Eddie Izzard has said she doesn’t plan on pursuing female dramatic roles, after announcing she was prioritising she/her pronouns in December.
The comedian and actor revealed her pronoun preference in a Sky Arts TV programme last year, and now says she wants to try “the next [50 years] in girl mode” after spending “50 years predominantly in boy mode”.
Speaking to The Huffington Post, the 59-year-old discussed her new film, Six Minutes to Midnight, about an English teacher and his pupils who go missing in the days before World War Two.
Asked why it had taken so long for Izzard to write her own film, having so many credits to her name, she suggested that she went through a period of “self-analysis” before coming out in 1985, an experience she compared to learning how to write.
She added: “It took this long because I didn’t want to do rubbish.”
Izzard then said she would probably still choose male roles for films. Asked whether she thought she might look for female roles she responded: “No, I don’t.”
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“I think there is a transgender action hero type character, which I think should be coming out somewhere in the future,” she suggested.
“I always was a tomboy. I was a boy tomboy, now I’m a girl tomboy. I was always fighting, scrapping, running, jumping, climbing trees. The tomboy aspect of me hasn’t moved an inch.”
Six Minutes to Midnight received mixed reviews from critics.
A review in The Independent gave the film three stars, calling it “fascinating but flawed”.
“Six Minutes to Midnight is torn between two desires – to serve as a thoroughly British piece of entertainment, and as an urgent call to remember our past,” critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote.
“While the film nods towards the Anglo-German relationship, it stops short of confronting just how widespread antisemitism was among Britons at the time (and throughout the war). [Judi] Dench’s Miss Rocholl, meanwhile, is never asked to confront her own complicity in the rise of Hitler’s regime. She’s not quite the trope of ‘the good Nazi’, but still lacks nuance.”
It concluded: “Six Minutes to Midnight is far from perfect, but it at least proves that historical entertainment doesn’t automatically have to come with blinkers on.”
