{"id":507448,"date":"2026-01-11T01:38:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T01:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/507448\/"},"modified":"2026-01-11T01:38:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T01:38:09","slug":"eddie-izzard-i-once-ran-90km-in-just-under-12-hours-that-was-a-tough-day-eddie-izzard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/507448\/","title":{"rendered":"Eddie Izzard: \u2018I once ran 90km in just under 12 hours. That was a tough day\u2019 | Eddie Izzard"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you started performing your one-woman Hamlet<\/a>, how much did you labour over your delivery of the play\u2019s most iconic lines, such as \u201cTo be or not to be\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first thing I found when I was rehearsing Hamlet was that I felt very at home. I thought, \u201cThat\u2019s unusual \u2013 I should be quaking in my boots!\u201d I just felt very at ease and happy to be there. But the first time I performed \u201cto be or not to be\u201d on stage, there was a sense of \u2013 aren\u2019t bells supposed to ring here? Isn\u2019t there supposed to be a klaxon?<\/p>\n

I come to \u201cto be\u201d in a slightly different way each night so hopefully the audience haven\u2019t seen it done that way before. I was a street performer for years, so I know how to talk to an audience, which is what they were doing in Shakespeare\u2019s time; they were performing to the people, not at them. Actors got into this fourth-wall thing in the 1800s, it wasn\u2019t there in Elizabethan times. Actors go, \u201cOh, da da da da\u201d and they look up to the skies \u2013 whereas I will talk to the audience and bring them in. They are part of my brain, they are part of Hamlet\u2019s brain.<\/p>\n

What is your most unpopular pop culture opinion?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think George Lazenby did a good job as James Bond. Some people think he didn\u2019t, but I think On Her Majesty\u2019s Secret Service really works. Telly Savalas and Diana Rigg did a great job, and the whole bloody thing is great. It\u2019s the first one I ever saw, with my brother on a school trip, and I loved it. I\u2019ve loved Bond ever since. \u201cIt\u2019s all right, she\u2019s having a rest\u201d \u2013 what a tragic ending. It\u2019s a beautiful film. It\u2019s unfortunate Lazenby didn\u2019t do more, but that was a good one.<\/p>\n

You have been performing new spins on some of your best-loved standup routines on the Remix tour. Are you surprised which of your routines have stayed in people\u2019s minds?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When some took off, yes \u2013 I could never quite tell what they would be. The Death Star canteen is the one that has stayed the longest. On the Remix tour I have done a spin on it \u2013 so just like Madonna did a remix of Like A Virgin and turned it into a German torch song and slowed the beat right down, I can do my story of Darth Vader having blown up the planet Alderaan and deciding to go celebrate down in the Death Star\u2019s cafeteria. There\u2019s a woman behind the counter who keeps saying, \u201cYou need a tray.\u201d And he says, \u201cI do not need a tray, do you know who I am?\u201d He\u2019s playing status games with her and she\u2019s just saying, \u201cJust get a tray!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Everyone knows that routine now. But as I said to the Monty Python guys when they were performing live \u2013 I said to John Cleese, \u201cDon\u2019t worry if you go wrong, because people love it because they\u2019ve seen it right so many times.\u201d So I\u2019m deliberately making it go wrong \u2013 Daphne du Maurier now turns up in the Death Star canteen and she\u2019s going to do a sequel to The Birds.<\/p>\n

I think about Evil Giraffe<\/a> quite a lot.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Evil Giraffe is fun. That is weird. The first time I moved as a giraffe, people loved that. The idea was, could you get an evil giraffe? What would that look like? Would they eat more leaves than they should eat? I like the idea of a giraffe with a pencil-thin moustache.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve run more than 100 marathons. Which one was the hardest?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The marathons I ran on the treadmill<\/a> were really tricky. Don\u2019t try it \u2013 there\u2019s nothing to look at! But the hardest one, and people should know this if they do marathon running, was when I was in Northern Ireland, where I used to live when I was a child. I ran from where I used to live in Bangor, near Belfast. And on the west side of Belfast it gets quite hilly, it goes up and up and up. I thought, if I get to the top of the hill, I should be finished. So I got up there and I could see how far I\u2019d run and I was in a pretty good place. Then I realised I\u2019d miscalculated \u2013 I actually had another six miles to go. When you think you\u2019ve finished, six miles becomes really gruelling.<\/p>\n

There was also the double marathon I did in South Africa, where I ran 27 marathons in 27 days. I spent one day in hospital, so I did a double marathon on the last day to make up for it. I ended up doing 90km in just under 12 hours. That was a tough day.<\/p>\n

Izzard during the 2016 Sport Relief challenge in South Africa when she ran 27 marathons in 27 days. Photograph: Comic Relief\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

What are you secretly really good at?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sword fighting. In Hamlet I have a sword fight against myself, so no one knows that I can actually do it very well. But I was a sword fighter in Covent Garden for a couple of years, so I do know what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n

We like to ask about people\u2019s biggest fashion crimes, but you wore some amazing outfits in your specials \u2013 do you still have them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A lot of them are in storage. There were some great Gaultier pieces. There\u2019s one I wore on stage in Definite Article \u2013 it was orange and had good shoulders. On press night, a button fell off and everyone heard it. I found it and someone in a box threw down a sewing kit they\u2019d taken from their hotel on to the stage, which was very funny. So I decided to sew the button on in real time, while doing my show. I thought, \u201cI\u2019ve committed to this now \u2013 I have to make sure I get it on.\u201d That coat still exists and you can see where I sewed it on.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

What\u2019s been your biggest onstage disaster?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once the theatre flooded and all the lights went out, so I had just one light on a stand on stage. I said, \u201cLet\u2019s just do ghost stories!\u201d and I tried to make up my own ghost stories while they were trying to fix the lights. That was a big mistake.<\/p>\n

Another time, I was in South Africa and all the lights went crazy. I made them switch them off and got my phone out and switched on the phone light and did another ghost story \u2013 that seems to be my way of getting out of disaster.<\/p>\n

In Hannibal, there is a scene where Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) makes your character, Abel Gideon, eat snails that have been feeding on his severed body parts. What did you actually eat in that scene?<\/strong><\/p>\n

They made me some mushrooms that looked like snails. It\u2019s quite a scene! I decided to stab at them with this long pronged fork and in one of the takes the fork tumbled off the table to the floor, which is the one they used \u2013 I thought that was interesting. I loved that scene, sparring with Mads. It was a very scary show but making it was not scary. We filmed it in Toronto and at the time the mayor of Toronto had been filmed taking crack cocaine<\/a>. So we\u2019d be on set saying, \u201cHave you seen that? God that\u2019s terrible. Anyway, when you slice into the body \u2026\u201d Everything we were doing was completely horrible!<\/p>\n

What\u2019s been your most cringeworthy run-in with another celebrity?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know, they\u2019ve all been pretty good! This is the opposite of cringeworthy. I was at the opening of Ocean\u2019s 13 in Los Angeles. I\u2019m in Oceans 13 for barely a couple of scenes but I went to the red carpet thing. I wasn\u2019t talking to people, because you can\u2019t barge your way in and say [grandly], \u201cYes, yes, let me tell you about things!\u201d when I\u2019m just a small supporting role. So I was standing at the back when Brad Pitt<\/a> comes shooting through. Brad was going through a relationship thing at the time and did not want to do the red carpet, so he just moved through at a very fast pace and plopped himself next to me. So we\u2019re just hanging out, having a chat. Someone came over and said, \u201cThere\u2019s a group photo Brad, you have to do it.\u201d So he says, \u201cYou\u2019re coming too!\u201d And he dragged me into the group photo. So that was nice.<\/p>\n

Do you have a nemesis?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, but I will say I wasn\u2019t very into Margaret Thatcher\u2019s politics and, when her career stopped, mine started really taking off. I don\u2019t think it was linked but it did seem to go in the same way. Her politics were not mine; she wasn\u2019t into people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you started performing your one-woman Hamlet, how much did you labour over your delivery of the play\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":507449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[185,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-507448","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115873913578045930","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}