Suzy Eddie Izzard on risk, reinvention and taking on Hamlet
Saturday, 18 April 2026
Suzy Eddie Izzard is bringing two radically different shows to Aotearoa ‒ a surreal comedy remix and a one-person Hamlet. For an artist who has built a career on reinvention, the shift between laughter and tragedy is not a departure, but the point, writes André Chumko.
Just as William Shakespeare moved from comedy into tragedy, Suzy Eddie Izzard is doing the same ‒ not across decades, but as it happens.
The British stand-up comedian, actor and activist is bringing two radically different shows to Aotearoa over a two-month period this year: a remixed celebration of her surrealist comedy, and a stark, one-person performance of Hamlet ‒ adapted by her brother Mark and directed by Selina Cadell ‒ in which she plays all 23 characters on a bare stage.
Taken together, they capture an artist in motion, and reflect the multi-Emmy Award winner’s desire to still push into new territory, more than four decades into her illustrious arts career.
In true Izzard fashion, absolutely nothing about the plan is static.
“[New Zealand and Australia] will be the first two countries to ever see this happening in real-time. I don’t think anyone’s done this kind of stuff before, going from surreal comedy to drama and tragedy in just a month’s time,” she tells Your Weekend.
Two acts, one artist
Firstly, a bit of housekeeping ‒ Izzard, 64, today goes by Suzy Eddie ‒ mostly.
“My brother goes Eddie then Suzy then Eddie then Suzy; my director’s staying with Eddie. A lot of people are going Suzy. I prefer she/her, don’t mind he/him … If you just want to chit-chat, then Suzy is probably the way to go. But you can’t get it wrong if you call me Eddie,” Izzard says via video link from a nondescript Washington DC room.
Born in February 1962 in Yemen to a hippie father named Harold John who’d taken a job in the port city of Aden on the Arabian Sea ‒ at the time a British colony ‒ and a nurse mother named Dorothy Ella, Izzard is the youngest of two. To this day, she remains close to her brother Mark.
The family left Aden in 1963 for Northern Ireland, where they stayed for four years, before relocating to Skewn, Wales.
In 1968, when Izzard was only six, her mother Dorothy died of cancer.
Sent to boarding school with her brother in Porthcawl, Wales, thereafter, and then in 1969 moving to Bexhill, England and being sent to boarding schools in the town of Eastbourne (first St Bede’s, then Eastbourne College), it wasn’t till Izzard was at the University of Sheffield in the early 1980s studying accountancy that she decided to drop out to pursue a career in comedy.
Her 2017 memoir Believe Me ‒ a candid account of that journey ‒ went on to enter the top ten of both the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists.
Back to the matter at hand: Izzard was supposed to perform her The Remix Tour Live show in New Zealand last year. Due to a fall in which she smashed her knee, it was postponed ‒ until now.
Having been touring the world with Hamlet for about two years (at the time of writing, Izzard had completed her 250th show in the United States), she saw an opportunity to challenge herself, artistically speaking.
“You can see the movement in my career, just like Shakespeare. I’m walking in his footstep,” she says.
Parallel to her Shakespearean production has of course, been the global success of Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Hamnet, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s book of the same name, that focuses on the marriage of Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare, and the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet in 1596.
“We’ve just been tracking each other going along,” says Izzard.
A Tony and Olivier-nominated actor who has performed on Broadway in the early 2000s and has had a long and successful career on London’s West End, Izzard said she felt ready to add Shakespeare to her ever-expanding repertoire.
“I have an eclectic career ‒ an unusual career ‒ not necessarily [one] where people say, ‘You’re the next person we want to bank on a Hamlet. … But I just wanted to do it. And so I pushed for it, it came and it happened. We’ve sold almost 75,000 tickets.”
That global reach is reflected in how she now performs, too ‒ touring her shows in four languages: English, French, German and Spanish.
If comedy is like a dessert, drama is the main course, Izzard says.
“We do love desserts. We have chefs who just do desserts. … But the drama has all of the flavours in it. So that’s what a lot of comedy people move towards.”
Izzard knew she wanted to act since she was about seven, not long after her mother died.
“The whole family loved her like crazy ‒ she was a nurse and helpful. Any time you were ill and sick, she would help you. That is such a thing to have with a mother, and that’s not every mother in the world.
“As you grow up, you think all mothers are like that, and that is not true. So she was so wonderful. Then boom, she disappears from my life. Two years later, I see someone on-stage doing this play, a Christopher Fry play called The Boy with a Cart.
“I thought, ‘I need to do that’. And I think it was substituting the audience’s affection for my mother’s affection.”
But, dyslexic and unable to sight-read parts she was given her at school for auditions, Izzard instead decided to into comedy: an art form in which she could set up and write punchlines herself.
Post-dropping out of university at 19, it took about 11 years for her comedic career to properly take off. Now, her dramatic work is getting strongly known, too.
“And Hamlet is the pinnacle of where you can go, dramatically, as an actor.”
As a trans woman, Izzard says being able to tour the world with the production is a privilege.
“Hamlet is set in a country tearing itself apart, and we are in a world, well, it’s not really tearing itself apart, but it’s like one or two or three operatives are trying to tear the world apart. And the rest of us are saying, ‘We get on with most people, guys ‒ you’re stirring this stuff up’.”
“… It’s an unfortunate thing with humanity. But I think literally 99.9% of the eight billion people out there are live and let live, as you say. You can count them on one hand, maybe two hands, but they do surround themselves with people who become implicated.
“They are fake leaders,” she says.
Performance and principle
Art then, is Izzard’s own form of personal politics. “And I’m someone who wants to go into party politics.”
A supporter of Britain’s centre-left Labour Party, Izzard in 2018 was appointed to its national executive committee, and campaigned against a hard Brexit with a pro-European voice. In 2023 she failed to become a Labour candidate for a Brighton constituency ‒ but it hasn’t scuppered her ambitions.
“Everyone in the world has the right to a fair chance in life. That is, in a single sentence, my life view, my world view, and that’s what I’m fighting for. And I think most people in the world would be happy to fight for that,” she says.
“Creativity is political. In fact, most lives are political. … Even people who don't do anything, that is a political statement.
“[I’m] trying to get to a future where there are more rights for people and there’s more positivity out there.”
Part of that, she says, is encouraging members of the rainbow community to de-centre their queerness.
“It’s just saying, ‘I do creativity’, ‘I make furniture’, ‘I do this’, ‘I do painting’, or whatever, ‘and I happen to be LGBT’. … I think that’s a stronger position to be in. Because then young kids growing up can say, ‘Hey, that’s kind of like me, and I want to do this. So let’s go do it’, as opposed to, it has to be linked to it.
“… All the animals of the world ‒ and the rest of the world ‒ do not care about us as we agonise. … We’re human beings. Let’s get on with it. We’re somewhere on the spectrum. Let’s go on and use cubicle toilets and wash our hands and be sensible about it.”
Izzard believes in meritocracy, working hard, and taking chances. “We will prevail.”
On identity and endurance
After Izzard came out publicly as trans in 1985, she remembers the British Observer newspaper questioning if it was a joke because she was still wearing pants on-stage; and the abuse people shouted at her, “and me shouting it back”.
Generally being surreal, and talking about Daleks and Doctor Who and “weird things; human sacrifice or whatever it was”, whenever her transness came up, Izzard says she was trying to work out if she was losing her audience. She’d have stress attacks ‒ but no more.
“Now, I’m not worried. … This is my authentic self, and I want to stand up.”
The best way to live life, middle-class background Izzard says, is as though it is an adventure.
“They wouldn’t let me in those films. So I thought, I’m going to just make this life [one]. And it works better, because adventures have to have ups and downs. And I've had a lot of downs … You’ve got to fight through those, and then you get to the uplands.”
In between her comedy, drama and politics pathways, Izzard has also run 130 marathons in a major test of her endurance and resilience. Just one, is equivalent to more than 42 kilometres.
She says it is not so much about the distance as it is the motivation.
“If you had a loved one ‒ a person you really had a strong affection for ‒ and there was a lockdown or some sort of terrorist thing or something, and there was no transport, but 13 miles away ‒ 21 kilometres ‒ there was medicine, you’d get there and get back, and that’s a marathon.”
And does she feel safe in the world today?
“I’m not sure if safe would be the perfect word. … Right-wing people are stoking things.”
In saying that, prior to our interview Izzard admits she’s just wrapped a visit to Tampa, Florida, where she had no problems. “I just deliberately try and give off a vibe of ‘I am fine in my own skin’, and, ‘Do you have a problem?’”
Izzard says it helps that she’s older ‒ that she’s been out for 40 years. “If someone looks at me, I’ll just look ‘em back.”
In fact, she admits that sometimes she cannot really tell if someone is in positive or negative shock any more.
“I was training where I grew up in Eastbourne ‒ a big, posh, conservative voting area. … I was out running, looking as I do, and [this woman] gave me this look, and I thought on the way back, I’m going to stop. And I slowed down to say, ‘What is the problem?’ And she said, ‘My daughter is a big fan of yours’.”
Izzard the artist has a request; a plea: buy a ticket to both shows, if you can.
“Some people, as they get older, they do phone it in. … But I’m going to just keep pushing the edge. As David Bowie said, always be just a little bit out of the water.”
Suzy Eddie Izzard’s The Remix Live Tour runs at Auckland’s The Civic, May 20, Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre, May 24; Christchurch’s Isaac Theatre Royal, May 25, as part of the NZ International Comedy Festival. Hamlet, Auckland’s Q Theatre, July 15-18, Wellington’s Soundings Theatre, July 21-23. Ticketing info: bohmpresents.com