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Bankrate: Considering that shooting on "The Riches" is suspended, how is the writer's strike affecting your ability to make a living?
Eddie Izzard: I spent most of my life doing stand-up, so now I can just go and do it. So I'm in a better position than most people who are actors, because I can earn a living doing a stand-up gig here and there. But I want the strike to end. I want there to be a settlement.
Bankrate: On your Web site, you write about growing up in a middle-class background and then heading off to boarding school. How do you think this sort of background, and the disparity between the two, ultimately affected your comedy?
Eddie Izzard:
My mother dying and me going to boarding school
just kicked my life in the head. I don't know
what it would have been like if that didn't happen.
I think two-thirds of my life would have been
the same, but the other third ... I can't say
how it would have been different. I remember doing
a play just before she died. I didn't know she
was dying. I did the play and I got a laugh, but
I didn't really think that much of it. Then, a
year after she died, I saw a play two kids were
doing at school, and I thought, well, I should
do this. So what happened between the first one
and the second, I can only think it had something
to do with my mum passing away.
Bankrate: You describe yourself on the site as a bit of a hustler at a young age. Were you always really savvy about how to scrounge up some money?
Eddie Izzard: Yes. Lenny Bruce said he was a hustler, and I really identified with that.
I just am a bit of a hustler. I was selling crayons to kids at school. We had a model railway, with little
buildings and little shops, and I always wanted to run a shop. I just like selling things. That's why I
like Richard Branson. I love the way he does business. Apple Macintosh, the way they do business. It's attention to
detail in making really good products, fun products. Both of them do this, and that's what I try to do with my
Web site. We have all these little moving things, and if you put your cursor on the little moving thing, it moves, and the bees all buzz around the screen. So I like trying to push that edge.
Bankrate: What are some other ways that precociousness -- and the fact that you're a hustler -- affected the way you handled the business end of your career later on?
Eddie Izzard: It meant that I kept all my copyrights. I studied accounting and financial management and mathematics at Sheffield University before I dropped out. I was ready to go at about 18, and then at 30 things started working, so there was a 12-year wilderness in that.
But when stand-up started taking
off ... it's because of Kirk Kerkorian, actually.
Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM in the mid-'80s, I believe,
and he sold off the studios and kept the catalog,
and I thought he was crazy. Why is he selling
off the buildings where they made these wonderful
films, and keeping the old dusty thing? I hadn't
been in business that long at this point, but
then I thought, oh, hold on -- it must be the
copyright that's important. And now, of course,
I know it's the only thing. Who cares, when you
make a film, what studio it's in? So, I've kept
all the copyrights of my DVDs.
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