Eddie Izzard: She/Her

Eddie Izzard doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. In December, it was reported that the standup comic/actor/campaigner/ endurance runner had adopted the pronouns “she” and “her” and wanted to be “based in girl mode” from now on. Well, it hardly came out of the blue, she says today. Izzard had spent the past 35 years building up to it, and when she did finally make the announcement it happened by chance. 

A few months earlier, Izzard had been a guest on the Sky Arts series Portrait Artist Of the Year, and was asked, for the first time, which pronouns she preferred. She replied “she and her” and never gave it another thought. By the time the programme was broadcast, Izzard had forgotten about the conversation. And suddenly she was headline news.

The funny thing, Izzard says, is that she had first announced she was trans in 2017 in the Hollywood Reporter and nobody had taken a blind bit of notice. But this time it was different. Within hours of the show being broadcast everything had changed – her Wikipedia entry and IMDb history were revised, and every media organisation was running stories about how he had become a she. Actually, Izzard says, she had not intended to be so definitive about it. She had always talked about being in boy mode most of the time and girl mode part of the time, and she was still hoping to keep her options open. For her first half century, boy mode had dominated, and now it was time for girl mode to take centre stage, but on occasions she would still like the freedom to be a he. She soon discovered that wasn’t an option, though.

Take, for example, the new Netflix series she is currently working on in Manchester. In the adaptation of Harlan Coben’s thriller Stay Close, Izzard plays a small-town lawyer called Harry. “As I’m playing a male role, I suggested people should go back to calling me he and him for this, and what the world seems to have said to me is you can change your pronouns but you can’t use he and him as well. You’ve just got to be she and her from now on because we’ve only got so much time on our hands, thank you very much.” How does she feel about that? She beams. “Great. I’ve been promoted to she, and it’s a great honour.”

Click here to read the rest of this article from The Guardian by Simon Hattenstone.

Wearing Ann Taylor

Matt LeBlanc, David Birkin, James Cosmo and Eddie Izzard femulating in the 2002 film All the Queen's Men.