EDDIE IZZARD Love You Madly

Eddie Izzards Master Plan
EDDIE IZZARDS metaphors dont sit still, onstage or off; they leap into the conversation with an almost physical presence, even when hes simply describing how tough it is for a comic to be accepted as a dramatic actor. If you arrive in comedy, he said, the studios wont let you get off that horse. You have to shoot it, you have to kill it, you have to Bill Murray kill it, boom! and he mimes shooting a horse as he explains, Bill Murray successfully did that so he could get to the dramatic place he wanted to be; he really had to kill that Ghostbusters place.
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Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Whether doing comedy or drama, Eddie Izzard is leaving his skirts and fishnets in the closet: I didnt jump out of a not-wearing-dress box into a have-to-wear-dress box.

The man who chats offstage is a less frenetic version of the performer whose fans recite lines from his stand-up shows, like Dress to Kill, the HBO special that made him a cult figure 10 years ago. In person, he also does voices and accents, talks about Napoleon and George Washington, drops in bits of songs. (Its going to be about cats! he said, jumping into a spoof Broadway musical and cheerfully singing, Hes dead, hes in a box, all as a quick aside.) He pulls out a phone and shows photos of a recent vacation with his father and brother to Yemen, where he was born before the family returned to Britain when he was 1.

But just as the inspired silliness of Bill Murray shooting the Ghostbusters horse almost obscures a deeper point — Mr. Izzard has analyzed that career for all its worth — the surreal wit veils a methodical determination to be taken seriously in drama. The guy who may be the most brilliant stand-up of his generation really wants to act. His ambitions are huge, but when he talks about his step-by-step career path he makes himself sound like some plodding worker ant.

That would be complicated enough without adding — and hes the one who brings it up first — that hes a transvestite, or an off-duty transvestite as he tends to put it now, since hes been appearing onstage in jeans and a blue sport jacket in a workshop version of Stripped, the show hell take on a four-month national tour starting next month.

That was hardly his look in Dress to Kill or other stand-up shows. Then he appeared in heavy eye shadow, glittery shirts and sometimes skirts and fishnet stockings as he roamed the stage delivering riffs about culture, history and language — routines that are literally loopy as they swoop and circle back on themselves. In his recent New York show he quacked like an evil duck left behind after Noah loaded the ark (because, really, would the ducks have drowned?) and acted out a scene in which Jesus returns to heaven and tells his Father how he messed up on Earth. (How did he die? Donkey cart accident.) As he interspersed these pieces with bits about Wikipedia or updating computers, out of nowhere the evil duck quacked again.

But he did all this looking like his character in The Riches, the television series in which he plays Wayne Malloy, the father of a family of travelers or con artists who have taken on false identities and settled into a McMansion. Wayne masquerades as a lawyer named Doug Rich, which means that these days Eddie Izzard could pass for a corporate lawyer. (He is also an executive producer of the series, whose second season begins Tuesday on the FX network.)

The Riches and his nonfemme appearance are part of his bid for the leading roles that have eluded him onscreen. He was most widely seen as the computer genius Roman Nagel in Oceans 12 and Oceans 13 and has another small role in Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise World War II movie coming this summer, but more often he has landed in parts that make you wonder what he was thinking, like the mad scientist in the flop My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

He has had more substantial roles in plays, including David Mamets Cryptogram in London and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in the West End and on Broadway (where he was nominated for a Tony). During the time of that run he lived in the West Village, and we met at Tavern on Jane, a casual restaurant a block from his old street of brick town houses. Its really beautiful, he said of the neighborhood, and he recalled going to that corner shop to get as much wood as I could to heat up — the snows of 2003. As he does onstage, he sometimes breaks off sentences and zooms ahead, as if his mind were racing too fast to bother finishing; the rest is clear, anyway.

TO READ MORE GO TO...http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/arts/television/16jame.html?_r=2&oref=slo­gin

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[Ilhamfv]

Love the pics! It's good!! I adore this guy!

[femonanon]

those are the way his teeth arerrrrgggggghhhh

[rg2001mm]

Ok, at 0:52 is that Eddie with vampire teeth???