Eddie Izzard turns hometown history into spy thriller
Eddie Izzard can pinpoint exactly when his journey to “Six Minutes to Midnight” with Dame Judi Dench began. “I grew up in Bexhillon-Sea,” Izzard, 59, began. “It’s a little seaside town where nothing actually happens much.
“Because I got a bit known, I became a patron of their museum. The museum curator showed me the blazer badge of a school there which had the British flag and the Nazi flag on it.
“I asked if it was real. He said, yes, it was a girls’ school called the AugustaVictoria College for Girls. I thought to myself, Well, there’s a film in that!
“Now 10 years later ‘Six Minutes to Midnight’ is coming out about these young Nazi girls in a town in England.”
“Six Minutes” begins in summer 1939, days before Germany’s dictator Adolf Hitler will plunge the world into a global war.
Izzard, a co-writer, co-producer as well, stars as Thomas Miller, the son of a German father and British mother. “He’s just an English teacher coming to teach the girls. But he’s not who he seems to be.”
A British spy, Miller must stop a Nazi plan to evacuate the girls and destroy Britain’s espionage network overseas.
As for the coup of casting Dench. “I did a film with her called ‘Victoria & Abdul.’ Judi played Queen Victoria and I was Edward VII, her son. That was when I pitched her the idea of playing a Nazi-sympathetic head mistress. She was up for it because I think she wants to
do roles that are not the roles people would expect her to do.
“She’s very down to earth. What you think Judi Dench will be like is how she is, just
a great person who likes her glass of champagne.”
Is a thriller set back when meant to be relevant for today?
“I think it is,” Izzard said.
“The 1930s was a time when certain right-wing political people decided that they could use lies as a tool of politics. You just lie over and over.
“Hitler said, ‘If the lie is big enough, then people will really believe it. It’s easier than the smaller lie.’ That’s an interesting thing to say.
“And 90 years later we have politicians around the world who’ve decided to lie and lie and lie. And people are quite happy to believe these lies.
“It was very scary 90 years ago and it’s scary now in the 2020s. If we do not learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. And that is the message of the film.”