When you started performing your one-woman Hamlet, how much did you labour over your delivery of the play’s most iconic lines, such as “To be or not to be”?
The first thing I found when I was rehearsing Hamlet was that I felt very at home. I thought, “That’s unusual – I should be quaking in my boots!” I just felt very at ease and happy to be there. But the first time I performed “to be or not to be” on stage, there was a sense of – aren’t bells supposed to ring here? Isn’t there supposed to be a klaxon?
I come to “to be” in a slightly different way each night so hopefully the audience haven’t seen it done that way before. I was a street performer for years, so I know how to talk to an audience, which is what they were doing in Shakespeare’s time; they were performing to the people, not at them. Actors got into this fourth-wall thing in the 1800s, it wasn’t there in Elizabethan times. Actors go, “Oh, da da da da” and they look up to the skies – whereas I will talk to the audience and bring them in. They are part of my brain, they are part of Hamlet’s brain.
What is your most unpopular pop culture opinion?
I think George Lazenby did a good job as James Bond. Some people think he didn’t, but I think On Her Majesty’s Secret Service really works. Telly Savalas and Diana Rigg did a great job, and the whole bloody thing is great. It’s the first one I ever saw, with my brother on a school trip, and I loved it. I’ve loved Bond ever since. “It’s all right, she’s having a rest” – what a tragic ending. It’s a beautiful film. It’s unfortunate Lazenby didn’t do more, but that was a good one.
You have been performing new spins on some of your best-loved standup routines on the Remix tour. Are you surprised which of your routines have stayed in people’s minds?
When some took off, yes – I could never quite tell what they would be. The Death Star canteen is the one that has stayed the longest. On the Remix tour I have done a spin on it – so just like Madonna did a remix of Like A Virgin and turned it into a German torch song and slowed the beat right down, I can do my story of Darth Vader having blown up the planet Alderaan and deciding to go celebrate down in the Death Star’s cafeteria. There’s a woman behind the counter who keeps saying, “You need a tray.” And he says, “I do not need a tray, do you know who I am?” He’s playing status games with her and she’s just saying, “Just get a tray!”
Everyone knows that routine now. But as I said to the Monty Python guys when they were performing live – I said to John Cleese, “Don’t worry if you go wrong, because people love it because they’ve seen it right so many times.” So I’m deliberately making it go wrong – Daphne du Maurier now turns up in the Death Star canteen and she’s going to do a sequel to The Birds.
I think about Evil Giraffe quite a lot.
Evil Giraffe is fun. That is weird. The first time I moved as a giraffe, people loved that. The idea was, could you get an evil giraffe? What would that look like? Would they eat more leaves than they should eat? I like the idea of a giraffe with a pencil-thin moustache.
You’ve run more than 100 marathons. Which one was the hardest?
The marathons I ran on the treadmill were really tricky. Don’t try it – there’s nothing to look at! But the hardest one, and people should know this if they do marathon running, was when I was in Northern Ireland, where I used to live when I was a child. I ran from where I used to live in Bangor, near Belfast. And on the west side of Belfast it gets quite hilly, it goes up and up and up. I thought, if I get to the top of the hill, I should be finished. So I got up there and I could see how far I’d run and I was in a pretty good place. Then I realised I’d miscalculated – I actually had another six miles to go. When you think you’ve finished, six miles becomes really gruelling.
There was also the double marathon I did in South Africa, where I ran 27 marathons in 27 days. I spent one day in hospital, so I did a double marathon on the last day to make up for it. I ended up doing 90km in just under 12 hours. That was a tough day.
What are you secretly really good at?
Sword fighting. In Hamlet I have a sword fight against myself, so no one knows that I can actually do it very well. But I was a sword fighter in Covent Garden for a couple of years, so I do know what I’m doing.
We like to ask about people’s biggest fashion crimes, but you wore some amazing outfits in your specials – do you still have them?
A lot of them are in storage. There were some great Gaultier pieces. There’s one I wore on stage in Definite Article – it was orange and had good shoulders. On press night, a button fell off and everyone heard it. I found it and someone in a box threw down a sewing kit they’d taken from their hotel on to the stage, which was very funny. So I decided to sew the button on in real time, while doing my show. I thought, “I’ve committed to this now – I have to make sure I get it on.” That coat still exists and you can see where I sewed it on.
What’s been your biggest onstage disaster?
Once the theatre flooded and all the lights went out, so I had just one light on a stand on stage. I said, “Let’s just do ghost stories!” and I tried to make up my own ghost stories while they were trying to fix the lights. That was a big mistake.
Another time, I was in South Africa and all the lights went crazy. I made them switch them off and got my phone out and switched on the phone light and did another ghost story – that seems to be my way of getting out of disaster.
In Hannibal, there is a scene where Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) makes your character, Abel Gideon, eat snails that have been feeding on his severed body parts. What did you actually eat in that scene?
They made me some mushrooms that looked like snails. It’s quite a scene! I decided to stab at them with this long pronged fork and in one of the takes the fork tumbled off the table to the floor, which is the one they used – I thought that was interesting. I loved that scene, sparring with Mads. It was a very scary show but making it was not scary. We filmed it in Toronto and at the time the mayor of Toronto had been filmed taking crack cocaine. So we’d be on set saying, “Have you seen that? God that’s terrible. Anyway, when you slice into the body …” Everything we were doing was completely horrible!
What’s been your most cringeworthy run-in with another celebrity?
You know, they’ve all been pretty good! This is the opposite of cringeworthy. I was at the opening of Ocean’s 13 in Los Angeles. I’m in Oceans 13 for barely a couple of scenes but I went to the red carpet thing. I wasn’t talking to people, because you can’t barge your way in and say [grandly], “Yes, yes, let me tell you about things!” when I’m just a small supporting role. So I was standing at the back when Brad Pitt comes shooting through. Brad was going through a relationship thing at the time and did not want to do the red carpet, so he just moved through at a very fast pace and plopped himself next to me. So we’re just hanging out, having a chat. Someone came over and said, “There’s a group photo Brad, you have to do it.” So he says, “You’re coming too!” And he dragged me into the group photo. So that was nice.
Do you have a nemesis?
No, but I will say I wasn’t very into Margaret Thatcher’s politics and, when her career stopped, mine started really taking off. I don’t think it was linked but it did seem to go in the same way. Her politics were not mine; she wasn’t into people.
Izzard’s Hamlet is at the Sydney Opera House 9 to 21 June, then Arts Centre Melbourne 30 June to 12 July. Her Remix tour is also touring Australia 6 to 16 May
