are handed out. And they have been, you know, I don’t believe in a god, so Mother Nature just hands them out and its genes going way back. And the good thing is about being honest about it and talking about it. And if people, if we can get boring, if LGBT can get boring, then we’ve made it.

47:40 That’s the goal. That’s the goal. Somebody says, I’m gay and I make soup. And they go, I don’t care about your gay. What’s the soup like?

47:49 Brian Rose: Isn’t it good? Let’s have some soup then. You said it unlocked your career. Was that a fair quote? When you kindly came out and talked about being transvestite?

47:57 Eddie Izzard: Not unlocked my career. No. I tried not to say that. So I think, because some people said, oh, your career took off because you were wearing makeup. And that wasn’t the situation.

48:08 My career was taking off. And if you go back and look at it, you can see the stages. What happened is, I did three years on the circuit, 88, 89, 90. I was best newcomer at the Edinburgh Festival of 91. I was nominated.

48:26 End of 91, I came off the circuit. I played bloom. And I told people, I think in, at first I went 91, I think. I was off the circuit. So I started talking about it then.

48:42 So I’d already come off the comedy circuit, which is a difficult thing to do. And I played the Bloomsbury Theatre in January. And then two months later, I played the Wimbledon Theatre, the Hackney, I think it was the Wimbledon Theatre. Then two months later, the Hackney Empire. And then two months later, I did the Shaw Theatre for two weeks.

49:00 And I was talking about it in this point in the journalists were saying, why is he talking about it? Is this some sort of weird joke? Because he’s not wearing a dress or makeup. So I said, okay, I’ll wear a dress or makeup. So I started doing that and testing that out.

49:11 And it did bring a certain focus, and they did photos in a different way or whatever. But I don’t think people are saying, hey, the guy’s wearing a lot of makeup. I’m going to go and see the guy wearing a lot of makeup. It’s not a pull thing. It doesn’t make your comedy go.

49:23 It makes your profile go bounce in a certain way. But I didn’t, I thought I could lose my career. It was definitely, it’s probably a 60-40 against me of losing my career, having spent ages trying to get it going. At least 50-50, if not 60. In my head, you couldn’t analyze it.

49:39 It could be 60-40, it could be 70-30 against your career. Like, who knew? Where were all the transvestite comedians out there that you could say, ah, his career went fine after that. There just weren’t any. So I just had to try it.

49:53 And I did this one gig, and I did a gig, my first joke about being a transvestite, which was, it’s good to be a minority, but I’m a white male, middle class, so thank God I’m a transvestite. And that was my first laugh. And I didn’t really go anywhere. I think people thought that was just a bit of a joke. But then I did, no, I was wearing a dress when I was doing this one.

50:14 So that was my first joke, and I got a laugh. So I thought, okay, that’s fine. Then I had jokes about Daleks and Doctor Who. And I thought, well, if I can look, wear the dress and makeup and do jokes about Doctor Who and still get a laugh, then we’re through. Okay.

50:30 Brian Rose: You talked about your career. I mean, 83, you were street performing in the Covent Garden. 93 was your big West End show.

50:36 Eddie Izzard: 85, I started in Covent Garden. In Covent Garden.

50:38 Brian Rose: What did you learn from those days of street performing that you at least still have in the back of your mind, or you remember when you play something like the Hollywood Bowl, where it’s a huge place, or what are some of the things, was that a crucial place to learn?

50:52 Eddie Izzard: Yeah, it’s good. I played, no one had played all, no comedian had played all night at the Hollywood Bowl. I’ve played it twice now. And I noticed that, and it’s because they haven’t been a street performer, I think.

51:03 It’s the confidence you learn, because essentially you’re playing this massive, the Covent Garden, this massive opera-sized stage with no roof. And the Hollywood Bowl is just like that, and it goes further back. But you learn that the confidence is from your gut, because I lost all my confidence on the street. And then built it back.

51:26 Brian Rose: You lost it on the street.

51:28 Eddie Izzard: Yeah, I totally lost it. I’d seen people do it. It looked a lot of fun. Stomp, the touring company Stomp, came from a street bank called Pookie Snackenberger, and they used to perform with a comedy group called Cliffhanger. They’re all from Brighton, and they performed at Edinburgh, and they had a lot of fun.

51:45 They did great shows. We loved this stuff. We thought we could do it. We thought you could just do sketches on the street, so we tried to do sketches. That didn’t work.

51:53 We tried to do knock-about comedy, me and my partner, Rob Ballard. And nothing worked, and it was really awful. I was quite a confident sketch comedian, and I found I was a really awful street performer. I couldn’t do it, and I thought I could be able to do it, so I lost all my confidence. I couldn’t work out.

52:14 I was using the analysis that I’d just suddenly developed from having come out. I’d sort of come out and then put it back into the box, come down the carbon garden just in boy mode, and I couldn’t get laughs. I couldn’t hold the audience. We couldn’t do anything right. It was a year, maybe a year and a half of failing, definitely a year of failing.

52:37 There came a point when I started realizing I was developing a voice on the stage. I realized I had to develop the ability, which I felt was more of an American ability to be the narrator. When I analyzed that as the narrator, the guy who says, hi, welcome, come along. We’re going to do something today. It’s going to be interesting.

52:56 It might be boring. People may die. To be able to talk and do that hosting thing, to be the host, which is not part of sketch comedy. Sketch comedy is just playing the characters of someone who has a voice like this saying, I’m in charge of everything. Everyone’s got to go and stand up there.

53:11 And you have their attention by definition in that scenario.

53:15 Brian Rose: In which night?

53:16 Eddie Izzard: In the sketch. Yes, because indoors, sitting there, they bought a ticket, lights. I thought that was difficult enough.

53:23 But on the street, they are not even there to see you. You’re trying to be something more interesting than everything they got to do at Covent Garden. Having a coffee and ice cream. Go watch your film. Go to see a museum.

53:35 The whole list, the panoply of things you can do on the street. Just go and look at another street show that’s just around the corner. It was so difficult to hold people. I found you had to do physical situation comedy. That is what works on the street.

53:48 Physical situation comedy. You can’t do sketches.

53:51 Brian Rose: You said once that in the street, children have the attention of animals and adults have the attention of children. And you really have to… Yeah.

54:00 Eddie Izzard: Adults become children, children become animals. It’s… If you do something very violent… I mean, Tom and Jerry violence works on the streets. If you say…

54:09 If there’s a kid, especially if a kid’s being a bit annoying in the play I’m talking about, you say, okay, let’s go out here, come here. Okay, we’re going to kill this kid. And then they just laugh and they laugh and that. That’s a really violent thing to say. But for some reason it goes into Tom and Jerry style of…

54:27 Okay, you can say very violent things though. You don’t actually do anything about it. But you had to do things. You had to set up car crashes. In the end I was getting onto a five-foot unicycle in a pair of manacles and then escaping from that and people would stick around back there, even in bad weather, because I might die.

54:49 Brian Rose: Right, because you’re dealing with that too. You’re dealing with bad weather.

54:53 Eddie Izzard: Yeah, and how to hold people. And you can’t hold them with… You can’t stand there and go, you know when you’re in the supermarket?

54:59 Now, in Washington Square Park in New York, they did say that guys would come out there with beat boxes and do stand-up. And I think you probably could if there’s… If the human traffic in Washington Square Park is quite… Different than coming back. Right, and there’s not much shops and things.

55:13 It’s just a sort of chill out and hang out and sit out kind of vibe. Whereas Covent Garden, the cafes are right there, right behind you. There’s a pub right above you. There’s just so much to do. There’s so many shops.

55:25 And you’re right next to the river and you go across the South Bank. It’s just too much to do.

55:29 Brian Rose: What kept you at it for a year when you were losing confidence every day?

55:33 Eddie Izzard: Nothing. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

55:35 I’d already done three shows at the Edinburgh Festival, sketch comedy, and I’d packed up the sketch comedy. The sketch comedy doesn’t work. It’s not a hot medium. It wasn’t a hot medium on telly. People weren’t doing it on television.

55:46 No one’s coming to New York and coming to… So no one’s coming to the Edinburgh Festival and discovering me. So I’ve dumped this thing. I’ve got to do something else. And I started the street.

55:56 And then that wasn’t working and that was going backwards. And I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I’d run out of ideas. I was sort of at my… At the end of a road, end of a tether.

56:09 Just going, this isn’t working. I re-analyzed it. I rewrote the show that made it worse. Church will have a thing. Keep buggering on.

56:21 I kept buggering on. KBO, you call it. So that’s from… Because 1940, people remember well, but from 40 to 42 till he won a… We won an LLMA.

56:36 It was a lot of KBOing. So I just kept buggering on. Couldn’t think of anything else to do.

56:40 Brian Rose: Was it in the 50-year plan?

56:42 Eddie Izzard: I don’t know if it was in plan at that point.

56:44 Brian Rose: But were you thinking, okay, I am going to get to stage and do my one-man show?

56:48 Eddie Izzard: Well, I thought I had five-year plans.

56:50 Brian Rose: Is it that much 50?

56:51 Eddie Izzard: Sometimes there’s a spike. At a zero.

56:53 I’ve said on the 50 thing that you may as well aim for an age you want to pass away at. Aim for 100, if you say, if you want to. So now I’ve got a 50-year thing. Now I’m ready to go on a 50-year plan. But I don’t feel I’ve talked about 50-year plans before.

57:09 I’ve talked about five-year plans before, but that sounds like Stalinist. Let me ask you about Europe. It’s a good way of planning, though. It is. Having a chunk of time.

57:18 Brian Rose: Because you said that’s one of your greatest assets is your ability to plan and plan and work and analyze, because this is all stuff you’ve thought of before.

57:29 Eddie Izzard: Oh, yeah. If you’ve got instinctive in one hand and analytic on the other hand, that’s really tough to beat, because I found that you can build a natural, you can train yourself into a natural working model of someone who is good at something. Does that make sense? Yeah.

57:49 Like, stand up. I could not do stand up. There was, in the believed documentary on my life, there’s somebody, some critic said, why do you want to, or some interviewee said, why do you want to be so, so active when you’re a brilliant comedian? I said, well, I used to be a so-so comedian. And I was a so-so street performer before that.

58:08 I’m a very bad street performer. And I’ve worked out how, because I thought sketch comedy, I was quite natural at that. And some people say, I’m naturally good at this. I can’t do those. That’s it for my life.

58:22 I’ll go, oh, I can do that. Or whatever. How would they work it out? I’ve worked out that I really wanted to do street performing. Well, I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

58:29 If it worked, it would be fun. So I worked out how to build the pieces together to, it felt like building a, you know, like an artificial valve of a heart or something. I built an artificial sensibility to how to sense how to do street so that I could go onto a street and I could feel street. I can actually now feel energies of street venues. I started articulating the street venues because people say, you’re a street performer.

58:57 There’s a big street. I do a show here. And I go, and it would, you know, just be on the cars going by and there’s no people there. And they say, you’re not very good as a street performer. I say, no, no, no, hang on.

59:07 I had to articulate. That is a bad street venue. The street venue you’ve put me on is not a good street venue. It’s not, it’s not, if you’re, because you’d think with an opera singer, they’ve got to be in a huge opera house with a humor orchestra and lots of people watching, and then they’re a good opera singer. But you don’t say, okay, you’re an opera singer.

59:24 Go and sing over by those toilets. And they’re saying, well, you know, you’re just wailing away there, maybe. But that’s, anyway, the analysis of that, sorry. I went off the point there a bit. So you knew that once you were, you could get good street performers.

59:39 I could build, yes, I could build on things. I worked out from, and street performing was what made it, because I lost all the confidence down to a minus level. I was asking people who had no clue, just anyone hanging around, I was saying, how do you become a street performer? How do you make this work? I thought I’d get it in two weeks, and it took me a year, maybe a year and a half.

1:00:00 But then there was a point where I felt it coming out, and picking up, and I felt I was developing the voice. And I’ve worked out then, because I went into street, and then I went into dramatic acting, and my initial dramatic work was not good, and now it’s got a lot better. And I’ve worked out how to build almost like an artificial piece of an intuitive working model, gyroscope, or something, and put it into your brain so that you can get out and feel an intuitive person.

1:00:37 Maybe that is just developing so, you know, like we could all develop social skills, you know, like when my kids, a lot of us are shy, how do I do this, and then later I say, okay, without maybe analyzing it, we say, okay, humor is quite good, so how are you, how are you, oh, weather’s terrible, keep chatting, talk about interesting things. You develop a number of social skills. I found I could develop the skills needed to go into things that I wanted to go into that I didn’t seem to naturally have an ability for.

1:01:04 I didn’t naturally have the ability to be a street performer. I became quite a good street performer, not a brilliant one, but quite a good one. Stand up, I seem to have got a good stand up, and I really couldn’t do stand up initially. I couldn’t do it at all. I just couldn’t work out how to write it.

1:01:21 And then acting as well, I think the acting stuff, work I’m doing now is getting really interesting. There was a swordsman in Japan named Musashi, and he wrote a book called The Five Rings, and he said, The Five Rings, and he said once a man knows something well, knows something broadly, he can learn it in all things. And so he just observed it as a sword fighter once he found someone that could learn a discipline, that they were very good at them knowing how to learn a separate discipline.

1:01:49 That, I agree with that, that is it. I’ve worked out, and there’s also humiliation. There’s a big front part of the learning process when people go, God, did you see? Maybe not even to your face, just you can catch them sniggering at you. This is a separate sniggering to the transgender one.

1:02:08 But it’s because I went through the humiliation of walking down the street, people staring at me, or I’m thinking that they’re staring at me, and I’ve come through that, that I worked out there’s a humiliation part of learning. And once you know what that feels like, it’s horrible. But you can deflect it saying, this is the bit you go through. So I’ve been through that in the street, and that was a bad burning humiliation. Because once you finish your show, you have to hang around to try and get another show at Covent Garden.

1:02:34 No one’s talking to you, and I remember there was a point where I didn’t want to do the show, then I’d go out there, I didn’t want to be in the show that I was doing, and when I came off, I didn’t want to have just done that show that I did. And we were earning no money on it, and it was all just messy. So I’ve worked out that there’s a humiliation start off point. Right, and you can use that pain of humiliation to motivate you to get… No, I don’t think it’s a good thing.

1:03:02 It’s not a motivation. The humiliation is just not good. It’s just when you’re crap. Okay. But the only way to get better is to keep doing it again.

1:03:12 And people say, that was crap too. See, a third time they say, that was crap too. If you did a box pot with them, but they probably won’t say anything, just look away. You know, I want to go to politics, and as long as I go slow enough into it, if I run and charge into things, it blows up, maybe this is the same with anyone, it’s a logical thing. Just take your baby steps, get in there, get your feet under the table, and build your confidence.

1:03:40 Brian Rose: Right. You said with acting that in the beginning, you went in and you were like, okay, I’m here to act. I’m not going to be funny. And you had said you removed all of that from your character, which was the wrong thing. All the comedy muscles.

1:03:51 Eddie Izzard: Well, I don’t think it’s the wrong thing to do. It was a radical thing to do. I did these radical things. I set all my comedy muscles to zero. So I switched them all down.

1:04:02 Don’t reach for the comedy muscle. But then, okay, dramatic muscles, turn those on. I didn’t have any. I hadn’t developed any. So what I was supposed, I didn’t know what to do.

1:04:16 All I worked out was, I knew that you had to be, rather than project, don’t go, because there’s a very early, Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon film, which Jack Lemmon is overacting off the chart. I think Billy Wilder kept saying, in Someone Like It Heart, Billy Wilder kept saying, less, do less, do less, do less. Because Jack’s there going, but later, Jack Lemmon films, he’s… Right, he calmed down. Yeah, way that is.

1:04:42 Brian Rose: It’s beautiful. Yeah. Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross was in that. Very subtle. Clint Eastwood once said that his director said to him, don’t just do something, stand there.

1:04:54 Eddie Izzard: That was his advice as an actor. And if you look at Clint in those Spaghetti Westerns, he just, so much of it is him just being there. Well, that’s it. Well, I worked out early dramatic stuff. I was saying lines and trying to threaten people or something, and it wasn’t reading.

1:05:18 If you bring the, on the camera, that camera will get right inside you. If you just bring that audience right inside you, it gets very interesting. I just had to do a deal of failing. When I got into doing Dr. Abel, Gideon, and Hannibal, I only did five episodes, and I’ve never had so much reaction before.

1:05:46 Brian Rose: And you just think about the camera coming into you?

1:05:50 Eddie Izzard: I don’t even think about it. I just know it will do it. Okay. I hear Alec Baldwin does that, and then someone said on 30 Rock that everything comes to him.

1:06:00 Brian Rose: Well, yes. That I totally agree with. I think the people watching through the camera, you’re bringing them in. You don’t need to push out of the camera. Okay.

1:06:12 Eddie Izzard: You can just bring them in and be very still, and it can be fascinating. And you’re essentially in the moment. What I was good at at stand up, once I got stand up, was I was very in the moment. You sort of had to be in the moment, but then I would play a giraffe, and I’d be that giraffe and whatever. And when I got into acting, I wanted to be searchable.

1:06:43 I was seven years old, and now I was going through the drama, and I got to cut this. I was trying too hard. I was trying too hard. When I stand up, I never… Well, probably at the beginning I tried, but you can’t try to.

1:06:59 You have to practice, you know, research, train, get yourself into the thing, and then let go. Lost Christmas is the one where I let go. There’s a film called Lost Christmas. You may not have seen it, but it’s… It’s a wonderful life cross, but shameless.

1:07:18 Brian Rose: Okay, and that’s when you first felt that.

1:07:20 Eddie Izzard: Well, I accidentally let go, because I’d just come… Two weeks before I’d come off Treasure Island, playing Long John Silver. And the second half of Long John Silver, I’d really got my feet under the table. At the beginning again, I was trying…

1:07:34 I was doing a London accent. It wasn’t an accent I’d done before, so I had to stay in it the entire time. And so after a bit of practice, which is obviously what Daniel Day-Lewis spent six months getting himself to the point where he’s that character, he creates the luxury of the six months before he does a film where he will just get himself. So it’s… He is that…

1:08:01 He is moving in that chassis, and that makes total sense. The weird thing is when I came into Lost Christmas, this totally goes against all that perforation. I didn’t have a lot of time to get there. I sort of just let go, and maybe that was a little bit lucky. What was coming out of the character that I was portraying, I’d made a few decisions quickly, and it was different to Long John Silver that I’d just been playing.

1:08:35 And it just seemed to work rather well.

1:08:38 Brian Rose: You mentioned when you were seven, that was when you first had that big dream. I saw someone in a play. And so when you finally come and act, that’s finally kind of realizing that dream, and comedy has been kind of not that ultimate goal.

1:08:54 Eddie Izzard: No, it was a journey through something else.

1:08:57 I love comedy, and I still do it, and I’ll do it forever. And I always used to laugh at it. But it wasn’t the first love.

1:09:04 Brian Rose: Right. And I remember you saying that when you were five, you were in a play, but when you were seven years old, you were in a play and you had a different feeling.

1:09:13 And I think it was because your mother had died by then, and getting that kind of unconditional love that you had to work for, you noticed that difference in feeling, right?

1:09:23 Eddie Izzard: Yeah, I played a raven. It was a Christmas. I was five. I was going to be six in a couple of months.

1:09:29 My mum made a raven suit. It’s the last Christmas she was alive. I didn’t know she was ill. I didn’t know she was dying. So I was just a raven.

1:09:39 I was there. There was another raven. We had a line. I got it wrong. Got a last.

1:09:45 I thought, oh, why are they laughing? It wasn’t that big a doodah. So that’s five. I’m going to do six. So that would be end of 67.

1:09:59 Sixty-eight. So it’s two years later, actually. So it’s January of 1970 when I saw the play. I got the date. I know I lived there.

1:10:08 A Boy With His Cart by Christopher Fry. And in it, this actor, down something, he was getting reaction. I think it was getting, it was dramatic and funny, what he was doing. Getting a lot of reaction. I just thought, that.

1:10:23 I’ll do that. I think it must have been for the audience reaction. Yeah.

1:10:29 Brian Rose: And how has your relationship changed with the audience over the last 40-some years? Do you still have that feeling that I want that love?

1:10:41 Has that relationship changed between you and performing in the audience?

1:10:48 Eddie Izzard: Yeah. It’s still there. I still like it if they think it’s good. In comedy, I can hear the thickness of a laugh.

1:10:58 In drama, I can feel the fatness of a silence, which I found in Joe Egg. I can really lean into the audience. And that was an interesting thing. But yes, I’m still, in comedy terms, I’m sitting out there with them, actually. I want me to do something interesting and new because I’ve been to all the shows.

1:11:27 So I think they’ll stay with me as long as I keep pushing it. Pushing the ideas and pushing the envelope. The ideas and things. Yeah, you’ve got to do that if you say, okay, this is it. I’m just going to do similar stuff to this for the rest of my life.

1:11:41 And the thing is, my comedy isn’t going to change. I’m not going to start just doing the funerary stuff. It’s always going to be surreal. It’s going to be off the wall. It’s going to be animals talking in it.

1:11:51 It’s going to be historical characters in it. So you could think, well, didn’t you do historical characters animals before? Yeah, but they’re doing different things. Is that different? But you’ve got to go back into that.

1:12:06 You could say Shakespeare. So there are going to be kings in this one? Wasn’t there kings in the last one? Yeah. And some of them die?

1:12:12 Yeah, well, didn’t you do that before? Come on, you’re just repeating, man. So you’re constantly staying on your game. New languages, new locations, pushing yourself and pushing your audience. In a practical way.

1:12:24 Brian Rose: Like, you know, French is very, as a political positive, you know, 200 years since the Battle of Waterloo. You face the continent very much so. And I saw you on the Jonathan Ross show a couple of years ago and you mentioned Europe and it was like, boo. And I was just wondering why you’ve always been so kind of looking towards the continent. I know you weren’t born in Britain.

1:12:45 I know you speak these languages and you’re really with these people.

1:12:49 Eddie Izzard: If we can’t, the way I am, if we can’t learn to live together and work together in Europe and the world, in some shape or form, if we all can’t work out to do it, the world will not make it. There’s 500 million people in the European Union. If we can’t do it, if we can’t make it work in Europe, it’s not like America was overrunning Native American lands. It’s not really, it’s not a good human history.

1:13:13 There’s a lot of people coming in and saying, I had nothing in Europe and thank you for giving us these free lands and hey, we used to live here, well, just go away. So that doesn’t work as a model. Europe does because two and a half thousand years, Alexander’s great to World War II, killing each other, endless killing and then stopping and then making things, building things, painting things, doing stuff and then saying, whoa, 50 years have gone by. Let’s kill the guys with the blue hats.

1:13:36 It almost seemed to be no reason why anyone was attacking anyone. It was just on and on and on and on. And now, since World War II, we said, no, let’s try and work out a way we can live together and work together in some shape or form. And some people say, no, run and hide. UKIP says, run, hide.

1:13:56 Stick your head in the sand. Well, the world isn’t going to go away. Europe isn’t going to go away. Even people want, they say, become like Norway and be part of the free trading era. Well, if you’re like Norway, they say, stay in the European Union because we can’t change anything.

1:14:11 They have to obey all our rules in the European Union and they don’t get to change anything because they’re in the free trade agreement. So we’ve got to get this right. We really need to figure this out. We need to get it right. And it’s a difficult process.

1:14:28 If you look at the history of America, one thing that does tally it up is that when lots of different states then came together, different countries coming together, it’s a tricky old thing trying to get agreements, trying to get things working. Luckily, we don’t have slavery involved, which took you years to get out of the way. But it’s a tricky old thing, and it’s still tricky. We’ve got too much bureaucracy. That’s what happens when 28 countries come together.

1:14:50 But if we can’t do it in Europe, how the hell are the other continents going to do it? And if all the continents are not trying to do it, how the hell are we going to get a world where everyone has a fair chance? And if we don’t get that, we will not make it because despair is the fuel of terrorism and hope is the fuel of civilization.

1:15:07 Brian Rose: Speaking of terrorism, comedy unites. Your comedy in multiple languages unites even more.

1:15:12 You know, 11 days ago, we saw the attacks in Paris. You lived in that city. You performed in that city. You speak in that language. When you hear news of that, how does it make you feel when it seems like you’re out there touring the world with this kind of message of, our languages don’t matter, our countries don’t matter.

1:15:30 We need to come together and think about each other, and you see something like that happen. How do you react?

1:15:38 Eddie Izzard: I mean, it’s obviously, what they did was cowardly and disgusting, and it’s a horrible thing. But I didn’t know quite how to articulate it. I articulated it in the sense, because I wanted to say something online, and I said the Nazis were there in the 40s, 30s and 40s, and now there was ISIL, and there was no difference.

1:16:03 And I think it sounds a bit of a leap, but Nazis had a twisted ideology. This is right for people to live this life and believe in these things. No, that wasn’t right, because that worked well for you, but it’s murdering everyone else. The idea of this extreme Sharia law thing, and how they’re treating women and how they’re treating people in the areas that they control, this is not for humanity. This is not what Mohammed would agree with, and they are an insult to Islam.

1:16:38 So they’ve twisted their ideology as the Nazis twisted the logic of what was good for Germany. You murder all the Jews, yeah, why? Where did that come from? It’s just something, it’s just built on hatred, it’s built on, and it’s so, did they do a fair fight? No, they just loaded up guns and went and shot people.

1:16:59 We have to, I really think, we just have to push back on this and close them down like the Nazis. It is a horrible concept. Al-Qaeda think they’re Nazis. But I worry that this will come again and again and again, and people can say, if despair is the fuel of terrorism, people can say, look, our people are despairing, and we are here, so let’s go and do this, and this guy says this is the way to do it, and someone sets themselves up as a preacher of hate and someone who says, I can tell you what to do, and you should blow yourself up, or you should get a gun.

1:17:40 It’s a twisted logic, and we’ve got to be trying to get a chance so that everyone has a fair chance. Democracy, security, infrastructure, a better chance for their kids, everyone in the world. People are going to invent things smaller and smaller. They’re going to put liquid bombs in their bodies, all this kind of stuff. There’s going to be something that sides of a pea that can poison a city, blow up a city.

1:18:00 They’re going to be divided. There’s one chemist who’s pissed off, or one pissed off person who learns chemistry. I’m quite surprised a dirty bomb hasn’t gone off yet in a big city. If you’ve had seen films about it, I’ve never had one go off but a huge, horrible bomb. But you could see we have to be heading towards a world where everyone has a fair chance, and if we’re running and hiding, if we’re running away from Europe, we’ll never make it.

1:18:29 I think we got to the end of the century, maybe only at the end of half the century through. The clock is ticking. And so I will keep being positive. I will keep being positive with French people, German people, Arabic people, any human being. You know, the 90% of the world, 95% of the world probably, are living that live.

1:18:48 It’s probably that many. You know, it only takes a few thousand people who are twisted, hateful. They decide they’re going to make that their mission that murders their mission. Some people like murder, you know. We know this down in their history.

1:19:02 We were these hunters. You tap into that thing.

1:19:04 Brian Rose: You’ve mentioned politics in the past, and I won’t spend too much time on it, but you always threw out that 2020 date. But I remember you said to someone one time that if it happens, you’re not going to be the guy that’s like, I’m coming in to change all this and change all that. But it sounds like you want to use the same learning curve that you did with street performing and acting.

1:19:24 You kind of want to feel it out and try to do the right things. Should we watch this space?

1:19:29 Eddie Izzard: Yeah, just watch this space. 2020, I’m going to try and get elected somewhere. We’ll see what happens.

1:19:35 I’ll put all my energy into it. I’m not going to line up policies, but I have done a few things in different ways before I have worked out. There are some positive ways of looking at the world. You’re going to see life as an adventure and have a positive heart. Some people do not have a positive heart.

1:19:52 Some people work very hard. I think the Nazis worked very hard, but they had twisted hearts. They had twisted their logic round back to front. I like people. I think people are really interesting.

1:20:05 People from different backgrounds, different countries, LGBT people, doesn’t matter what skin color. 200,000 years ago, we were 10,000 people. Now we’re 7 billion. Right, you went back to Africa. I went back to Namibia, and I painted the nails of these women whose genetics went back 200,000 years, which is all of our genetics at that point, and we’ve got to make it work for everyone.

1:20:31 If not, say goodbye to the world. So I’m going to go in, and you can’t go in and say, hey, I’m going to make that happen on Tuesday. Let’s make the whole world fair. But I need to get inside and be an active part of it to see what is doable, what isn’t doable. From my analysis of politics, it’s not a complete equation, but there’s a certain amount of time inside before you get the chance, the ability to make enough contacts that you can actually get elected to be able to do something or get into a position where someone’s going to make you a minister or whatever.

1:21:22 There’s a number of things that need to fall into place, so I could go in, and maybe nothing special particular happens, but I want to go in and put the career into hibernation and then come back out at some other point.

1:21:35 Brian Rose: Good. In January and February, you’re going to be doing 30 shows here in London. It’s got to be a pretty crazy time for you. I was just curious, are there things that you do in that 30-day period that parts of your morning routine or ways that you set it up so you can kind of handle such a crazy workload and entertain so many people and keep your energy level.

1:21:55 Do you have any success secrets that have kind of made you be the performer you are? These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show.

1:22:25 Eddie Izzard: Now I think people have said these before, eat, try and eat healthily.

1:22:31 I cut out refined sugar. That was a big thing. So eat healthily and train. You know, you have to be an athlete. If you’re going to be a mental athlete, that’s really what comedians are.

1:22:44 We’re mental athletes. We have to move our minds so fast that people pay money to be tricked into thinking they’re going that way. Oh no, they’re going that way. To be surprised. That’s the trick.

1:22:58 It’s more a surprise.

1:23:00 Brian Rose: You’ve got to keep surprising them every, is it 30 seconds? 25 seconds?

1:23:05 Eddie Izzard: I don’t know. Every 15 seconds.

1:23:07 Every something you’ve got to and get a certain amount of laughs. And if you’re not, it’s not working.

1:23:14 Brian Rose: We are mental athletes, I think. Yeah. When you think of the word successful, who comes to mind?

1:23:20 Whether it be alive, dead, comedian, politician, any names that come?

1:23:30 Eddie Izzard: For successful?

1:23:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, the word successful.

1:23:36 Eddie Izzard: Actually, no. I mean, I could argue a number of people, but what kind of successful ones?

1:23:48 You mean, because that gets interesting. There’s an instance of successful and then five years later, people are saying, they did what? And then there’s long-lasting success in the sense of doing something that lives on, which I think is more interesting. So your Mozart, your Beethoven, you know, Lincoln’s, Nelson Mandela’s.

1:24:13 That stuff will live on. It’s interesting looking at Churchill, things he did wrong, and the things he did right and what has lived on in history. That’s kind of fascinating. Something just dropped away. He was dead against India being able to vote for themselves and their own government.

1:24:30 Again, again, again, he was against it. That’s not very enlightened. There’s a whole bunch of things about that.

1:24:40 Brian Rose: I always ask everyone, get the clothes, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Eddie and give that young man a bit of advice, is there anything in particular you would tell him?

1:24:57 Eddie Izzard: Just keep buggering on.

1:24:59 Well, there was a thing I worked out at 25, which I could have told the 20-year-old person, that might have helped, but I quit. I don’t regret any of the journey, but the thing I learned from 25 was work on the staff, work on the material. I was trying to get someone as fast as possible and then writing whatever material to get someone as fast as possible. But no one ever cares. It makes the work as good as possible.

1:25:34 You’ve got some really good piece of work that took 20 years to make. No one ever goes, oh, it’s fantastic, but it’s at 20 years, so I’m not going to watch it. And contrarian-wise, no one ever says, oh, this is awful, but he wrote it in five minutes, so he wrote it so fast, so fast. But it’s rubbish. Let’s watch it.

1:25:59 You know, you don’t watch things that are rubbish and written in a minute. It’s, you’ve got to, it’s the work. You need to put the work in, which is a pain in the backside, because it takes work to put the work in. Concentrate on the work, not necessarily where it’s going to get you. Well, just make sure the work is good.

1:26:22 You want it to get the right place. You need to line it up right, because you can make a thing that’s not commercial at all, but it’s more, make sure the work is good.

1:26:33 Brian Rose: Okay, last thing is, what’s the best piece of comedy advice you’ve ever received?

1:26:38 Eddie Izzard: Do 100 gigs. That was an early thing a friend said.

1:26:41 He said that generally, but if you do 100 shows, if bands do 100 shows, you get your own voice, you can develop your own voice. You just, it’s how many hours on the stage, how many, how much time have you done on the stage? It’s a very important thing.

1:27:01 Brian Rose: Force majeure Reloaded. I’d love to come see it perform.

1:27:05 It’s going to be January and February here in London. And then are you off to conquer the world again, or are we going to see?

1:27:11 Eddie Izzard: We shall see. I’m just working out when I read it after.

1:27:13 Brian Rose: And what should people expect to come?

1:27:15 Eddie Izzard: Should they not expect anything? No, it’s a very good show. It’s played 28 countries from Moscow to Hollywood Bowl, Cape Town to Reykjavik. It’s made a lot of people laugh. It’s done in French and German and Spanish.

1:27:28 So it’s in a very, it’s reloaded because I’ve been through, I’ve made one pass through the UK before, and this is a fine-tuned, certain bits of, the weaker bits have been taken out, the better bits have been adjusted, and it’s in a good shape.

1:27:43 Brian Rose: Excellent. I look forward to seeing it. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being open and honest about everything in your life and pushing us towards that union when sometimes in this country it feels like we’re going away.

1:27:57 And yeah, for spreading the message with comedy, I really appreciate it.

1:28:16 Eddie Izzard: It’s been a pleasure. All right. Thank you.