You couldn’t come out as trans 40 years ago and be ... negative: Suzy Izzard

From the outset, Suzy Eddie Izzard wants you to know she’s not too bothered about names and pronouns. “Prefer Suzy, don’t mind Eddie. Everything works. How relaxing is that?”

The 63-year-old’s career has always been as fluid as her onstage persona, leaping from stand-up to screen drama, political campaigning to charity work. At the age of 47, she decided to take up marathon running, and that year she crossed 43 finish lines in 51 days. She’s not one to sit still.

Izzard is a regular visitor to Australia, and she has two very different tours coming up. In November and December, she’s bringing her Remix Tour to venues around the country. In mid-2026 she will return with her acclaimed rendition of Hamlet, in which she plays every part.

There are several reasons why a chat with Izzard is difficult to translate into print. For one, her wildly meandering onstage delivery is nothing compared to the tangents she takes in conversation. Over our several interviews, she embarks on scenic tours into the ignoble history of the Nobel Prize, 11th-century Viking taxes, Anglo-Saxon electoral processes and why the god she doesn’t believe in could at least have had the courtesy to show up for World War II.

Then there’s the stream-of-consciousness style Izzard’s fans will recognise well. Ask what seems like a straightforward question, and you might be rewarded with a response closer to a debate between two or more parties as Izzard ponders aloud the different possible responses she might have. She describes it like a solo chess game: rather than trying to find a definitive position to take, it’s more fun to jump back and forth between roles, each trying to surprise the other.

And how do you render legible a piece of banter that unexpectedly takes a detour into French, German and Spanish? Izzard has lately been performing in languages other than English, and while describing how one bit about human sacrifice works just as well en francaise, she launches into an extensive riff that leaves me lost for words. It’s only when transcribing the interview later that I realise Izzard hadn’t just been performing the routine in another tongue, but that she had in fact been continuing our conversation in French (and then German) as if we were both native speakers.

One of the discoveries she has made while performing in France, Spain and Germany is that the hoary old stereotypes regarding the comic sensibilities of particular nations simply don’t hold up. If mainstream comics don’t appear funny outside their own country, it’s probably because their reference points are too local.

Izzard’s less parochial subjects – “haircuts, sex, marriages, family, bicycles, cars, inventions, going to the moon, dinosaurs” – mean she doesn’t suffer the same fate. She’s also been working on adding local spice to her routines. “Slang is good, slang and swearing. I’ve learnt to say bad words in lots of different languages. ‘Excellent’ in German is ‘Ausgezeichnet’ so I say ‘ausge-f---king-zeichnet, baby’ and they love that.”

Suzy Izzard’s new show is something of a greatest hits, spanning 35 years of stand-up.Credit: Photo Amanda Searle

Izzard’s Remix Tour is a bit of a greatest hits show spanning 35 years of stand-up, but much of it has been switched up to keep things fresh. “I realised that I’d seen people’s material become leaden,” she says. “They came up with this piece of material five years ago and now they’ve lost the joy in it. So I constantly try to keep it molten. That’s why it is definitely a remix.”

It helps that Izzard has always avoided jokes tied to any one place or time. “I made sure that none of them were topical. I was thinking forwards and being practical about it. If you did Mrs Thatcher material that was also going to date the hell out of it. But if you talk about gods and teeth and haircuts, then you can go anywhere.”

And Izzard has been everywhere. She was born in Yemen and was raised in Northern Ireland and Wales. When she was six, her mother died, and it was off to boarding school for young Izzard and her older brother. At 12, she discovered a passion for making others laugh, and she has since become a regular fixture on the global comedy scene, with fistfuls of accolades including two Emmys and a Grammy as well as five honorary doctorates.

You have to wonder if she ever takes time off. “My dad said I’m always on holiday. Everything I’m doing is stuff that I want to do, even though it’s really quite hard. So is that relaxing? I can understand if your job is more regular you would say, ‘Let’s take two weeks off and get out of this hell’. But I never seem to be in hell.”

Izzard has long been an outspoken proponent of progressive politics, and she has been active in the British Labour Party. “I’ve been progressive since I worked out that being positive and decent seemed to be better than being an arsehole. Since I realised that I wanted to fight in World War II against Nazis, I thought, ‘Okay, Nazis equals bad’. And a lot of the rest of us are trying to treat other people as you’d like to be treated yourself.”

The world might seem to be in a bad patch right now, but Izzard believes the overall trend is towards a brighter future. “If you track human rights from ancient Egypt to now, the graph does gradually go up. Sometimes it goes back, but then gradually goes up. I’m a relentless positivist. I’m a ‘glass is two-thirds full’ person. And you couldn’t really come out as trans 40 years ago, as I did. You couldn’t really be a negative person and do that.”

Suzy Izzard running in South Africa in tribute to Nelson Mandela in 2016.

When Izzard did come out in 1985, the only word available to describe her gender persona was “transvestite”. “It was such a lumpy word with all this negative baggage,” she says. “No one had updated the word since the f---king Romans.” Now she embraces trans as an umbrella term accommodating a vast range of different identities.

Which brings us to Hamlet, in which Izzard has challenged herself to play every character without turning the whole thing into pantomime.

“My career route is very unusual. It wasn’t necessarily at the top of people’s lists to say, ‘Yes, we’re going to build a Shakespeare role around you’. So I decided to build it myself. Shakespeare started with his comedies, then he moved to his dramas. I’m just following in his footsteps. But the difference between comedy and drama is this: the bottom line of comedy is to be funny. The bottom line of drama is to be truthful.”

She feels a kinship with the original performers of the Bard’s works. “I was sort of self-trained, like the actors in the 1600s. Very few drama schools around in those days.”

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The challenge of taking on such a challenging play single-handed has much the same attraction as performing in other languages. “It’s like I’m starting my career again. I have to win them over because they’re not already with me.”

Which is, as a French-speaking English marathon runner might say en Allemand, Ausgezeichnet, baby. Ausge-f---king-zeichnet.

The Remix Tour Live is at Hamer Hall on 17 November. Hamlet is at the Arts Centre Melbourne, June 30-July 12, 2026. www.bohmpresents.com