Eddie Izzard: ‘I’ve been promoted to she, and it’s a great honour’

Eddie Izzard doesn't understand what all the fuss is about. In December, it was reported that the stand-up comic/actor/campaigner/endurance runner had adopted the pronouns "she" and "her" and wanted to be "based in girl mode" from now on. Well, it hardly came out of the blue, she says today. Izzard had spent the past 35 years building up to it, and when she did finally make the announcement, it happened by chance.

A few months earlier, Izzard had been a guest on the Sky Arts series Portrait Artist of the Year and was asked, for the first time, which pronouns she preferred. She replied “she and her” and never gave it another thought. By the time the programme was broadcast, Izzard had forgotten about the conversation. And suddenly she was headline news.

The funny thing, Izzard says, is that she had first announced she was transgender in 2017 in the Hollywood Reporter, and nobody had taken a blind bit of notice. But this time it was different. Within hours of the show being broadcast, everything had changed – her Wikipedia entry and IMDb history were revised, and every media organisation was running stories about how Izzard had become she.

What the world seems to have said to me is, 'You can change your pronouns, but you can't use he and him as well. You've just got to be she and her from now on, because we've only got so much time on our hands, thank you very much'

Actually, Izzard says, she had not intended to be so definitive about it. She had always talked about being in boy mode most of the time and girl mode part of the time, and she was still hoping to keep her options open. For her first half-century boy mode had dominated, and now it was time for girl mode to take centre stage, but on occasions she would still like the freedom to be a he. She soon discovered that wasn’t an option, though.

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Take the new Netflix series she is working on in Manchester. In the adaptation of Harlan Coben's thriller Stay Close, Izzard plays a small-town lawyer called Harry. "As I'm playing a male role, I suggested people should go back to calling me he and him for this, and what the world seems to have said to me is, 'You can change your pronouns, but you can't use he and him as well. You've just got to be she and her from now on, because we've only got so much time on our hands, thank you very much.'" How does she feel about that? She beams. "Great. I've been promoted to she, and it's a great honour."

The thing is, she says, when she first came out as a transvestite – a person who wears clothing, accessories, jewellery or make-up not traditionally associated with their assigned sex – in 1985, she was pretty much making the same statement she is now. For Izzard it was never just about having a thing for dresses and high heels; it was always about identifying as female. As far as she was concerned, being a transvestite simply meant being transgender without physically transitioning. She says she was four years old when she first had an inkling that she was transgender, even if she had no words for it back then.

Izzard is big on self-analysis. Read her memoir, Believe Me, and the two most important dates are dissected time and again – first, when Izzard was six and her beloved mother died; and, second, the day she first stepped out in a frock and lippy. Both shaped her future. After her mother’s death she realised she would never again feel so lost and betrayed by the world. Everything she has done since then, she says, has been for her mother – not only to make her proud but also in the hope of somehow bringing her back.

Coming out at the age of 23 was the toughest thing she has done. It emboldened her as much as it terrified her. From then on she knew she could take on anything, because nothing would be so scary.

Today we are Zooming to discuss her new movie – an entertaining if rickety second World War spy thriller, in which Izzard stars alongside Judi Dench. Six Minutes to Midnight is yet another first for Izzard – her debut as a screenwriter. The film is loosely based on a remarkable true story about a tiny girls’ school in Bexhill-on-Sea (one of a number of places Izzard grew up in, as the family regularly moved because of her father’s job with British Petroleum) whose students were all German, including daughters of the Nazi high command.

But Izzard being Izzard, the movie is hardly the only thing on her mind. Yes, acting is her priority at the moment, but she is also planning a stand-up tour of Spain in Spanish. Then there is her solo performance of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, which she hopes to take to the United States. Oh yes, and in January she raised more than €350,000 for charity by doing 32 virtual marathons and 31 stand-up gigs in 31 days. Her appetite for ever more audacious challenges is as huge as her ambition to succeed. And, finally, there is politics. Izzard tells me that she is planning to win a seat for the British Labour Party at the next general election and that if, by some quirk, she fails to she will stand again and again until she does win. There have been few performers with the stamina or self-belief of Eddie Izzard. I tell her I’m exhausted just listening to her itinerary.

Doesn’t she get knackered? “No,” she says. Again, it goes back to the early days. From the age of seven she was desperate to act, but she never got chosen for anything. So she insinuated herself into school plays – when the cast were rehearsing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, she hovered by, uninvited, and when the drama teacher wanted a table moving, she would move it. Her persistence paid off when she was given one line in the musical. At the age of 15 she broke into Pinewood Studios in the hope that somebody would spot her potential. Nobody did, and she was turfed out. At school she already had that hunger to achieve and impress. She was expected to do nine O-levels – the strongly academic forerunners of GCSEs, the British version of the Junior Cert – but opted for 12.

Alongside her outre persona, there has always been something rather conservative about Izzard. As a teenager she wanted to join the special forces (until she discovered she couldn’t pick and choose her wars) and believed strongly in moderation and the rule of law. One of her favourite expressions is “cool and groovy”, and never does she sound more establishment than when she says it. She studied sciences at A-level, started a degree in accounting at the University of Sheffield and left a year later to pursue a career as a street performer.

She honed her comedic skills by talking to (often imaginary) audiences on the streets as an escapologist. Inspired by the Goons and Monty Python, she developed her own brand of stream of consciousness riffing. Izzard’s humour is a form of mental contortionism, twisting crazy concepts one way, then another, before reaching even more half-baked conclusions. She never made any headway until establishing herself as a stand-up comic at the age of 30. And this, she says, is why nothing exhausts her now. “I was seven and I was ready to go. So there were 23 years of twiddling my thumbs waiting for things to get going. And when it did get going I thought, I’m way behind, I’ve got to catch up.” She pauses. “I realise now if I go towards things slowly they tend to work.”

While many transgender people suffer body dysmorphia because they believe they have been born into the wrong sex, Izzard continued to seesaw between girl mode and boy mode. Perhaps because of this there has been a tendency to dismiss her as attention-seeking or whimsical. But she insists this could not be less true. In January, she told the Big Issue: “I went through such hell since 1985 that the idea that I’ve come out recently just sounds ridiculous.”

Can she describe that hell? “There’s the self-analysis I did lying on the bed with the curtains closed trying to walk through my mental passageways and my brain not letting me do it. Then there’s the coming out – the people hurling the abuse, and what do you do. And then there’s the panic attacks that happened most days, several times a day. You start sweating, and if it’s in the summer months and you’re panicking, you bucket with sweat and you think, My God, I’m sweating. So you sweat even more.”

The panic attacks stopped only a few years ago. Izzard shows me how people used to laugh in her face. She moves her face forwards so she is virtually headbutting the screen. “People would stand this close and say: ‘What the f**k is that? What the f**k is that?’ They turn you into an it.” Did it scare her? “No, it infuriated me. I want to fight everyone that says things like that.”

People don't expect a trans woman to be able to run 130 marathons for charity, and it changes their sense of what a trans woman is

There is another fight, though, that she thinks is utterly pointless – between trans women and feminists. She believes they should be allies rather than enemies. “It saddens me. How do we change that conversation? I can’t come up with a magic wand and provide an answer for everyone. I’m just trying to create a space for myself and anybody else who wants to slipstream behind that. But if you sat me down with some radical feminists I’m not sure whether we would sort everything out.” She thinks it’s a waste of political energy. “I’d like to get to the place where we don’t have to have this fight, because I’m trying to deal with right-wing fascists and what they say.”

Izzard, who is now 58, is dressed soberly in a shirt and jacket, and could easily pass as a politician. In fact, she says this is how she will dress when (not if) she wins her seat. Has she talked to Labour about standing in the next election? “Yes, I’ve told everybody that I can tell that I want to stand. But, still, a lot of other people want to stand, so nothing is a given.”

Is she as determined about this as she has been about her stand-up, acting and running? “Yep. I’m not mucking about with this. I’m going in. If something goes wrong, if I stand in a byelection and I don’t get in, I’ll still go on. It doesn’t really matter, because I am a relentless bastard.”

She’s had to be, she says – after all, she has chosen the path of most resistance in everything she has pursued. So after climbing to the top of the stand-up mountain, she walked back down and started again at the bottom of the acting mountain. And now, having made a respectable career for herself in acting, she is preparing to give it all up for Westminster.

Why is it so important for her to go into politics? “If moderate people don’t go into politics then you leave it to egotistical extremists who are happy to lie. Moderates have got to go in. I’m a radical and a moderate.” In what way? “I do radical things, but my politics are moderate. I perform in French, German and Spanish as well as English when I’m a stand-up, so that’s slightly radical. And I’m radical because I came out as transgender. I’ve run about 130 marathons for charity. That’s slightly radical.”

Why does she do all the marathons? Are they an obsession? Again, she returns to her early life and trans issues. “No. It’s more feeling I never did enough when I was younger.” How has running changed her? “It’s been great for my mental health. Great for reclaiming the sort of fitness I had as a kid. It’s also changed people’s attitude towards me, too – being a trans person who is an endurance runner is no bad thing.” In what way? “People don’t expect a trans woman to be able to run 130 marathons for charity, and it changes their sense of what a trans woman is. I can see in their eyes they go: well, fair play.”

In so many ways, she is bursting with self-belief. But Izzard says she has never found relationships easy. As a teenager, she struggled to make an impression on girls she fancied. When she grew up, it didn’t improve much. And now as an out trans woman she reckons it may get a whole lot harder.

I was the right person to come out, because if people were going to hurl abuse at me in the streets, as they have done, I would hurl it back

“Relationships with me are tricky. You’ve got to be a woman who’s very self-confident about your own sexuality to go out with me.” There have been few relationships in her adult life, partly because she is so often on the road working or running, partly because she is happy with her own company. Does she prefer not being in a relationship? “I don’t think I prefer it, but I’m not going to agonise over it.”

I ask if it’s easier to be a trans woman now that she’s getting older. “It’s true older men and older women look quite a lot similar. There’s a middle area where it’s much trickier. Visually, there’s not so much difference between older men and older women, so it does get easier.”

Is she worried that transitioning may harm her career? After all, she worked so hard to be recognised as an actor, and now casting directors may well be unsure what to do with her. “Yes, potentially, but that was there already. So, yes, it is a thought, and a lot of people wouldn’t come out because they felt that was going to screw up their career.”

Again, she says she has been astonished by some reactions. “Some people are going: ‘Are you serious?’ I have floated this thing up as slowly as I f**king can. Thirty-five f**king years, mate: how much warning do you need?” But she says she has had plenty of practice taking on hecklers on stage and in real life. “I was the right person to come out, because if people were going to hurl abuse at me in the streets, as they have done, I would hurl it back. Sometimes it would just be us standing in the street swapping abuse, or if they fight me I’ll fight them back.”

At the moment, Izzard is self-identifying as a trans woman. Does she think she will ever physically transition? “I might do. I feel that boy mode has had a good innings in this one life that we get. It would be great to get up in the morning and think I look like a woman so I’m going to throw on a tracksuit and have breakfast. It is getting better and better. I do feel I can express myself in a more feminine way, which may be the age thing.”

Would she like boobs? “Yeah! I’ve had boob envy since my teens. Just when teenage girls of my age were going, ‘I want boobs,’ I was thinking, Yeah, me too. But I couldn’t say it. They talk about penis envy, and I believe some women suffer penis envy. I cannot for the life of me get my head around this. But, yes, I’ve always had breasts envy.”

As she talks, I’m thinking how she has grown into her face over the years. Her features seem softer and more feminine these days. I ask if she is taking hormone pills. She smiles and, for once, declines to answer. “I’m very happy to transition, and I feel I have been transitioning,” she says. “But I do feel I’ve told everybody everything in my life, so I’m going to keep a certain amount of privacy.” – Guardian

Six Minutes to Midnight is available on Sky Cinema and Now TV from March 26th