If you’ve followed the career of Eddie Izzard even slightly, you’ll know she’s someone who likes to jump in with both feet, whatever she tasks herself with. Why simply do stand-up comedy around the world, when she could perform it in six different languages? Why run just one marathon, when she could run 27 in as many days? Why stop at speaking out on social injustice, when she could turn your activism into an actual political campaign?
And, indeed, why take up just one part in a Shakespeare play, when you could play all of them?
Yes, for her latest ambitious project, Eddie is daring to tread where even the most celebrated of thespians wouldn’t, playing everyone from the lowly grave-diggers to the pompous King Claudius and the titular tortured hero in a new solo production of Hamlet.
This is the second of such productions (in 2022, she appeared in a similar adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, in which she also played every single character), but this marks the comedian and actor’s first foray into Shakespearean territory.
“I’ve been wanting to do Shakespeare for some time,” she tells HuffPost UK, shortly before her play’s London debut, which followed popular runs in both New York and Chicago.
“I was so intimidated by it in school, even though I really wanted to be an actor from the age of seven, but with my severe dyslexia, I had difficulty with the Elizabethan verse and quite how it worked, and just my attitude towards Shakespeare.
“But if you think about my training to get to this point, even though I’ve been doing dramas for 20 or 30 years now, I may not be at the top of the list for someone to say, ‘let’s build Shakespeare or Hamlet around me’.”
“So,” she says. “I thought I’d do it myself.”
“People might have expected that I would come back and do another Dickens after the first show,” Eddie notes. Apparently, though, the idea for Hamlet was already being discussed before Great Expectations even came along.
Ultimately, she and director Selina Cadell “thought we’d just do Great Expectations first, to prove that we can make this work”, before tackling the hefty Hamlet.
Despite being written more than 600 years ago (and set, as Eddie herself points out, more than a thousand years ago), the actor maintains the story is still one that resonates today.
“It is set a long time ago, which makes it less grabbable for modern audiences. But human attitudes are grabbable,” she insists, remarking the tragedy is as much a story about “a family coming apart at the seams” than the specifics of royal court.
“The characters do behave like humans, and so we do recognise that in them,” she says.
“I think [Hamlet] is an unusual hero. He really doesn’t do what a hero ‘should’ do – grab the sword, go out, find his uncle, kill him, there you go.
“And it does have this epic feeling to it. This thing of a ghost turning up, your father dying – how would you feel if it were your father, and your mother was immediately off shacking up with your uncle? How depressed would you be, in those days when blood was spilled, and everyone was going around with swords and sticking it into people, at a much easier, faster pace than they do these days?”
“I don’t know if [Shakespeare] planned it that way, but it turned into this accidental epic story of a family coming apart, and one hero for maybe all time,” she suggests. “Because he questions, and he’s honest, and he doesn’t know quite what to do.
“Real people don’t quite know what to do, people in fiction know what to do, they just go out and kill everyone that pisses them off. And he does not do that.”
But Eddie observes that there’s one other crucial reason that her Hamlet could resonate with a modern audience.
“Claudius is lying a lot. Donald Trump’s lying a lot, Boris Johnson’s lying a lot. So, lying has been around for a long bloody time,” she jokes.
“I don’t think Boris Johnson was going as far as swords, and poison in ears, but he seemed to be quite happy to lie left, right and centre – and Claudius does that.”
However, Eddie is quick to add that Johnson and Trump were not her “main sources of influence for that character”. “It’s just the determination and the ego on the guy,” she says.
The “biggest thing” for Eddie when putting together her characterisation for all 23 of the different figures she portrays in Hamlet, was “trying to make them all stand on their feet as separate identities”.
“It was more separating them out, and making sure that the audience could tell them part – which is not a normal thing that the cast has to worry about, because obviously it’s separate people,” she explains.
But Eddie also herself a personal mission to do right by the play’s two sole woman – Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, who marries her late husband’s brother just weeks after his murder, and Ophelia, his love interest, who meets a tragic end after being manipulated by her father and mistreated by the man she loves.
“I wanted to be very true to the characters, and especially to be very honourable to the female characters,” she says.
“My director was saying the reviews in New York and Chicago have been very positive about how Ophelia and Gertrude are being portrayed, so that’s great.”
While Eddie’s acting career now spans decades, most probably associate her with her work as a stand-up comedian, as well as her political activism.
Throughout her time in the spotlight, Eddie has always been vocal about her gender-fluidity and her own gender identity, and has long been using the term “transgender” to describe herself.
However, she notes that this conversation seemed to be exacerbated in 2020, when she was asked for her pronouns during an appearance on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, and responded with she/her.
She recalls: “There was this kind of erroneous thing where some people said, ‘oh that’s when you came out’,” she recalls. “No, I came out 40 years ago. You can’t skip over all that and just say, ‘that was it, it’s all about pronouns’. It’s not all about pronouns, that was just something on the way.
“I’d already been thinking about introducing [feminine] pronouns… And I knew that when I did, at some point, it would get around. It was surprising how quickly it did.”
She continues: “I didn’t demand it either. They just said, ‘do you want she/her or he/him?’, and I said, ‘oh, she/her’. But it turned into, ‘right you have now defined it – we, the whole world, will change in a trice’. And I’m fine with that because I prefer she/her! But I don’t mind [he/him].”
Around this time, Eddie told HuffPost UK in a 2021 interview: “I spent 50 years predominantly in boy mode, so let’s try the next 50 in girl mode.”
“It’s just a language adjustment,” she added. “And no one should get het up about it.”
Since then, Eddie has also disclosed that in her personal life she’s introduced the name Suzy, but would still use her original moniker “in public”, an announcement she tells us was also a “bit of kerfuffle”.
Opening up further about her chosen pronouns and name, she told her social media followers last year: “Going forward I am preferring Suzy but I don’t mind Eddie. And I prefer she/her but I don’t mind he/him. So no one can really get it wrong unless they call me Kenneth or Sabrina.”
“It’s good and positive to have put those out there and issued the statement and said, ‘no one can get it wrong with me’,” Eddie says, claiming she doesn’t think public perception of her has “shifted much at all” in the last four years.
“If people were transphobic before, they’re still transphobic,” she says. “But the vast majority of the country, and the world, who interact with me, I think, just seem, ‘oh yeah, you’re being your authentic self, OK! I’m going to get it wrong occasionally but we’ll go for it, we’ll try it’.”
“Some people don’t want to, they’d rather stick with ‘Eddie’. Fine. That’s still a living name. I don’t have a deadname, so that’s all cool,” she reiterates.
But with the debate around transgender rights – and, regrettably, as a result, trans people in general – growing increasingly toxic, a quick search for Eddie’s name on social media can often throw up some unpleasant results.
Of the online abuse she often finds herself at the centre of, Eddie says it’s something she “doesn’t inhale”. “People will say hellish things – but before marriage equality, there was a lot of anti-gay, anti-lesbian hate, and now they’ve turned their attacks to trans people. So, that’ll pass,” she says.
“When I came out, no one was having any conversations. Now the conversation’s quite heated, but back in ’85, there were no conversations at all.”
“It seems to have shifted, where the noise is coming from,” she observes, stating that online abuse is something she does “guard” herself from. “I think I could go a little bit mad trying to analyse that. And I’m not really that bothered.
“I just know that I do exist – I have been honest, and if you’ve got a problem with honesty, that’s your problem. I’m just going to keep sailing on. It doesn’t get to me.”
For young trans and gender non-conforming people feeling afraid in the current climate, Eddie’s message is simple.
“I’d say, be brave,” she explains. “It’s better to be out and honest than to lie and be in the closet all your life. But try and surround yourself with friends.”
“There are hateful people out there, so be aware of that,” she continues. “But the more of us that come out, the more people will calm down.
“The thing to do is come out and just carry on with your life – try and do good and positive things, and then we show that we’re members of society and we’re just trying to exist and pay our taxes, and give a bit back, and do some charity work. And then the vast majority of people will go, ‘they seem fine’. When LGBTQ+ hits boring, then we’ve made it.”
And while Eddie says she’s “very happy” to be viewed as a role model in a landscape that too rarely celebrates transgender people, she adds: “I’m not setting myself up as a role model, I’m trying to be a role model to myself.
“Lots of people have done very hard things before me – and as well as me. I’m just another name. But if anyone finds anything positive out of that, I’m very happy for that.”
However, the fact that a trans actor is currently taking on something as woven into the national tapestry as Shakespeare, in the city where it was first performed, is something that’s not lost on Eddie, either.
“I do feel particularly with this play, particularly with Hamlet, particularly with Shakespeare, this is a good place to be,” she admits.
“I was born in ’62, and I am 62. It’s quite nice on the numbers front, there’s a resonance there. And 62 is the new 31. So think young and do bold and brave things.”
As if she ever did it any other way…
Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet is currently at London’s Riverside Studios until Sunday 30 June.