Eddie Izzard’s Master Plan

Correction Appended

EDDIE IZZARD’S metaphors don’t sit still, onstage or off; they leap into the conversation with an almost physical presence, even when he’s simply describing how tough it is for a comic to be accepted as a dramatic actor. “If you arrive in comedy,” he said, “the studios won’t let you get off that horse. You have to shoot it, you have to kill it, you have to Bill Murray kill it, boom!” and he mimes shooting a horse as he explains, “Bill Murray successfully did that so he could get to the dramatic place he wanted to be; he really had to kill that ‘Ghostbusters’ place.”

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Whether doing comedy or drama, Eddie Izzard is leaving his skirts and fishnets in the closet: “I didn’t jump out of a not-wearing-dress box into a have-to-wear-dress box.”

The man who chats offstage is a less frenetic version of the performer whose fans recite lines from his stand-up shows, like “Dress to Kill,” the HBO special that made him a cult figure 10 years ago. In person, he also does voices and accents, talks about Napoleon and George Washington, drops in bits of songs. (“It’s going to be about cats!” he said, jumping into a spoof Broadway musical and cheerfully singing, “He’s dead, he’s in a box,” all as a quick aside.) He pulls out a phone and shows photos of a recent vacation with his father and brother to Yemen, where he was born before the family returned to Britain when he was 1.

But just as the inspired silliness of Bill Murray shooting the “Ghostbusters” horse almost obscures a deeper point — Mr. Izzard has analyzed that career for all it’s worth — the surreal wit veils a methodical determination to be taken seriously in drama. The guy who may be the most brilliant stand-up of his generation really wants to act. His ambitions are huge, but when he talks about his step-by-step career path he makes himself sound like some plodding worker ant.

That would be complicated enough without adding — and he’s the one who brings it up first — that he’s a transvestite, or an “off-duty transvestite” as he tends to put it now, since he’s been appearing onstage in jeans and a blue sport jacket in a workshop version of “Stripped,” the show he’ll take on a four-month national tour starting next month.

That was hardly his look in “Dress to Kill” or other stand-up shows. Then he appeared in heavy eye shadow, glittery shirts and sometimes skirts and fishnet stockings as he roamed the stage delivering riffs about culture, history and language — routines that are literally loopy as they swoop and circle back on themselves. In his recent New York show he quacked like an evil duck left behind after Noah loaded the ark (because, really, would the ducks have drowned?) and acted out a scene in which Jesus returns to heaven and tells his Father how he messed up on Earth. (How did he die? “Donkey cart accident.”) As he interspersed these pieces with bits about Wikipedia or updating computers, out of nowhere the evil duck quacked again.

But he did all this looking like his character in “The Riches,” the television series in which he plays Wayne Malloy, the father of a family of “travelers” or con artists who have taken on false identities and settled into a McMansion. Wayne masquerades as a lawyer named Doug Rich, which means that these days Eddie Izzard could pass for a corporate lawyer. (He is also an executive producer of the series, whose second season begins Tuesday on the FX network.)

“The Riches” and his nonfemme appearance are part of his bid for the leading roles that have eluded him onscreen. He was most widely seen as the computer genius Roman Nagel in “Ocean’s 12” and “Ocean’s 13” and has another small role in “Valkyrie,” the Tom Cruise World War II movie coming this summer, but more often he has landed in parts that make you wonder what he was thinking, like the mad scientist in the flop “My Super Ex-Girlfriend.”

He has had more substantial roles in plays, including David Mamet’s “Cryptogram” in London and “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” in the West End and on Broadway (where he was nominated for a Tony). During the time of that run he lived in the West Village, and we met at Tavern on Jane, a casual restaurant a block from his old street of brick town houses. “It’s really beautiful,” he said of the neighborhood, and he recalled “going to that corner shop to get as much wood as I could to heat up — the snows of 2003.” As he does onstage, he sometimes breaks off sentences and zooms ahead, as if his mind were racing too fast to bother finishing; the rest is clear, anyway.

His humor reflects the scattershot lunacy of Monty Python, but with flashes of Robin Williams’s manic energy and a sophisticated silliness that is entirely his own. Walk into a room, say “Cake? Or death,” and some people will fall on the floor laughing at the phrase from one of the most uproarious and sharpest parts of “Dress to Kill.” He imagined what it would have been like if the Church of England, instead of the Roman Catholic Church, had run the Inquisition. It might have resembled a polite invitation to tea with the vicar, he said in the act. “Cake? Or death?”

Describing Mr. Izzard’s humor, Mr. Williams said by e-mail: “It sounds like a contradiction, but his comedy is gentle cutting edge. Kind of like a velvet razor.”

Part of this edge comes from walking onstage not knowing exactly where he’ll begin, in performances that have a sense of direction rather than a script. I saw two workshop shows a few nights apart at the Union Square Theater, and the second began with a completely fresh, high-energy rush of material, a dazzling little prologue: he danced out as though he were on Broadway, raced through a snippet about “Hamlet” (“Dad is dead?”), did Christopher Walken as George Bush, and said he is clueless about Broadway shows because “I’m a straight transvestite; I know nothing about musicals.”

He doesn’t always mention being a transvestite in his shows, he said. But he did in the two I saw, and it worked as a disarming strategy: acknowledge it for fans who are wondering what happened, then move on. “I am a transvestite; I’m just off-duty at the moment,” he told the audience, and immediately went on, “I never was a transvestite; it was a tax thing.”

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 30, 2008 An article on March 16 about Eddie Izzard described the setup to his “Cake? Or Death?” routine incorrectly. He imagined what would have happened if the Church of England rather than the Roman Catholic Church had run the Inquisition — not if the Church of England rather than the Romans had tried to conquer the world.

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