KEY POINTS:
Here's a story. It's an Eddie Izzard story, about Eddie Izzard, so it veers around the houses and back and forth. He's packed a lot into his 45 years; yes, even into the two-thirds of his life that happened before he became famous. Stick with it. Like many an Izzard story recounted from the stages of comedy clubs, theatres and arenas around the world, it's worth it. If you imagine it recounted in his slurred style, it's even better.
It is the early 1980s. Eddie Izzard has hitchhiked from the northern English industrial steel town Sheffield to the city of Birmingham in the Midlands. He's been living in the student area of the Steel City, sleeping on mates' floors, having abandoned his degree (accounting, financial management, maths) after only one year. He'd never really wanted to take a place at Sheffield University anyway, or study bean-counting. His big plan had been to go to Cambridge University, "do the Footlights [Cambridge's famous theatre club that has launched countless British stars' careers] then go to Edinburgh [Festival] and then boom, you get a career - they give it to you on a plate."
But at boarding school Izzard had decided to give up on studying. "I thought I wasn't cool enough. So I thought: I'll stop studying. That'll make me cool. It's like cigarettes. Why are you smoking? Because they're cool. And then maybe I will get to talk to girls."
The result of his poor results? Cambridge was out, but Sheffield Uni would have him. Izzard took a proper degree course to please his father, a financial officer with BP.
But, after one year, he messed that up as well. And then Izzard is that sad figure: the drop-out who hangs about the university union. He's putting on student productions with his own group, the Official Touring Company of Alpha Centauri. He's trying to persuade his contemporaries in Sheffield University Fringe theatre company - among them Stephen Daldry, future director of Billy Elliot - to take shows up to Edinburgh. But Sheffield's undergraduate thesps don't share his enthusiasm. They lost money the last time they took a show to the festival. Sorry, Eddie.
So Izzard resolves to make his own luck. Hence him thumbing a lift to Birmingham.
Izzard's big plan, based on a scam that Peter Sellers once pulled, was calling the local television studios where they made OTT, a late-night comedy show. His idea was to ask for the host, the agent for star presenter Chris Tarrant, so he could hear what his voice sounded like. Then he'd hang up, call back, ask for Tarrant and, impersonating Tarrant's own agent, recommend a hot talent named Eddie Izzard for OTT. In fact, Izzard was in reception right now ... maybe Tarrant could pop down and see him ... Did this plan work?
Nnnnoooo, says Izzard, rolling the word round his mouth. "No. Because the agent was in London all day."
After a long day's nothing, Izzard hitchhikes back to Sheffield. "Those are the things I used to do", he sighs. "My dad said this thing recently: 'You always had stupid ideas - but now some of them have worked.' That's the difference. And I did - when I was 14 I decided to cycle from Sussex, where I was living, to Wales, where we used to live, with no money, in order to lose weight, because I kept eating chocolate.
"I had big crazy plans. AND!" Izzards bendy and expressive voice, as it is wont to do, suddenly stands straight up to attention, in capital letters, before sliding into italics. "I've still got some of them."
For someone ubiquitous in the British comedy ether for much of the 90's and the beginning of this decade, he hasn't been seen around much recently. The reason is he's been holed up in LA working on the next phase in his plan for world domination: a lead role in an American TV drama series called The Riches.
He thinks his performance in Peter Bogdanovich's film The Cats Meow, and getting the Tony nomination and all those other awards for his 2003 Broadway appearance in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, put him "in a decent place" with the TV executives. In early 2006, they shot the pilot. Late last year The Riches got the green light. It's a big deal.
Enough to make Izzard forgo what sounds like a plum TV gig in the new series of 24 - he would have played an unscrupulous arms dealer, one of whose nuclear weapons goes off 'in the wrong place".
Izzard is telling me how he's been based on the West Coast on and off for three years because "tactically and practically" it gives him a better vantage point from which to "flood out" into the US entertainment business. He remembers, years ago, making an American TV show in Britain - an episode of Tales From the Crypt with Irish actor Ciaran Hinds - and how the actors were paid scale. That is, minimum fees. The Americans were members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), while the Brits belonged to Equity. SAG's scale was much better than Equity's. That's another reason to be working in the US, and to be a member of SAG. So long thwarted - first by being a slack-arse at school, later by the miserly crowds who didn't take to his surrealist act during his years as a street-performer - Izzard will not now be denied.
"My first year [performing] in Edinburgh I saw Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson win the Perrier Award [for Best Comedy act]. That was '81. My last year in Edinburgh was '93. That", Izzard says with a slight shrug, was my 12 years of climbing the mountain."
Today, he's looking slim, trim and manicured. The blow-dried, blond hair. The beard. The power suit. It all speaks of a successful professional, and of someone who's doing very well for himself, thanks very much, in Hollywood.
Finally. He will say that, "I always wanted to do drama and films", and that he moved into comedy only because, as a spotty teenager with greasy hair, he felt he couldn't play a romantic lead. He certainly wasn't pulling any girls. But he could make people laugh. He pursued that instead. So comedy was a 20-year detour on the way to an acting career? "It kinda was", he says with a frown and a grin.
He happily admits that, having started late, he's been playing catch-up ever since. With Robbie Coltrane, Jim Carrey, Robin Williams - with anyone who has managed to defy their comedy roots and be taken seriously as an actor. With Hugh Laurie, who this year won his second Golden Globe award for his role in hit US medical drama House. "And I'm pleased that Hugh is doing ..." He tails off, as he often does, but I presume he was going to say "well". "Because I'm trying to do exactly what Hugh is doing."
Izzard is acting alongside fellow British expat Minnie Driver in The Riches. They play husband and wife Wayne and Dahlia Malloy, members of a gypsy travellers community. On the day I visit the set, Driver is dressed in a mini-skirt and knee-high boots. Izzard, famously the only transvestite in the mass-media village, admits to enviously eyeing up Driver's four-inch heels. He is also an executive producer and is helping with the writing on The Riches.
He looks younger than his 45 years. With the help of a personal trainer and what sounds like a scary kind of dieting, he appears far healthier than he did in his lumpy 30s, after success at last came knocking. "When you start earning money you can eat, snort or drink your wages. I started buying food and I got a bit too heavy. I didn't know how to control it. Then I started pulling back and back ... and now I don't need hardly anything. I thought, they've given me this lead role and I should try and be as lean as I can."
Izzard has been working hard on his acting - his coach is on the set of the show and on hand at all times, helping him improve his craft.
"They said to me, 'Can you put a little bit more light into the darkness?'" Izzard says of his contributions to the script. "So more of my comedy has been allowed to come into it."
I ask Izzard if we must give his new show, like Desperate Housewives, the voguish classification of dramedy? He almost winces at the term. "I prefer to call it drama with a funny underbelly. I've been trying to get out of comedy for so long, I don't want to get stuck halfway."
As we sit in his trailer parked out the back of the studios to talk properly, I wonder: how did Eddie Izzard rambling comic raconteur with a thing about conversations between pets get here, from the British comedy circuit to Hollywood? By applying the same single-minded focus that took him from Sheffield to Birmingham, and him and his bike from Sussex to Wales. By shaping his career like he's shaping his body. By being utterly, dedicated to getting on and getting ahead.
Over the past decade he's conquered stand-up comedy with a series of acclaimed one-man shows, international tours, including gigs delivered in French. He talks about taking New York and getting Paris and about how, once he gets back to stand-up, Germany, Russia and Spain and jokes in their native languages are next on his hit list.
"I was just smashing and grinding these shows out", is the way he describes his early days gigging. It's odd language for someone who, on stage, comes over as a big softy who says cool and groovy a lot. But this funny stuff was a serious business, and in business you need to be aggressive. "I played all over, kept going everywhere, until I could pay for the cameras to film one of my shows."
He became a member of the Association of Independent Producers when he was unemployed in his 20s, and learned the lucrative importance of retaining his copyright on his filmed performances. All his top-selling videos and DVDs, made by his production company Ella (named after his mother, who died of cancer when he was 6), repaid his investment many times over. "I think I earned my accountancy degree." His last stand-up show, 2003's Sexie, played to sell-out crowds across the world for five months.
But he'd also had an acting agent since 1993, the year of his breakthrough comedy show in London. Parts in movies - not lead roles, but nor were they bit parts - have come his way: The Cat's Meow, The Avengers, Velvet Goldmine, Ocean's Twelve and now, Ocean's Thirteen. His last role on the big screen was in My Super Ex-Girlfriend. He played an evil criminal mastermind out to get Uma Thurman, the vengeful - and super-powered - ex-girlfriend of Luke Wilson.
Were he a pop star or a straight actor, we'd call Izzard a careerist, or a name-dropper, or an egomaniac. Here he is, for example, talking about his reappearance as technician's technician Roman Nagel in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen: "It's interesting filming with George and Brad because the camera stays on them - I mean, they're good-looking guys. But the cameras waving around following them and you've got to try and get your face in.
So why do we forgive Izzard his craven ambition? Because he's honest and direct: about his goals, his weaknesses, his drive. He wants only to entertain and to get better. "I think my ambition was always there, and it was held back for a long time because nothing ever happened. And if you think you can do something and it doesn't happen, and everyone tells you it won't happen, you have to hold on to what I call the Madness. I will just hang on and keep going and keep going until ... the thing gives in."
We forgive him because he's still openly bereft at losing his mother at such a young age, and ascribes his lust to entertain to that loss. "I've analysed it", he admitted in an interview with his friend Bono last year (they both supplied voices for the upcoming animated film Across the Universe). "I think the desire to perform has something to do with my mum dying, because I don't remember wanting to perform before that. She died when I was 6, and at 7 I saw a kid on stage in a play and I thought, 'I want to do that', and that feeling stayed."
We forgive him because he's clever and ethically engaged: he doesn't just want to tell jokes in French, Russian and German to show off although that is part of it. He's a passionate believer in the European Union, in the notion of the ethnic melting pot as a force for good. He even accompanied Tony Blair to Brussels last year to report on a European Council meeting.
Because he's intriguing, a purist who, for all his ubiquity, remains a bit of a mystery. I suspect he may have a girlfriend right now but he has always, managed to keep his relationships private. I ask him if he's in a relationship, and he replies: "I always keep that kind of closed. Certain people in my family and certain people I have relationships with don't wish to be judged through my whatever ... So I tend not to talk about it." Even after the acres of newsprint discussing his transvestism, it's still strangely unfathomable; and I mean that in a good way.
And because, frankly, he's a genius; buy the Eddie Izzard MMVI box-set DVD - 573 minutes of six live performances that'll have you laughing until Christmas.
And we forgive and indulge Eddie Izzard because, unlike plenty of other fat-cat celeb entertainers, he refuses to rest on his laurels. With his acting, he's still getting there, as I'm sure he'd be the first to admit.
He remembers the missed chances, the unappreciated routines in London, the bad days in Birmingham, as if they were yesterday.
"If you get too established in comedy, people get addicted to the druggy nature of comedy, he thinks. You're releasing endorphins ... No, you're releasing ser-o-to-nin", he says, savouring every syllable, "in the brain. And people become serotonin junkies because it's great. You just get these hits [he clicks his fingers three times] and it is like coke: bam, bam, bam.
"And I feel that drama is like carbohydrates with minerals, vitamins. It's a main meal of a thing. With lots of different tastes and variances. And it works in a different way on the palate.
"After my big scenes in Ocean's Twelve and Thirteen, it feels like I've got to the Himalayas. I'm at base camp. It's slightly frustrating at the same time. I'm here, I've had a couple of scenes - now can someone just give me a big frigging slice of a film role and I'll tear through it! But I've got to keep hacking my way up the mountain."
- Observer
* Ocean's Thirteen is screening now.
