After a break of six years, Eddie Izzard returned to stand-up comedy in 2009 with an arena tour, Stripped. Reflecting on the tour’s success, the comic is very pleased with what he accomplished this year.

“Yeah, it was really good,” enthuses Eddie. “It got a five-star review in the Telegraph, which I think is a first for an arena tour. You can’t complain about five-star reviews! It was good because arena tours haven’t been going for that long. I did the first arena tour of the UK six years ago, and there are about eight comedians doing arenas. The only way you can get good at them is by playing a load of them, so possibly the five-star review shows that I’m on the right track.”
Is playing arenas a very different experience to performing a stand-up gig in a theatre?
“It is,” replies Eddie. “It’s not the same as playing a 100-seater. Initially, making that leap from doing clubs to theatre was kind of scary. You go, ‘Wow, a thousand seater! I was only playing to a hundred people before.’ Then I went from 1,000 to 3,000. It depends what the jump is. Playing the biggest theatres in the land, they’re generally between 2,000 and 2,500. If you went to, say, 4,000, it’s not much of a jump. But the jump when you go to arenas – which hold around 15,000 – is slightly unsettling.
“But I’ve spent time studying how to make it work. You use screens and stuff to make it so that everyone in the whole audience can see the show. I don’t think it takes a longer time to get the crowd onside, as such. I tend to ignore that. It’s a bit like getting in a really big car – do you assume that everything’s going to be slightly more scary on the road? You try and just get on with it. One thing about arenas is that the audience can see the audience. In theatres, you tend to be all looking forward, whereas in arenas, some of the people at the side and the back are looking down upon the audience.
“That can make it feel bigger, but it can also make it feel like a huge community of 10,000 all watching one show. You use all the moving lights and the stage design and everything to make it work. Like Obama, he was talking to 100,000 people in a massive field in Chicago, but people did feel a certain intimacy with him. He had six screens up there. The more you play with the screens, the more you can generate a relaxed atmosphere, which helps people to get into it.”
Eddie is noted for being a politically engaged performer and a long-time Labour supporter. Is he still very much onside with the party?
“Absolutely,” he nods. “I was up there supporting the candidate in the Glasgow East by-election. I wanted to stand up and be counted, because when the going gets tough, a lot of creative people tend to move away from supporting the government. But because I’ve been positive on Europe for so long, I thought now was the time to stand up. It’s actually turned a corner. A poll last weekend put Labour only six points behind, and the recession seems to be moving into a turn-around phase, which is making the Tories jumpy. It’s good, we’ve got a fight on our hands, which we should after 12 years in power.”
So Eddie wasn’t one of the people who became disillusioned with Labour following the Iraq war?
“No, I wasn’t,” he responds. “I have been very particular not to say that going into Iraq in the first place was the right decision. What I do say is that it would be great if people who are running countries in an illegal way, which goes against human rights, could actually be removed. It’s a question for the world to answer in this century. How do we do that? You’ve got Zimbabwe, you’ve got Belarus, you’ve got a number of countries in this situation. Tony Blair made a decision alongside George Bush and he got into a lockstep situation there.
“I want every country to be democratic. I wasn’t looking at the M15 and M16 reports about weapons of mass destruction and that kind of stuff, so in the end, I quite honestly did not know what I thought was right. But I absolutely did not trust Bush.”
A few years back, Eddie did an extensive interview with Bono when the U2 frontman guest-edited the London Independent. What was his take on the singer?
“I think he does good work,” says Eddie. “He really pushes his stuff on Africa and he has his career. I’ve watched that quite closely over the years. I’m very positive on my issues and I have my career too. I’ve said that I’m thinking of standing in about ten or fifteen years’ time for an MP or MEP position. But I do look at what Bono’s doing. You can really keep your career going — I’ve worked so hard at mine that it seems a bit crazy to shoot it. All power to him, I hope he goes on and on.”
It’s a hell of a commitment to run for elected office.
“Yeah, I know,” he acknowledges. “I spend ages trying to get everything going and I do have a lot of energy. I don’t want to leave it to the right-wingers, because they’ll always want to be doing things for the few — tax breaks for the few and so on. That’s what Mr. Cameron and Mr. Osborne seem to be about at the moment – tax breaks for the rich. I’d rather work on ideas for the many rather than for the few.”
As Eddie says, he certainly has a lot of energy. In addition to his stand-up career, he has also enjoyed some success as an actor, appearing in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen movies, as well as Valkyrie with Tom Cruise. What was it like working on those films?
“I loved doing them,” says Eddie. “With Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, I’d love to have done a larger role, but you can’t have everything. Some people get leading roles when they’re 16 and 17, but my story is a different one, where I seem to have to keep pushing away, and eventually I’ll do really good roles when I’m in my late forties and fifties. That’s fine, that’s just how it is. But it was wonderful to do the Ocean’s movies. Steven Soderbergh’s great; he’s very relaxed and he lets you get on with it. He wants you to do your take on it and I’m very happy with that. I get on well with him and it was great to be asked to do it.
“I also really enjoyed Valkyrie. My first day of filming was a six-page scene with Tom Cruise. All my stuff was with Tom, actually. It was intense — he is Tom Cruise. Not only was he the star of the film, he owned the company that was making it. He’d been filming for about a month and I’d only just got the uniform on. Then I was on set to do the six-page scene.
“I don’t think I did it quite as well as I could have, but that’s just something you have to go through to get to the end point, where you’re relaxed, you don’t care and you can do great stuff. But I loved doing it and I think the film is really good. I really think Valkyrie is going to live forever — it’s already taken $200m around the world.”
Finally, does Eddie keep track of the new generation of comics? Is he a fan of, say, Peep Show and The Mighty Boosh?
“I have seen certain things, and other things I’ve missed,” says Eddie. “I know the guys who are up-and-coming, and I know the Boosh people. I do think there’s a very healthy scene in the UK and Ireland at the moment, and I think London is an amazing powerhouse in terms of comedy clubs. I’m very pleased with it all. I just want to encourage them to take off abroad and go and get America – because it’s sitting there waiting.”