Comedian Eddie Izzard talks to handbag.com about love-hate relationships, wearing a dress, making it in Hollywood and getting his head around European politics.

Eddie Izzard is arguably the UK's most successful, most loved, and most surreal stand-up comedian - he won the Perrier Award in 1991 and since then has had a string of sell-out tours, which led to a comedy first with his gigs at Wembley Stadium in 2003. He's probably best-known for his cross-dressing, and is a crusader for transvestites everywhere. He's had several Hollywood film roles over the years, his latest playing the evil Dr Bedlam in this summer's comedy 'My Super Ex-Girlfriend', alongside Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson.

What's it like working with Uma Thurman?
Uma, she's unusual – even from the fact that her name's Uma! She does launch herself in, she's one of those people who commit. I'm not quite like that, I have to spend time shifting around before I commit. If I'm not happy I won't commit, I'll just sit back on things – there can be advantages and disadvantages with that. But she was very helpful. She was throwing out technique to me, because you know she's done this since she was a child and I'm a kid in terms of films, even though I'm older than everyone! It was very handy stuff.

And you got to kiss her!
Well, someone's got to get off with Uma Thurman and it had to be me!

And how about the rest of the cast? Did you feel any competition over who would be the funniest?
No one was really throwing egos around, saying, 'Please can I have this funny line or that funny line?' Don Payne had already written the lines out and we did a table read before they'd green-lit it, which was quite pressurised. You basically have a big table and everyone just sitting opposite and we did the whole thing for them, and that was when we realised everyone was going to have enough funny lines. And Rainn Wilson, who plays Luke Wilson's side-kick, was very funny. It was all fine, it was all easy, it was just sort of bouncing off each other. And Luke is very laconic and I realised I should just be tight up against his laconicness and that would all work well.

Did you get to play around with your character?
I could somewhat in a dialogue way, but I liked the lines that were written by Don Payne, who comes from 'The Simpsons', which I'm a big fan of. And I couldn't really muck around that much because if you start moving the plot around, the whole script would just go off in a different direction.

One of the film's big themes is getting revenge on someone you love. Have you ever taken revenge on a lover or has an ex ever taken their revenge on you?
I don't think anyone's taken revenge on me. I try to end relationships in as equitable a way as possible, because I like to get on with people. But I worked out the only way to stop loving someone was to hate them, you know, because that 'in love' thing is just hellish – the chemicals that are released in the brain are not good. Whoever came up with that thing that said 'in love' was going to exist - I don't know who because I don't believe in God – it's a very weird thing. But hatred seems to be the only thing strong enough to kill love. That's a dangerous thing. So I have gone through that situation and it's not great, and behind all the hatred was still the love.

So what do you think Hollywood makes of you these days?
I think the industry and the 'alternative' population seem to know that I exist and I do stand-up, and they seem to hold that in quite good regard. So, I think they're kind of curious, vaguely aware of me – I'm on a sort of radar, but I'm not top of their A-list, probably on the top of their C-list! I tell agents and managers that there's certain things I'm just not going to do, so there could be stuff coming through that they're just saying, 'No, that's not going to happen.' It's not piling up, like I've got 17 films to choose from - as I believe John Travolta once had after 'Pulp Fiction' – but it's progressing and I'm a relentless bastard so I just keep going until all the tumblers line up. It might be a little bit of a slow approach but there's no way I can speed it up – I just have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing.

I want to do 'The Simpsons' in the future. It would be a great way of doing comedy without having my face all over it. I've tried not to do comedy roles very visibly, I try not to put my stand-up on it with that kind of surreal 'dogs with guns' stuff because I think it might be too buzzy and then you get a restriction on your dramatic roles. But with an animated thing I think I could do very weird comedy and have characters say weird things without it being so attached to me, even though people say my voice is very distinctive. I do think audiences are reluctant to see people who do very weird surreal comedy doing a dramatic thing – because they crave serotonin, and that's what we provide!

Would you like to do a film wearing a dress?
I've done one film where I wore a dress, but I think the film I need to do is one that has a story and really the dress has nothing to do with it. A bit like in the stand-up I try and talk about generally being a transvestite in an oblique way, as apposed to an overt way. I don't know when I'm going to do that. At some point I have to do it.

The most dangerous thing to do as a transvestite is to just go out in the street wearing a dress, and be everyday about it. Like in rock 'n' roll people were throwing on dresses back in the '70s but that comes under a theatrical banner – and me actually doing it on stage I thought there would be a big reaction, but in fact on stage people also say, 'Well, that could just be a thing'. It's actually doing it when you go out on the street and buy a Mars bar that's the most radical thing.

You've played some huge venues in the past - are you going to carry on with your stand-up comedy?
I'll do stand-up forever. At the moment I'm concentrating on making a mark in LA. I play 300-seaters in Los Angeles. I like playing 100-seaters and I like playing 10,000-seaters. People would say, 10,000-seaters aren't very intimate – but I don't want rock 'n' roll to be able to play whatever it wants and comedy be restricted!

I think comedy needs to do gigs in fields. Quite often there's a comedy tent at a music festival and you're actually competing with quite heavy electric musical sounds in a dance or rock tent next to you, and they're doing 'feel' gigs and you're doing a 'mind' gig where attention to the word and the word-play is the important thing. So then I realised that classical music also does gigs in fields with the picnic thing - if you take comedy it's halfway between that. I think you can do the sit-down-in-the-field-picnic if you have three or four comedians and then put music on after that – that should work. There's no reason for it not to happen. You've just got to go and do it.

You like doing things that haven't been done before, don't you?
I like doing things which I feel need to be done. It helps keeps you on the edge and hopefully makes the public and critics think I'm not just cruising, saying, 'I'm going to churn this shit out for the rest of my life', which looks like a dangerous place to go to. That's where Benny Hill went to. In America you can get early Benny Hill tapes and he was doing very interesting stuff – I remember watching the early stuff with my family, who all had quite discerning comedy tastes, and we were all laughing our heads off. He was doing stuff on surrealist painters, on European television, but then he got locked into some of those characters that worked and kept repeating them, and then he got the women, and the speeded-up endings and he just ended up knocking them out. He was under huge amounts of pressure and the plot got lost, and now the memory is of stuff that was churned out. He lost the overall picture. Now the alternative greats wouldn't hold him in high regard – but early Benny Hill is really good stuff.

You recently took up an offer of going to visit the European Council with Tony Blair and making a podcast of it - why?
That's my European thing. I didn't get that in-depth about the European Council in the podcast, but then a lot of people don't want to know, even though there's a lot of information around about European politics. No one wants to know about British politics, it's so boring – you have to take in so much stuff to get down to the nitty-gritty. At the European Council they just go in rooms and talk, which is what you'd expect really, but until you see it you think something magical happens – but it's just people in corridors.

I try not to be preachy. With trans-gender I found some fun places to go, where people can kind of examine it or be aware of this sexuality thing and also feel it's not attacking them, or embarrassing them. If you put it out as 'Everyone wants to be Captain Transvestite now!' it seems more fun and it takes away the scary nature of it. I suppose that's the case with Europe. In England particularly, where there's a big fear of Europe – people think Europe is going to come and bite their toes until they die! So, I just know that Europe is there and it's happening and I'm very practical about it. I just believe that getting on with people is better than hating them forever!

You were in 'Ocean's Twelve', and we hear you'll be popping up again in 'Ocean's Thirteen', is that right?
I enjoyed hanging out with the guys last time – I had a couple of scenes and I think Jerry Weintraub threw me into the mix because I got to know him when I did 'The Avengers', which Uma was in as well. You can't really make a huge mark in a couple of scenes but I got to know the guys and I think they've written me back in just for one scene. But I'm very happy to come back in and do that; it'll be fun.