Shining in the Midnight hour
TRANS TRAILBLAZER, ASPIRING POLLIE, MULTILINGUAL COMEDIAN AND WRITER OF HISTORICAL DRAMA: EDDIE IZZARD DOES NOTHING BY HALVES
Eddie Izzard was rather surprised and bemused at a kerfuffle that arose late last year when she announced on television her preferred pronouns were now “she” and “her”.
After all, the gender-fluid actor, writer and stand-up comedian, who first came out as trans in 1985, had given the world a fair bit of notice that it might be on the cards.
“Pronouns is a bit of a stumbling block,” she says on a Zoom call from England. “Some on the extreme right say ‘no, no, no – you’re not allowed to change pronouns’, and they just need to calm down. Some people said I came out last year – I came out 36 years ago. So, from my point of view it was like ‘how much lead time do you need? Is 36 years enough? Do you want another 10 years?’.”
That said, Izzard isn’t terribly fussed what people call her in 2021 – she’s playing a male character in her new World War II drama, Six Minutes To Midnight, and says she has “boy mode and girl mode” – but is grateful society has progressed to the point that it’s at least part of a conversation.
HISTORY REPEATING
“If people want to say he/him or she/her, I don’t really mind and I have told people to relax,” Izzard says.
“Coming out in 85, it was very toxic back then and I knew there was going to be a lot of fights and abuse in the streets, and if they hurled it at me, I hurled it back. I knew I had to fight for my corner so that’s what I did. If there was a fight, then I would fight back. There was a lot of stress, a lot of fear and it’s not easy. But it’s better now.”
Izzard has noted that trans people, indeed the entire
LGBTQI community, endured far greater hardships and the threat of persecution n and even death in
Nazi Germany, during which era Six
Minutes To
Midnight is set. And, while that wasn’t the main reason she chose to write and star in the spy drama, it was at the very least a subconscious factor in the decision.
More pressing to the would-be politician, who has been active in the British Labour Party for more than a decade and has her eye on a seat in parliament, is the continuing rise of far-right politics, particularly in the Donald Trump and Boris Johnson era. While Izzard believes “there is more goodwill than ill-will in the world”, she agrees with the aphorism that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
“That sits underneath it, but it’s more that people were murdered for saying ‘hey, this lying stuff, this extreme violence, is wrong’,” she says. “Hitler only ever got a third of the vote but once he had kidnapped the country, a lot of people felt obliged to go along with it. So being trans, I don’t think it was an overt thing.
“Anyone who was a positivethinking, open-minded, live-andlet-live kind of person, if the extreme right gets control then you get straightjacketed and you can’t speak out.
“I was in America for the second Gulf War and anyone who said they disagreed with it, it was like ‘oh, you’re a traitor’. They were using the word traitor during the insurrection, the failed coup attempt on the 6th of January – they were calling the policemen there traitors. It’s not a great situation. But we have to work this out for humanity, otherwise I don’t see how we are going to make it long-term.”
STRANGER THAN FICTION
In Six Minutes To Midnight, Izzard plays a half-german, halfEnglish teacher who lands a job in a seaside town at an English girls’ boarding school for German students with close ties to the Nazi high command. If that sounds far-fetched, think again – the town (Bexhill-on-sea) and the school (Augusta-victoria College) actually existed and for a time was home to the goddaughter of SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the daughter of German ambassador to Britain Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Bexhill was also Izzard’s childhood home and when she was shown the school’s blazer badge by the curator of the local museum (of which she is a patron), featuring the Union Jack side by side with the swastika, she knew she had found the perfect topic for her first screenplay.
“I thought ‘that’s insane – that really happened?’,” she recalls. “And they said ‘yes, it’s true’ and that was the start of this film. It’s kind of a 39 Steps, Hitchcocky thriller, sitting on top of the true facts of this school.”
Although her famously offthe-wall, stream-ofconsciousness routines have cemented Izzard as one of the most revered and successful stand-up comedians of her generation, she has also amassed an impressive acting CV in films such as Valkyrie, Ocean’s 12, Victoria and Abdul and the Adelaide-shot The Flip Side. Indeed, movies have been a longheld dream and she broke into the UK’S Pinewood Studios at the age of 15 hoping to be discovered, much as master director Steven Spielberg famously snuck into Hollywood’s Universal lot while on a tour as a teenager. “His career started straight away and mine has had a bit of a delay in starting,” she says with a laugh.
NOTHING LIKE A DAME
Having starred as Dame Judi Dench’s son in Victoria and Abdul, executive producer Izzard was also able to rope in the
veteran Oscar-winning actor (who was also a long-time standup comedy fan) to play the Nazisympathising school mistress in Six Minutes To Midnight.
“She likes working against the grain of being a national treasure,” says Izzard of Dench’s morally ambiguous role. “She doesn’t want to be a national treasure – she wants to do roles that are different and out there. She’s great fun to be with – and her phone alarm is the Bond theme and it goes off periodically when you ring her, and it’s on very loud. It’s just great.”
Izzard is not kidding around with her political ambitions, citing Oscar-winning actor Glenda Jackson, who spent 23 years as a Labour MP as an inspiration. Doing things by halves just isn’t in Izzard’s nature.
In 2009, she ran 43 marathons in 51 days to raise money for Sport Relief and seven years later ran 27 marathons in as many days in South Africa to honour Nelson Mandela. She also delivers her stand-up shows in English, French, German and Spanish (and is working on Russian and Arabic). She bristles slightly as to whether she’s worried about being seen as a “celebrity politician”, adding that she feels she needs to be inside the machine to change it.
“I think if moderate people don’t go into politics, then you leave it to people who are opportunistic and egotistical, or extreme right-wing people to come in and throw out a whole bunch of lies,” she says.
“So I think I do radical things with a moderate message, like running my marathons – I have now done 130 for charity, and performing in three extra languages apart from English, and coming out as trans, I suppose. I want to take that energy into politics.”
If they hurled it at me, I hurled it back … I had to fight for my corner