Eddie Izzard on My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Moments before the Eddie Izzard interview is due to start the thought occurs: what will he be wearing? A famous transvestite, Izzard delights in pushing against the boundaries of expectation in both dress and his comedy.

As it happens he is wearing a very dapper suit, but when he appears such details pale into insignificance. The range of his interests, from democratising comedy to educating 'Guardian' readers on the workings of the European Union, take precedence.

Ostensibly Izzard is here to talk about his new film My Super Ex-Girlfriend, a frothy Ivan Reitman comedy in which he plays the ominously named Professor Bedlam, nemesis to the superheroic G-Girl (Uma Thurman) who is having relationship difficulties with her bemused boyfriend (Luke Wilson).

With roles in The Cat's Meow, Romance & Cigarettes and Ocean's Twelve, Izzard has slowly been making a name for himself as a serious Hollywood actor. Though his stand-up routines seems to spring forth from moments of inspiration, frequently veering off in unexpected directions, Izzard explains that he is a disciplined actor.

"You can't really muck around that much," Izzard explains, "because if you started moving the plot around then the whole script would go off in a different direction. So it wasn't like I was running wild and free. There might have been an idea that I could improvise in the manner of Bill Murray in earlier Ivan Reitman films, like Ghostbusters. But then again he was the lead, he could go off, and he was already famous from 'Saturday Night Live' so he could get away with insisting 'I'm just going to go wherever I'm going'."

Next page • "I like doing things that haven't been done before"