Victoria & Abdul star Eddie Izzard’s message for Australia: ‘Think of the future, think of equality, vote yes’
HE’S big-screen royalty in his new movie Victoria & Abdul, but comedian Eddie Izzard is planning a future in politics and has a message for Aussies.
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EDDIE Izzard may be best known as a stand-up comedian, but his first love was film. A love so strong, it drove him to criminal behaviour: aged 15, he broke into Britain’s famed Pinewood Studios.
“I would say lightly criminal,” Izzard argues. “I just walked in. It would be a slap on the wrist and ‘don’t do it again’ type of thing. Steven Spielberg did the same thing, so we’re both guilty of breaking into the film industry.”
It’s this history that makes his starring role in the new movie Victoria & Abdul — playing Bertie, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII to Judi Dench’s Queen Victoria — such a career moment for Izzard.
The significance hit home last week, when he travelled to Venice to launch the film.
“I felt leading up to the screening everyone was going, ‘Who is that guy? What’s he doing in Venice?’,” Izzard recalls. “Then at the end of the screening, because I was happy with what I did on screen — maybe it’s just me thinking this — I suddenly thought, ‘Ahh, I’m supposed to be here standing next to (co-stars) Ali Fazal and Judi Dench and (director) Stephen Frears’.”
After all these years, he concludes, “it’s nice to finally be doing stuff that I think, ‘Yeah, this is getting your teeth into it’. It’s nice to play with the big kids.”
Based on a true story that only came to light in recent years, Victoria & Abdul begins during Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, with the monarch on the decline and her playboy son Bertie impatiently awaiting his accession.
When Victoria takes a shine to an Indian clerk named Abdul, sent only to present his Empress with a gift but quickly promoted up the ranks of the royal household, their unlikely friendship causes ructions among the Queen’s staff. Bertie threatens to have her declared insane.
Izzard’s likeness to the Prince in the film is uncanny, but wasn’t easy, requiring the daily application of a beard, moving completely differently and gaining 12kgs — the latter being particularly “rough” for this marathon runner.
But it was in tales of the Prince’s life that Izzard really found the character.
“The interesting thing about Eddie VII,” he says, “is he’s the only one who can tell his mum to piss off; everyone else is bowing and scraping. That’s the interesting way to play him.
“There was no love lost between them, they really didn’t get on, except for two times in their life: when he almost died and when she did actually die. That was the only time there was any empathy between them.”
Victoria’s Abdul-inspired second wind — she survived another 14 years after first meeting him — would have been a red rag to a royal bull.
“Bertie’s furious about it,” Izzard agrees. “He doesn’t dislike Abdul because he’s Indian, he dislikes him because he’s in the way. It could be anyone — blue skin, brown skin, anyone. He just says: ‘Everyone piss off, I want the ball, I want to play’.”
Victoria and her eldest son may not have got on (indeed, the Queen blamed Bertie for causing the death of his father, her beloved Albert), but Dench and Izzard are friends — the Dame often attending the comedian’s stand-up shows.
“She’s got a great sense of humour,” Izzard says.
He treasures the memory of dancing with Dench to the Ray Charles song What I Say in the Victoria & Abdul make-up truck and believes the 82-year-old Oscar winner is still “a teenage girl” on the inside: “She is a young woman who has just lived a life.”
As has Izzard. He came out as transgender around 30 years ago (before “transgender” was even the word for it — “Now my sexuality seems to be catching up with me,” he quips). He has acted alongside the likes of George Clooney, Robin Williams, Minnie Driver and Tom Cruise. Performed stand-up shows in Spanish, French and German. Run 27 marathons in 27 days across South Africa for charity. And now, he has ambitions to enter politics.
“I’m going into it because I believe as moderates we have to be impassioned, we have to fight for humanity and not for the extremism of these times of Trump. If we’re just going to hand it over to the extremists, go back and say let’s try 1930s politics ... How did that work out? Hmm, better get a history book and have a read.
“I’m a radical moderate, I want to get out there and do radical things but with a moderate message. The first general election after 2020 I will go up for election if they will have me.
“I’d rather do this — dramatic acting and surreal comedy in different languages; I’ve fought very hard to get here. But if Brex-hate is happening, if Trump-hate is happening ... we either let it go that way, or some of us have to stand up and be counted. It’s a tough old thing, it’s bruising. But I just feel I’ve got to do it.”
Under this haze of hatred, Victoria & Abdul struck him as “a good film for our times”, showing “that love is the one thing that unites the entire world”.
On that front, Izzard, who last toured here in 2015, would like to send a message to Australians awaiting the postal vote on marriage equality.
“What I love about Australia is its energy, its youthfulness, its forward-looking ability to say, ‘Forget the old empire, let us invent a new way of doing things’. And marriage equality is the new way of doing things,” he says.
“I don’t feel Australians should want to be on the side of the old imperialists, the old world, the old negative, regressive thinking. Australia, I encourage you to think positively, think of the future, think of equality and vote for it.”
VICTORIA & ABDUL OPENS THURSDAY
Originally published as Victoria & Abdul star Eddie Izzard’s message for Australia: ‘Think of the future, think of equality, vote yes’
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