Suzy Eddie Izzard

Look for Izzard in a film and you will usually find her at the edge of the frame, in charge of somebody. In Velvet Goldmine (1998) she is Jerry Devine, a manager with plans for a glam-rock star. In Valkyrie (2008) she is Erich Fellgiebel, an officer inside the plot against Hitler. In Ocean's Twelve (2004) she is Roman Nagel, one more expert in a heist that already has plenty. The casting has been consistent: the eccentric, the villain, the person with a plan for other people. Directors have not been wrong to do it. What they get is a performer who learned on the street and in the clubs in the mid-1980s exactly how long a line can be held before it dies, because there nobody is obliged to keep listening.

The career came in that order: stand-up first, then a television slot on Hysteria III in 1991 that got her noticed, solo West End shows from 1993, a first straight stage part in 1994, and only then film, with The Secret Agent (1996) and Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine two years later. Television followed in longer stretches, The Riches (2007–08) and then Hannibal (2013–15), where she is Dr Abel Gideon, a serial killer in Bryan Fuller's series. We liked both of the titles we have reviewed, and in both the interest lies elsewhere: in Haynes's clothes, which do half the storytelling, and in Fuller's dinner table. Izzard is part of the furniture of films whose main business is somewhere else.

That is not a complaint about the acting so much as a description of the parts. The thing she does better than almost anyone is not available to a supporting player: the long, wandering monologue that doubles back on itself, takes a detour through history or nonsense, and lands. We have laughed at Dress to Kill (1998) until we lost the thread entirely and could not have told you afterwards what it was about, which is the point. No film has had the patience to let her do that, and the mainstream comedies, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) among them, gave her the least room of all.

The answer has been the stage. She led a Broadway revival of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 2003 as Bri, and has since taken to solo adaptations, playing every part herself, Great Expectations in 2023 the most recent we know of. Some still see the comic first and the actor second, and she knows it. "I'm going for it like crazy. I've been playing a long game," she said in 2023. If you want to see what she can do, the films will show you a corner of it. For the rest you will have to buy a ticket.