Much to our joy, Lord Arux and I saw the Eddie Izzard documentary, BELIEVE, last Friday night. His story is interesting, yet another “overnight success” that took decades of dogged pursuit despite one discouraging event after another. Using lots of family home movies and other footage, the documentary was written and directed by his ex-girlfriend, Sarah Townsend. The surprise cameos were the best part of the documentary, especially the chat with George Clooney, who explained the correct pronunciation is Iz-zard, accent on the second syllable. (Really!)
The Q&A afterward with Eddie was funnier and generally more wonderful than the show Amelia G and I saw together last year. It started with a crazy guy telling Eddie about some dream he had where Eddie was a dog or something. Eddie parlayed that into hilarity and rolled on from there. Someone asked him why he wasn’t performing in drag these days. He explained that it was because he happened to be in “boy mode” right now. He’ll probably go back to “girl mode” at some point. And, besides, it wasn’t like he couldn’t go home and put on a dress if he felt like it. He’s really focussing on drama at the moment, as he believes it’s harder for an actor to move successfully from bonkers to serious rather than the other way around, so he’s focussing on serious. He reported that The Riches has definitely been canceled and, if he spoke to next steps in his acting, I don’t remember much about it.
He declined entirely to talk about his relationships. The documentary mentions how he and Sarah met, glosses over the breakup, and never again talks about his love life — which is probably for Eddie’s best, but I don’t think I’m the only person out there curious about his sexuality. I suspect it’s a mystery with very long legs.
If you want to see it, the documentary is still screening, but only for a few more days here in L.A. Go see it!