Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers - SUZY EDDIE IZZARD Did Sword Fighting In London

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

This week on the pod, Suzy Eddie Izzard joins Seth and Josh! She talks all about growing up in Aden, moving to Northern Ireland at a young age, attending boarding school as a child and what visits home were like, dropping out of university, building Edinburgh Fringe sketch shows, learning through London street performing and sword-fighting, plus her love of Monty Python. Plus, Suzy also chats about her incredibly impressive world tour of HAMLET! Support our sponsors: OlipopGet a free can of OLIPOP:Buy any 2 cans of Olipop in store, and we'll pay you back for oneWorks on any flavor, any retailer go to https://drinkolipop.com/TRIPSOLIPOP is sold online (drinkolipop.com + Amazon) and available in the soda aisle and with the chilled beverages at thousands of retailers nationwide, including Walmart and Target.ShiptDownload the app or order now at https://shipt.comDeleteMeGet 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to https://joindeleteme.com/ TRIPS and use promo code TRIPS at checkout. WildGrainWildgrain is offering our listeners $30 off your first box - PLUS free Croissants for life - when you go to https://Wildgrain.com/TRIPS to start your subscription today.Marley SpoonVisit https://marleySpoon.com/offer/trips for up to 25 FREE meals! That’s right… up to 25 FREE meals with Marley Spoon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Baji! Hey, Sufi. We got to see each other last week, which is so nice. Very briefly. Very briefly. I saw you. We literally basically just saw each other for the course of a podcast. Yeah.

A little bit, you know, pregame. Little green room, little green room action. Yeah. And a lot of fun. It was fun. I had a great time. Yeah. We, for anyone who is excited to listen to that, we interviewed McKenzie.

Yeah. It was, I mean, I feel like the, Festival itself, which I love doing, that kind of got hit by that storm that hit the sort of East Coast. There were a lot of grand plans for the sort of guests we might have. Yeah. And McKenzie, to her credit, suggested she's like, well, I could step in and I have some insights.

Oh, I don't know if I knew that, which is great, because I felt a little like we'd put her on the spot. So I'm glad that she actually had some enthusiasm for it. Yeah, I will say in terms of being put on the spot, which she thought. She thought she might be on this podcast someday, but she didn't think it would be a live recording with like, you know, 100 plus people watching us in a ballroom. So in the end, she kind of got burned super hard. Yeah. Because she, like, put herself out there and didn't realize she'd be in front of an audience.

Yeah, but, you know, we went to. I mean, she was great. When we came to New York, she got a three-day trip out of it. So everyone that comes on this podcast doesn't get a three-day vacation. That's true. Yeah. I mean, I would say the opposite. Most of them would just have to sit in there, you know, living.

I also apologize. I've had it queued up. I have not listened to you and mom do the listener episode. I'm sort of saving it for when I'm down in the dumps and need something to cheer me up. Yeah, she's great. How did her do? She was great, and she was very nervous,

but, yeah, I think, you know, our listeners will know her and will appreciate her, and it's, you know. Yeah, I can't imagine any of our listeners sort of, you know, chiming in with, let me down. You know who let me down this time? old, old hurry. Although maybe daddy will write in a comment. Maybe daddy'll be like, hurry could really...

Goes without saying. Yeah. He's never... If dad was in politics, he would never be in one of those politicians who refused to give a comment. Yeah. He was actually on a family trip.

He went down to Florida to see some cousins. And our cousin Shannon was also flying down there. and I talked to mom. I thought dad was back on Sunday. So I called the house, and mom answered. And she's like, well, your father's flights delayed, so I guess I'm glad I'm not on that trip. And it's like, how long is it delayed?

And it was like an hour. Yeah. And she's like, and yesterday they went to Cape Canaveral. I mean, the last thing in the world I would have wanted to do. And I was like, well, I think that sounds cool. And then I called dad and he's like, we went to Cape Canaveral. It was great.

It's very funny that he did the sort of trip you would do with children without children. Yeah. He sent pictures of me, like sitting in a, you know, the space shuttle chair. Yeah. I mean, he did it so I would share it with the children. He wasn't like, he didn't think that me as a 52-year-old

be like, whoa, a rock. I mean, I would have liked to see that picture. He didn't send it to me, but... Well, yeah, I'll forward it on to you. I think I have his permission to send forward picks alone. Yeah. Yeah, he was... I also called her, and she was like,

Well, he's home any minute. And she told a long story about, you know, I guess he flew out of Manchester, New Hampshire, left the car there, then flew back to Boston and was going to take a car service to Manchester to get the car. This car. Yeah. But he brought, mom had a lot of criticisms about the way he packed his luggage because he brought a duffel bag and he put the car keys in the side pouch of the duffel bag, which he didn't zip up. so he lost the car keys. Did he really? Yeah.

Now, he had a spare pair at home, so he just had to come home. But, of course, the downside, as was expressed to me, and this was not visually expressed, but I could kind of hear mom's eyes rolling. Was like, so now I got to drive him to the airport in the morning. It didn't seem as though the heart had absence and made the heart grow fonder in this case.

No. I will say, I had a one. wonderful thing and I won't have any in front of me right now. But I got excited about because when I think about the books on tape we used to listen to in car rides, the two authors that we listened to the most were Gene

Shepherd. Yeah, Christmas Story. Christmas Story, who I believe's book is called In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash. I hope I'm making that up. And then we listened to a ton of PG Woodhouse. I don't quite understand when that started, but we listened to all the Jeeves

books. Yeah. Which is such a funny thing to think about now. But somebody had just posted on Twitter, what is your favorite PG Woodhouse line? No wrong answers. And so it was just like the best of Twitter, where it was

just people writing quotes. And so I knew mom was in home alone, and so I called her up and just read her a bunch of Woodhouse quotes. And it was a delightful 25-minute conversation. I bet she loved them. She loved him. Yeah.

She was like laugh. She was cough laughing, which is really good. I just, I was just listening to some Woodhouse. I get to see if I can, I don't want it to play. But because there's so many different narrators who do those. Oh, yeah. And I was like, who, what's the best one? And if you're, if you're looking for one of these, I believe Jonathan Cecil is the premiere.

He's the one you like the most? Yeah. Okay. We also, I was driving the boys, skiing. this weekend. I also want to talk. You saw the kids, and I wasn't there, so I wanted an update on that. But I was driving the boys skiing this weekend. The boys see our neighbors' newspaper in the morning. You know, they come out, and she has her newspapers delivered, and she gets the New York Post. So the cover of the New York Post is, you know, by design, you know, super sensationalistic about whatever the news of the day is.

And so over the course of the last couple of months, there are a lot of headlines. that are fascinating to young children, be it about cartel leader killed in Mexico, Maduro getting kidnapped by the U.S. government, and then Iran. There are all these big stories. And so the kids were asking me about them, and I was doing my best to answer questions.

And, you know, when I try to answer them shortly, I don't do, like, the full closer look. Right. You don't talk about the fall of the Shah? No, I don't go that far back. With that said, though, I was like, hey, you guys want to listen? and some reporters talk about it.

And they were like, yeah. And so we listen to The Daily. Oh. You know, and I hate to shout out another podcast. You know how much I hate to shout out another podcast. But shout out to Michael Barbaro and everybody over the daily. They were riveted. Huh.

And it was really exciting to be like, oh, this is a perfect. And they made me pause a lot to ask questions. Oh, I was going to say, did you find a half hour way to make those kids shut up? No. No, they had a lot of questions. Like, because they say things about, like, you know, the cartel is decapitated, and then it's like, what does decapitated mean? And then there's, like, basically seven minutes about how nobody's head actually got cut off.

And then there's a lot of questions about, like, we actually, you can't disprove a negative. So, you know, Axel kept saying, but, like, there might be somebody's head might have gotten cut off. Sure. And I would concede the point while also saying that is not why the good people of the daily used decapitated. Yeah, but that was great. But you saw the kids. So what happened was you came in. We did a Thursday morning podcast.

I could not make, after my show, I had plans that I couldn't break. So you were on your own with McKenzie and you went over to see my children. Fill me in. We got there pre-children, which was great because we got to just like sit with Alexi for a half hour and catch up. And then Addie came home and. as you well know, she is kind of the light of everyone's life. And she was... Yeah, and a big fan, a big McKenzie fan from way back.

Yeah. She is just impossibly cute. And then your brother-in-law went to go get the boys. And Alexi said, Tolia, don't tell the boys they're here. Let it be a surprise. And so he took off and we were hanging out with Addy. And when the boys came in,

They, like, ran in and they were like, Mom, where's our present? And she's like, what? There's not a present. There's a surprise. And Ash said, no, there's a present. Tolia said, you're getting me an ATV for my birthday. The brother. So your brother in Latolia had tried to, like, throw them off the scent.

I don't know why you said anything. By telling them a better thing. A better thing. So when they saw me and McKenzie, they couldn't have been less. excited because they were like so he threw them off the scent by giving them the scent of something they would prefer more which and like they also their birthdays are both like in a month right they're yeah yeah they're right around the corner it's it's it's not on them to be like they're like totally fine to have been excited yeah um also good luck to you getting them something for their birthday

that they're going to like because right now the bar is a tv they think it's an a tv yeah yeah um but addie also had us like taking the couch apart in the little t-y TV room and making a boat and was crawling under these cushions. And then all of us went into that room and there was a lot of jumping off the couches. I feel like they had Olympic fever because... Oh, yeah, it was Olympic fever time. Yeah.

And so we were playing some sandstorm, some Deruta's sandstorm. And Axel would want me to tell him when to jump so that he could do a flip during the drop. Sure, sure. Which Ash would push him inevitably right before he was going to do it, which one time he really whacked his nose. But they each have their techniques, I will say.

Ash is a spinner, and Axel is a flipper, and Addy is a flopper. Okay, spin, flip, flop. Yeah. So, yeah, so we had a couple hours over there. It was really nice, And then it was bath time, bedtime, bedtime, book time. And we got out of there.

I had a good book moment with Axel the other day. We just finished the Great Brain books. Oh, yeah. Eight books. I love them so much. I read him as a kid. Yeah. So much fun to read with Axel.

Highly recommend. Last book of the eight, basically, because the narrator is the younger brother of the great brain. So the last book, the last chapter of Book. is the gray brain going off, going out east for boarding school. And it's like a brother saying goodbye to a brother. And I was so choked up and like crying. And Axel was like, why are you crying? And I go, it's just sad that their brothers are leaving.

And then he started crying, but not really. Like he was like real pretend crying. But also there was a moment where they were talking about smoking tobacco. And the gray brain says to his younger brother, have you ever noticed that dad smells like tobacco and like newsprint? And he's like, oh my God, dad does spell like tobacco and newsprint. And then Axel just interrupts and says, oh, I wonder what you smell like. And he smelled me and he goes, you smell like shit.

And then I said, Axel, and he said, S-H-I-T. And I'm like, yeah, that's what I thought. Unbelievable. Unbelievable the things I put up with. This is a real, I mean, I'm so excited about today's guest. Yeah. Susie Eddie Isard is just like has been a performer that we have been entertained by for years. Yeah.

Dressed to Kill one of the great stand-up specials of all time. I think that was my introduction to her. Yeah. And, uh, but she was, you know, like a street performer, I'm sure we'll get into this, but then, you know, comedian. And then now has, uh, you know, taken this dramatic turn. And I saw her, uh, doing a one person hamlet. Every part, uh, which she's touring the world now. And it was so good. And I, uh, yeah, I happened to know the stage manager at that show and, uh, uh, tech. texted him at intermission and he was like, oh, come back afterwards and meet Susie. So that's sort of what kicked this all off. I said, we've got a podcast and we'd love it if you'd come on.

And she was like, yeah, great, let's do it. So happy you did. And yeah, I mean, one of the, I'll say as much to her, one of the most singular people I've ever had the chance to talk to. So I'm fascinated to know what the roots of this were. And I know from digging into the bio a little bit, it is exactly as unique as one might think. Yeah.

All right, well, we're very excited to talk to her. And sometimes you record the intros after the conversation, but this time we're recording it before. So you're catching us in full excitement mode. Yeah. Here we go. All right. Here we go. Yes.

Yes. Hi. Hello, Susie. Hi. How are you guys doing? We're great. I'm so happy to see you. Good to see you.

I take it you're in the New York time or in New York. I'm New York time. Josh is L.A. time. Oh, right. So Josh is in the same time as me. Yeah. I'm in Vancouver, so. Are you doing Hamlet in Vancouver right now?

No, I was doing Hamlet in Toronto. Then I was going to go to Philadelphia, which I'm flying to in a couple of hours. I was doing an episode of Watson, the season finale of Watson, the CBS TV series. Oh, fantastic. So I'm coming in as the bad guy. and that, which has all this elements of Sherlock Holmesy stuff in it. Oh, yeah. Well, spoiler alert that you're the bad guy, but...

Yeah. Oh, should I say that? No, it's fine. Do you like switching gears in the middle of... You're obviously in the middle of this world tour of doing a one-person hamlet. Is it fun to then drop that for a little bit and go to Vancouver to do some television? It is actually. I mean, I think earlier in my dramatic career, I wouldn't have done this.

I have these two separate weird careers. I have two separate agents in London. One is drama, one is comedy, but it does confuse people. But initially, I remember hearing Citizen Surandon say, she really likes coming in to do a guest role in the film, say, and she comes for a week and then goes away, and I thought, I couldn't do it. How would you do that?

Because you'd have to get your mind so in the zone. But having played, done multiple film drama things now, I quite like it. You can come in, you can make some, my, some choices on how you're going to do the character. It might be at a shorter notice, but I had two, two, three weeks notice for this, so I could come in, do that. And Hamlet's all, performance, 225 just happened.

Unbelievable. So I'm very happy where that is. And, yeah, so it's nice to come from Hamlet, go to this character, who's based on one of the characters in the Conan Doyle, I think that's, that's a French word, But I keep with thinking the word is Urf, which means egg, it doesn't mean that. It's Erf.

But yes, play one of these characters, and then go back to Hamlet tomorrow night. I'll be on stage in Philly. I mean, when you have such a grasp on Hamlet, especially one person in Hamlet, do you feel like that makes other acting, not easier, but do you feel a freedom to go into other roles and just let it rip?

It is definitely a good place to go, particularly if you're playing all the characters in Hamlet, some critics have remonstrated with me, how dare you do this? You're not allowed to do this. Go to jail. Do not click 200. But we've just been in LA, and that was, we've got these raft of amazing reviews in LA

Times. Frankly, Charles McNulty, because he can really turn against things. So, yeah, we're just riding high now. We're off to Australia, New Zealand. So, yes, it's definitely a bit of a... We're touring hands.

I just said it in the elevator in the lift as we came up after shooting. Met this family. Hi, what are you doing here? Oh, you're on holiday. Yeah, what are you doing? I'm touring the world with Hamlet. Oh, Mike dropped. It is a bit of a, you can say other things.

You know, I'm doing a, oh, that's quite nice. You're doing a comedy. You're doing a this. You're doing a Hamlet around the world. It's just, you know, the world tour aspect is really nice as well. The control to be able to say, right, I'm off. And let's go play that. India, like we were just going on mind, who's really into their Shakespeare around the world?

India really likes Shakespeare? Great. Well, I'd already play in the Czechs in India. So we phoned up our contacts there and say, can I come and play Hamlet across India? Yeah, okay, we'll get into it straight away. So that's already, that's already public under, yeah. Yeah, I did, I met you after one of those Los Angeles performances, and you were just trying to recount a moment in the show. and just the way you can sort of spin through the text, because it's obviously so ingrained in you at this point. It really is... I don't know what to say.

It's an uncommon skill that you have to be able to do something like this show and to carry it. The memorizing of it all, I mean, it is a big chunky play. That is one thing. And I don't ask for lines as well. I've made the decision three nights before. the press night, the opening night in New York, I thought, let's not ask. Because you can do this thing of saying, line, if you run out of, if it just goes out of

your head. And then stage manager is supposed to shout to that. And I thought, let's not do that anymore. So if I come off, I have to get myself back on the tram lines of where I'm going. Because I know the story. I know where I'm going in the scene. Sometimes a word would just drop out of my mind. I think, what is that word? And as I come up to, if I can't get it, I will say other words that will fit. Sometimes quite beautiful. sometimes quite weird. As long as I don't say oky-dokey. That is not...

It's funny how you always hear... Oh, you know, Shakespeare was the first person to use that phrase, but I'm pretty certain, Okie-Dokey was not one of those. No, and also... There's a sitcom that Ben Elton wrote in the UK called Upstart Crow, and that had the fact that Shakespeare was supposed to go out with a raft of lines, but in fact other people did before him,

and he co-opted things, and there were other people who wrote plays, and a lot of the plays have been lost since the Elizabethan time. So, you know, Shakespeare was good, but there were a lot of other guys who were good as well. And Christopher Marlow, you know, he got stabbed in the eye. And if only hadn't been stabbed in the eye, he would have been, he would have had a lot more plays out there. But the plays that he's already written were very good.

But it is kind of amazing to it because I was so intimidated by Shakespeare. You know, this is the thing. No one was lining me out for a hamlet, so I just thought, well, I'll line me out for a hamlet. and at school, you know, probably in English, in English-speaking countries in the world, so in America there'll be kids, Greg, I don't know if you had some time in your teenagehood where the teacher said,

now we're going to study this play, and when a Shakespeare play could well have come up in that. But if you guys found it internally, we also found it internally. That's probably good to know. Yeah, it's good to know. We just assume you're all walking around quoting it. No, we all go,

what the hell is you on about here? Because there's Elizabethan verse, okay, you can work out what the poet was trying to say, but sometimes she's using words which are 400 years older, they're not used anymore. And so I do not know what that word is. And so I don't know what you're talking about. So you had to spend time, all these footnotes, these, oh, that's what that word means. All right. Couldn't you say that?

Oh, that's 400 years ago. Okay. I'll give you to slack. Hey, we're going to take a quick break and hear from some of our sponsors. Support comes from Ali Pop. Ooh. Pop, posh. Thanks, Sufi.

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And it's available in the soda aisle with the chilled beverages at thousands of retailers nationwide, including Walmart, Target, Costco, and Whole Foods. Alleypop! Support comes from Shipped. So, I was doing my usual weekend grocery hall on Shipped. I'm adding to the cart on my usuals. And then I had tomatoes. This isn't just any tomato-tomato situation. No, no.

This tomato is the most important ingredient in my grandmother's Sunday sauce. The same recipe that's been passed down generation to generation, and when I tell you it's good, it's good. So I'm picky about that tomato, and I need a personal shopper that's as picky as me to pick the right one, the ripest one. A shopper who's going to care about my cart like it's theirs. See, shoppers with shipped are no ordinary shoppers, because they know that no order is ordinary. It's never just delivery. Try Shipped for free for 14 days. Download the app or visit shipped.com. That's S-H-I-P-T-com. Terms Apply. In partnership with Airbnb, I'd like to share a travel story. Is that okay with Yusuf? Yeah, I would love that, buddy. Last minute this year,

before my birthday, I really wanted to go skiing. There was a lot of snow up at Mammoth Mountain, and I looked at some of the places that I usually stay, some hotels in the area, and they were all so expensive. They were so, I don't know why, the prices were so expensive. So I look up Airbnb, and I found a perfect little two-bedroom spot, condo, private hot tub, drove up. My host, Charlotte, couldn't have been nicer.

I told her that I was skiing. She was like, if you need to get in early, you know, that's fine as well. You don't have to ski until four. I was like, I'm probably going to ski till four, but she made that available to me. She was so friendly, so responsive. I got back to the spot. I had a great kitchen, so I didn't have to be going out to dinner every night. I asked her, I was like, hey, I've walked around the property.

I don't see this hot tub, and she said it's right out the door from the main bedroom. So I pulled the curtain back, and ta-da, hot tub. Wow. You love a hot tub. I love a hot tub. And it was great. It was my little home away from home, a perfect spot for me to spend a couple days while I was getting up on the mountain. Perfect location to any of the three sort of base lodges.

It was great. And I would stay there again and heartbeat. Well, it's wonderful. I'm so glad you booked on Airbnb, my friend. Yeah. Well, booking a trip on Airbnb makes for a better trip. You could be traveling with family or looking to discover authentic and local experience. AirbnB?

You have one of the most singular careers, I can think of. You were one of the most singular performers. And I was so curious as to know how your upbringing affected that. And you were a traveler from the very beginning, it seems like. You were from a lot of different places. Age of one, yes, because we were born in the city of Arden, the British called Aden, because they couldn't pronounce Ar. I don't know quite there.

Anyway, they call it Arden. people call it Arden. And it's at the bottom of Yemen, and the British took it, a bit like your Guantanamo Bay, or the Guantanamo Bay situation, which America said, we'll have that. Thank you very much, which is part of Cuba, which I didn't realize Guantanamo Bay is part of Cuba, it just sits at the end of Cuba. And then we did this with other things. It's a deep water port. So we didn't take the rest of Yemen. We just took that in that colony time of, I think it's 1700s, and said, yes, we're bringing things back from India. What things? knick-knacks that the Indian people don't want. Really? Yes, where we found them lying around.

They didn't have a flag. And so we put in the back. We need a deep water port where we can refuel and stuff and then send them off. And I think the Sears Canal, either going round, then the Seas Canal opens there you went up the Red Sea. So that was born. And age one, I was off to Northern Ireland, because a revolution was, this was part of my stand-up, I used to say, because a revolution happened in 60s. So it was burbling up this revolution in Yemen. And so there's this idea that dad said, we've got to get out of here.

There's a revolution coming. Where are we going, Dad? Northern Ireland. Okay, Northern Ireland. That sounds like a quieter place to go to. We got to Northern Ireland before. Obviously, there have been tensions since about 400 years, but the trouble's really kicked off in 69.

And we got there in 64 and left in 67. So I had three years, and I was talking like this when I was a kid. And we picked up the sign, you know, talking to other kids. So you're sounding like a Northern Irish kid because they are talking like that and going to school and learning like this. And coming home and Dad apparently used to listen to us through the door talking like this. And then we came and said, now you've got to speak English, speak with English accent, because they were from south of England. I think they were just freaked out by having kids that didn't sound like them as parents. So we did have two, like people can do with languages.

You know, if your parents are Spanish speakers or Italian speakers or whatever speakers, French speakers, you might come and speak that language at home and then in English out in the street. So we were doing non-Irish out in the streets. They're playing about and paying in gangs and running around, not proper gangs, but, you know, kids' gangs. And then coming in and going to go, Mommy, can I have a glass of lemonade? Yeah, mother, can I have a glass of lemonade now?

Not just ask if it in an English accent. What was your father's trade that he was in Aden and then Northern Ireland? He worked for oil company. He worked for BP, which obviously did bad things in the Gulf of Mexico a while ago. But at the time before that, but it was an oil company. I think he just went. He found them in the back of his diary, he said. He left the Navy.

He joined the Navy just after the war. And then he did sort of like a kind of national service there. And then he left. and he found, oh, British, it was Anglo-Iranian oil company at that time. And he went in there and they said, yes, you could have a job. And so I think he did one job interview and then he was in and just worked his way up. But he redesigned their accounting. So it's not terribly flashy, but they were doing accounting in a way that wasn't very useful.

It wasn't very, yeah, it wasn't very useful. They just had a system. If you imagine an oil company, they're making money, so they don't really care. Yeah, how do we count up? Oh, we count. Piles. We have four piles. Yeah, exactly.

You just put the cash in a bag and we'll just put it around there. So he said, why don't we streamline this a bit? And they didn't like what he was doing. And then they thought, oh, no, this is brilliant. Okay, you're in charge of accounting now for the whole of BP. So he was in charge of refinery counting for a while. And then he became order controller. So he just moved around these different refineries.

He was head of the Northern Ireland BP oil refinery for the accounting department. the chief accountant there. So we just kept moving around like that. But he was the first person in the family to get a career. His dad was a bus driver. My mom's dad was a cowherder. Wow. Who's found a cowherder who claimed he was a shepherd,

which I think is really fun. On the birth certificate, mom's birth certificate says, shepherd. I said this to my aunt. He said, he wasn't a shepherd. He moved cows in and out of barns.

But he dressed really, there's a picture, the one picture of God of him, but he's in a tweed jacket and with waistcoat and a vest, I think you'd call it, and he apparently read and re-read the works of Dickens. So he was, I think he was an intelligent person who decided he didn't want to be ambitious in anything.

He would move cows around. And then his wife died apparently, and then he sold his house. And having become the local Lothario around the village in Kent, where he lived, going around to all the divorcees and then he decided to go and live with his children said I'm coming to stay with you

for six months at a time like a king's progress around the country and he just, he had enough money to spend but he didn't have a house to live in he's got to live in their houses kind of weird but I think he's really interesting Do you remember him visiting and spending six months with you?

No, that's interesting he didn't maybe because we were moving too quick where are you now daughter He would call you from Yemen saying, wait a second, where are you? I'm trying to catch up with you. I really like the idea of intelligence without ambition, and that if you went to a sort of school counselor, they'd say, maybe cows?

You're really smart, but you have no ambition. Yeah, lots of time to read. Yeah, he was called Grandfather with a pipe. We called him Grandfather with a pipe. There was his granny and grandfather with a pipe. And his wife had passed away before I was four hours. born, so I never met her, but I can't like the, he just was called

girl. Because, you know, we all have two sets, quite often have two sets of grandparents. And I always said, this is a bit of my stand that you say, if you do become a grandparent, you're going to run to your kids and say, we're granny and granddad, okay, granny and granddad. The other's going to have the weird names, like whoopi and mumps and dingbat

and hairspray. Hairspray's coming over. Dingbat, ding bat, ding about an airspray. Grandfather with a pipe. I mean, that's what's the... It's really funny. And also ties him to a prop for the rest of his life. I know.

He must have loved that part. You have a younger brother, yeah? No, older brother. My older brother did the adaptation on Hamlet. He is the academic of the family. Gotcha. And he translates all the language shows when performing in French, German, and Spanish.

He is the expert in the languages. I will assume, based on the fact that you're still worked together, you must have been very close. We were very close because mom died when, in 1968, so I was just about the turn, I was just, I just turned six, and Mark was just about turn eight, so we're two years apart, but suddenly this loving mother, she'd had been a nurse, she'd worked in the nurse, in the hospital in Aden, in the refinery, and met Dad that way, and so she was this loving person, a very caring person, you had to, you know, cuts and scrapes

and all that kind of stuff, suddenly, voom out of your life, died of cancer, and massive upheaval, They decided they talked to each other and said, go to boarding. Boarding school is the way forward. So we didn't see dad for two thirds of the year when we're at these schools. So it was weird. But yeah, older brother, and he's the, he's the, my brother, my dad, I was sitting next to my girlfriend at the time. And dad said, yes, your brother, he has the brain in the family. You have half a brain.

I said, you see what I have to deal with this? He didn't really mean that, because I know I'm confident enough to know that. brain is sharp. It's not as academically sharp as Marks, my older brother. What's your age difference? Two years as well, yeah. All right. And who's oldest? I'm older, yeah. But I'm taller. I'm taller. Yeah, he's tall. So you went to the same boarding school at six years old and eight years old. Yeah, six, yes. It was called John's Boarding School in John's School in Porthcour, which is Wales. We were living in Swansea. Probably these names don't be much to. people in America, but

we're around the world, but Cardiff is the big capital, and then it's to the west of that Swansea's a big thing. And in between that, Tony Hopkins came from, I think, Port Talbot and Richard Burton from in and around those areas in the South Wales area.

But we were, I could have had a Welsh accent. I wanted to be able to pick up all these accidents, but I had to get, now I never got this, Welsh Jackson, because we're going to boarding schools. Yeah, so it was suddenly you know, dad drops you off and, yeah, it was, I just did a lot of crying, a lot of feeling sorry for

myself and a lot of crying, maybe understandably feeling sorry for myself. Yeah, I was going to say, that's the best to be such a, such a tough age to grieve and then to be, uh, yeah, to be put in a completely new place without any parents. Yes. It, I just, yeah, I just was,

I was clinging onto my, I worked this out. I was clinging onto my brother and he was clinging on to no one. And he had the toughest thing. And he was very sharp, very accurately, bright. So he got pushed up. Now, he wasn't very tall as a kid. We're both not a tall family, but he got put into the year above.

They had this idea of, so what was he, eight when he got there? And he said, you're going to be put with the nine-year-olds who were starting to grow up. So he was not only small for his year, but, you know, put into a year whether they're all starting to get bigger. So he hated that. I mean, not, it's a tough combination as being smaller and smarter than everywhere. That is not, no one's, no one's psyched to meet that. kid. No, I advise to all parents. Don't let your kids jump up. But that's like, almost famous. You have that storyline, almost famous of the kid being

advanced. So you would see your dad, what, a third of the year? Just the summer? Yeah, it's in the terms of 10 weeks each. But we would see, you go back for weekends. You get weekends and there's a half-term thing where you see them for about five days, six days. So you do see them, but it's, yeah, it's about a third to the year, you know, three, fifth, it's a small chunk and then you're just, this idea that at the end of the night you just go into a dormitory

like a Victorian hospital dormitories with beds and beds and beds and beds and beds and you get used to that. So it's hellish when you're six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Eleven, I stopped crying in a fight with Andrew Isherwood who was better at football than me.

He was the captain of the team at football soccer that we all lived to play for. But we had a fight. I think he had a fight. I think he had a fight. hit me. And I thought, oh, pain, cry. And I thought, oh, I've lost. I've lost this psychological game with him and with our, we're probably doing windmill fighting, which is what all kids

started doing. And I thought, don't ever cry again. So I didn't cry until I was 19 after that. But it's interesting that sort of analysis, the crying. The crying is the losing. I think for any parent, this is a good lesson that it only takes five years for your kid to stop crying and only then when they get punched. They got to have to punch hard enough by another good. I wanted to win the battles and crying. You can't, you're very really carrying out fighting with crying, I suppose. Yeah.

Crying. You've just so much effort into getting water out of your face. And that would be interesting to keep fighting while you're crying. I suppose some kids do. But anyway, yeah, I gave up at that point. It doesn't sound like this kind of childhood would have had a lot of vacations attached. Would you guys ever go away? Were there grandparents that you would go visit or would you travel just to get away?

We did because the grandparents, it's all southeast of England, which is the Kent and East Sussex. So that's the to be. This is geography-wise. If people know vaguely where London is, it's the south of that. I'm right down with it. So lots of sea. We were way of west in Wales, and then we would come back. Our granny would come over, our grandma would come over and go back.

But holidays, not a huge amount of holidays initially, just going home for holidays. But then we moved from Wales and we went back to where my dad's parents were, our grandparents were, the idea that they would help out, and our grand did help out. My granddad was off on buses, just driving buses everywhere, I think. But yeah, it was, you get hardy going to these things. I suppose in the old days it was British Empire and they wanted kids to go to boarding schools as kind of posher kids to go to boarding schools

and become young men who will happily go out and do bad things around the world and they were the British Empire. Do you have a flag? This is where I've developed my do you have a flag? Oh, we have a flag. Do we need a flag? Yeah, you need a flag.

Otherwise, we're going to take your country. but I don't know I suppose after the age of 11, 12, 13 I was quite happy going to I was okay going to these boarding schools because give you a level of independence

that, you know, parents with teenage kids or all that kind of tough times that they have together. Is it wrong for me to opine that like despite it like being a place to toughen you up, was there sort of a robust theater department at school?

like this? Was that something that was valued? Like, the theatre department. Like, was that something? Let me see. The first one wasn't there long enough. I was only there. We were only there for a year in the one in Wales. And we moved back to the other one. Yes, the

head teacher, this is a town called Eastbourne. Hastings, if anyone's heard of Battle of Hastings, that's near there. Brighton they may have heard of that's the big city down, town, city down the road. So it's South Coast, and I was in this town called Eastbourne. and where dad had been born,

and their headteacher, they really like doing plays. So I was trying to get into his plays. So they had a reverse and driven thing. They're doing a musical and a play every year, I think. And I was desperate to get into these, but I wasn't auditioning well. I'm dyslexic, so if you have dyslexic, and they say, read out these roles,

you're going to be auditioning for this, like you guys must have done. and anyone at schools does that. And getting the words from the page through my brain and out of my mouth clearly was not easy for me. So it used to go, my lord, you are coming. I am coming to see you now with, what is that word? You know, and so they think, this is an idiot. Spear carry, spear carry.

Spear carry, spear. How do the spears get on the stage? And you will carry the spear. I do. So this happened for year after year after year. So I was pushing from the age of seven strongly to do just acting. I didn't know comedy could be sectioned off and leaned into. And so it was just, can I do roles?

Can I do roles? And it was all spear carrier until I got to late teens, 15, 16, 17. I do remember auditioning for one play. And at the end, so you read out some of the lead role things. and then the teacher said this unusual thing he said what role are you looking for in this play i felt large role hero kills everyone gets the girl runs off something in that area how would jailer be oh for that's saying so i was but the jailer was handcuffed to the lead role and so when the when the lead role was going oh whoa it was me this he was doing this he had this big long chain

from going from his wrist to me. So I wasn't terribly tall. So I was going around and around the stage and pulling focus as much as I could. So upstaging, I got started by upstaging like crazy. It's very nice to be in a situation where you can both pull focus and also physically pull the lead,

you know. Well, not just figurative, literal pulling. Well, they were doing more of the pulling. I was doing more of the flying. Because they were the, They were the Duke of something. It's the comedy of error.

So I think it's the two dukes, I think. They're two twin brothers. So the conceit is twin dukes, twin posh people. And they have twins. They have servants. They have servants. They're actually twins. They've all been separated at birth.

And they don't know they exist. So they keep coming and go, oh, it's you. No, it doesn't. All that kind of stuff. So I'm just going round and around, around, around. But I even had a helmet on with a visor. So, you know, olden days of helmets. big metal helmet, a visor on that would go up and down, and it had one of the teachers said to me,

oh, you could put some string or cotton on that, and you could pull it down the back, and then you could make the visor up and down, like it was automatic, like it was an electric visor. All that's fun, not nothing much to do with Shakespeare, but, so I did put this on, and I was using it, and I was allowed to use it in the play. So it got an hysterical laugh. You imagine a Shakespeare play going on, even though it's a comedy play. It's going on and on and then I'm trying to drink through this visor. It had a bar down there and a bar there.

So it wasn't a completely closed visor like that. It was just a local one. It's called Cromwellian helmet from our 1600s. And it's quite a distinctive kind of helmet, but it has this thing. And if you're trying to drink, there was a bar scene, and I was trying to drink through this thing. And then I go, oh. And so I'm pulling focus because I'm trying to drink through this thing.

And then I just go, oh, and then I do this, and then I pull it. And the thing goes up, and then I just drink. And then it comes down again. So it's like, it's ridiculous. It's like, I've got an electric visor. and it killed, it murdered. It stopped the play. And the other kids were coming out to watch.

And it was the first time I felt, oh, this is good. This is the beginning of something. And one of the teachers afterwards, still remember the line saying, very funny is this is a lesson the next week. It's a very funny issue, yeah, but not really Shakespeare, is it?

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Like how does that leap happen? Well, it starts this. At 7, I want to do plays, and I think I really liked it. I didn't know you could be a professional actor. I didn't realize that until later. 16, I think I've worked that out. So I said, I made a pack, like a religious pack with myself, going, this is happy. You know, if I was going to cut blood and do it with my own hands and go, I am doing this.

So there was a certain parental pressure to go to university and, you know, your mother didn't go university. And I didn't go to university. Okay, I got to go through that rigmarry. but I'm not going to do that. And so, do you want to be a quantity of surveyor? Still don't quite know what a quantity surveyor does. Civil engineering, because I can add up, I'm quite mathematical. I was very good at math, bizarrely, you know,

because usually you're an arts person getting into doing acting, but I was the science person going to do acting. So I had to go to university. I did accounting and finance, financial management, which is almost the same degree that Mick Jagger did at his university. But then we both dropped out. I'm just tracking Mick Jaggy. And so I dropped out at 19.

So I got to university. I'd already made this pact. I'm not going to do a sensible job. And I'm going to go into acting. So I was already, you know, I broke into Pinewood Studios when I was 15. I worked out where that was, and I tried to get higher at 15.

I got out of boarding school to go and audition in London, which is a 60-mile journey in the middle of term time to audition for the National Youth Theatre. I did really weird things. So I was a driven twit from a very young age. And I get a university, and I'm still trying to do weird things to get my career going. I go to the Edinburgh Festival. People might have heard of this.

It's a big festival we have in Scotland. I did 12 of those over 13 years trying to get things going. So I thought, I dropped out university at 19. I thought, well, now I've dropped out. I'm not going to do a degree in accounting and finance because that's going to be a burden. If I get this degree, it's going to be, oh, you're going to have to go and do that. So no, I don't want that. And I pushed, and I started, I've been doing sketches at the Edinburgh Festival, like Python, because the pythons had come from Oxford and Cambridge, and they all went to this Edinburgh Festival, fringe festival.

Did you do it with a, did you do it with a troop, or were you on your own? No, so I built a troop. I made a trip. I was, I said, oh, actually, I was in Sheffield University, so that's a big industrial city halfway up the country. And I said, who's going to go to Edinburgh? I'm going to go to Edinburgh. As soon as I get to that university, oh, we don't go, we lost money some years ago, so we don't go.

You don't go. This is my whole plan. I'm a big planner. I'm a little. I layer my bed. This isn't interesting. I layer my bed and I said, I don't have the confidence to take a show to Edinburgh, because I'm only 19, but I'm going to assume I have the confidence.

I'm going to borrow confidence for my future self. And then once I've done it, I will have that confidence because I've already done it. So this was this sort of mind trick I play with myself. So I went around saying, we're going to wait a minute. I'm going to win. I literally begged people for about four months. I was throwing people for my childhood. I was praying my brother and people from previous school.

And we got up there. We did a show, and it was called Fringe-flung Lunch, and it was terrible. It was a sketch show on at 12 noon. What a ridiculous thing. So I was in the mix, and there were people who did really well, Stephen Fry, Hugh Lorry, Emma Thompson, they were doing their finishing year. They won all loads of awards.

in that year 81 and we failed dismally but I got there but I was still I was this you know cocky we're doing it even though what we're doing is pretty rubbishy I did three years of that and it got nowhere no one picked me out I was expecting TV people to come and say you I can see something in you we're going to bring you away we're bringing in the TV the BBC we would love to have you but no they didn't so at the end of that I was just sort of what do I do now so I'd already half moved to London and I started street performing in London. That's how I did it, because I'd seen it at the Edinburgh Festival, and people had amazing reaction. If anyone ever goes to that festival, any festival, there's quite often lots of people around.

And if you start doing something in the street, people go, oh, there's someone doing something in the street. Let's watch this person doing something in the street. Now, that's not real. That's just a festival situation. You get down to London, you say, I'm going to do something in the street. And people say, well, there's an idiot in the street, and they just walk past you. And you have to be really interesting before they say, that idiot's quite interesting.

I'm going to stop and watch that. So that's, I got to, 85, got to start performing at the Common Garden. And initially, we were terrible. I was with a partner of Rob Ballard, and we were just terrible. We had confidence that we could do sketches, but sketches do not work on the street. So we failed for a year, and then we started getting better. Then we did a sword-fighting thing, which links into Hamlet, because I had directed three musketeers at university.

having watched the Richard Lester Three Musketeers on the television you know great film Three Musketeers, Four Musketeers with all those it was just a great version of it because obviously there'd been many versions of it If I can just jump me real quick

how did your father at the time and how did your brother with the full brain feel about the fact that you were just sort of sword fighting in the street for a living in Govind Garden? My brother was okay about it because he sort of decided he didn't want to be the academic in life, and he decided to be assistant librarian. He's anti-ambitious, my brother.

So I said, he got from Grandpa with a pipe. He got his ambition from Grandpa with a pipe. When I was talking earlier, I was thinking, maybe that is what Mark was tracking. And Dad was going, but your, you know, the examiner took when he was 18, where A-1-B, which is like, you know,

he must have got 95%, 90%, you know, he was right up there. I was getting 80%, and Dad was, oh, impressed by me. That was surprised by my O-level I remember, whereas Mark was the brain. So it was fine, it was all fine, but I was this determined, I could smash

through the thing. So that was happening with dad, and we had a stepmother who, stepmother kept saying to me, you've got to get a proper job. I'm not going to get a proper job. Never going to get a proper job. I'm doing this. And it was, dad did say, are you sure, when I was on the streets in London, he said, you sure you,

I didn't prefer having a company car and thing and be an accountant. No, don't want to do that. I'm not, I was so certain. This was the weird thing. I don't know about you, Seth, when you're doing your thing, or just, but that is the lucky thing in life. If you know what you want to do, that is so much better than, because dad was 80 and he said, Joe, he says, I still don't know what I want to do with my life, but I just knew. And I just, seven, I'd seen a play, and I said, I really want to do this.

and at 16, I'm absolutely doing this, and I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing until the world gave in, I think, and just said... So street-performing wasn't the thing, but it did teach me amazing stuff. I was sword-fighting on the streets of London. I got this great picture online

of me and Robb, my partner, sword-fighting with a crowd around it, and that ends up being me sort-fucking against myself in Hamlet. And it just... I started building things and setting things up from that way, and performing abroad. You know, Memphis in Mayfest, that's the first one I did in 87 or 88, I think 88.

That's when I first, my first gigs in America was in Overton Square in Memphis. How crazy is that? You know, I get flown out because they celebrate different countries each year. We're doing Britain. Well, you get some people in the street because they're trying to, it's an artistic era, Overton Square. So that was my first gig. I keep going back to Memphis when I play there, and I go to Overton Square. I said, I played here, and the people go, we don't care.

You want beer? So you got flown in to provide. to street perform in Memphis? Yeah. We got flown in. So they paid for the flights. They paid us no money. And they put us up at the holiday inn.

So the holiday in and a flight, and that's it. And then if we worked on the street and made, got a bit of money. So I did this show. My first show was to US Marines in a marching band. And they were waiting around to do that thing the next day. And I did a show to them. I got about 20 bucks. And I could have breakfast.

And that was great. It was a wonderful experience. There were some British people there saying, why are you in Memphis? What are you doing in Memphis? I'm here to perform. So it was, but I've had great gigs in Memphis ever since then. You mentioned a stepmother.

How old were you when your dad remarried? 13. So we had seven years. Did you ever go on a holiday with your stepmother, with the four of you, with your brother? The four of us, yes, I think we did do the four of us. And then it cut down to the three of us, because Mark was out. As soon as he was 18, he was off.

Dust. And it's difficult for my stepmother coming in. I was 13, my brother was 15. Tricky thing for her. But she also thought in a different way to us, or to me particularly, because she was saying, fit in to society and know your place kind of thing. And I was saying, no, that doesn't work with, I'm going, go for your dreams. And she's saying, no, I have no dreams.

Or, you know, outsize your dreams. But I think, Kate, she was, she was high, she was actually quite talented. She was very talented. Apparently she took an exam for the whole of the country and came fifth in the country. And she, she was bright and sharp. But again, I'm talking about anti-the-ambitious. I don't think she thought ambition was a good thing. But I did, and so I wanted to be really ambitious.

So, yeah, she was there. And Dad was saying, well, as long as you're happy, and there was a period of time of me, you know, flailing, dropping at a uni at 19, refusing to take the degree in accounting and finance, and not really proving that I could do it. So I sort of failed my way through a bit and just treaded water until the stand.

I went solo on the streets, that was the thing about. In 87, in the spring of 87, I went solo on the streets, and that's when I saw, because I never thought I could be a solo performer. So going from, I was a four-person act. I don't know how you, Seth Ryan, you started doing comedy and just your career. We were like an improv troupe, so we were usually with like four others. Well, you know this thing. When we grew up with Python, Python were gods on Mount Olympus.

So you have to be in a group, and that's how you do it. And I felt instinctively when I was younger that I could play someone like this. I'm in charge of everything. Who are you? Oh, I'm an idiot. So I can play these small characters, or I could play a big character or nerdy character. I could just, I felt I could do that. Michael Palin was really my personal.

I'm very similar to that. But you put on costumes and you do that in a sketch. And then on the street, it was nothing like that. The attention is bound for the audience. Adults become children and children become animals. That's how it works. You have to do something where you're going to say, I'm going to set fire to my own body and die.

And then they go, oh, we'll stick around. and watch the guy die. It is. I mean, we used to do Edinburgh and those street performers, that's exactly it. And it would be like, you would have to make an announcement

and continue to, like, restate the premise and build an audience. And it would be some, you know, ultimately disappointing payoff, but the entertainment was to hold people's attention.

Yeah. And I think advertising a show at Edinburgh, that is the thing that you can do and you do whatever you can think you can do to get, and now I come to this show and at the end, which once you do it, as you're doing for living down in London,

and there's no particular, that is the show. I found it had to be physical situation comedy. It couldn't be situational. I had to be physical situation. I weren't going to get onto this unicycle, and then I'm going to throw this thing. In the end, I was getting on, I called it my big bullshit show.

I was getting on a five-foot unicycle, getting into handcuffs as a solo performer. I'm able to escape for these handcuffs. If people download, believe the ideas of us story, this is the documentary. Somebody videoed us, and so we got me.

back in 89, I think it is, trying to get... I'm in this thing, and I'm going to get out in 30 seconds. I'm going to get so that's... And I call it my big bullshit show, because even if it was raining, people would go, hang on, they could die. They could die. And they got out.

They didn't die. And there is two pence for your life, for the last 45 minutes I will give you. Sometimes it gives terrible money. We had to suggest money, which was the thing. But anyway, yeah, The street before he really made me because I lost all my confidence

and then I rebuilt myself. You know, they talk about things, we're going to strip you down, rebuild you in it. I actually didn't lead that to myself. And I ended up with his gut confidence. I could stand on the West Piazza, Covent Garden, which is a huge opera pitch. And there's no roof.

It's just a big area. And I could stand there, and I would just burble away. Good afternoon. I'm going to... I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't kill myself. I will kill birds and cats and dogs,

but not, not badly. These are animals that wish to die. It's the whole Switzerland thing. And I learned to talk in this word wrap thing, and I started it with a double act, because you had to encourage people to come forward. And if you say, people come forward now, I'm going to do a show.

They go, no, you're an idiot, and you're going to be able to do a bad show. That's why you're asking us to come forward. And it'd be better to say, could everyone back up and go away, please, because we're going to do a show here, and we don't want anyone to watch. And if you said that, they go, oh, oh, let's watch.

So it was all counterintuitive. And in the end, I developed this confidence. And then people were saying, you should do stand-up. And I just thought, I'm not a solo performer. And I thought, no, I have to do stand-up because I'm getting nowhere here. And I thought at 25, I would be a TV show, part of a group, just like the Python's if you're tracking their career. And I was just nowhere.

And I'd be trying to get somewhere as fast as possible. I changed that into getting somewhere as good as possible. I realize that no one gives a damn if you've learned to do some rubbishy thing really fast. But they do, if you're taking 10 years to get really good, then, oh, this good thing. I really like this good thing, but not this fast thing. So I just, I swept, I swapped my whole style, my whole technique around, my whole strategy. And then it started, people started turning up and watching, going, hey, hey, hey, come on. And then I took that into stand-up, and early stand-up was a bit all over the place. And then gradually, I realized I could bring the sketches back in,

and I could introduce ideas and say, that's kind of like this going, what are you? And I realized, in Richard, prior technique, I could do this thing of having two characters talking to each other. And he did that occasionally. He would have two characters talking to each other. So I stole that off, Richard. Did your father and stepmother ever come to Covent Garden? Did they ever be like, well, let's see? Not Covent Garden, but we have a newspaper called The Guardian, which is like New York Times, kind of cashier, that kind of importance.

and we have, I think, called Radio 4, which would be PRS, NPR. So when NPR equivalent and New York Times equivalent started saying, Eddie is on, the up-and-coming, surreal comedian, then that's, and my mother's, by stepmother, starting getting free sandwiches in pubs. What, Kate is, are? Oh, you linked to Eddie is? Oh, right, well, yeah. And so it suddenly became something else, and then I had arrived,

and it all changed. Dad wasn't that bother, but Kate did change her attitude, so she no longer said, when are you going to get a proper job? So I wasn't fighting that battle in particular, because, you know, Kate was finding her fight, and Dad was kind of as long as you're happy,

and then we got to a happiness place, and then eventually, you know, I was doing the richest TV series out in L.A. for FX, and I flew Dad out to come and see the opening of the second season, and he seemed quite happy about that. And he came to the, when Day and the Death of Joe, I was nominated for Best Actor there, and he came to the award ceremony and stuff.

So it gradually got to this better place. But it took a long time, but I wasn't worried about it so much, because I was just so deciding, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And then gradually it started to work, because I really did think, I can do this on a world level. But the world was saying, no, you can't, you're rubbish. You see how rubbish you want? and people are walking away,

and even your early street performing is terrible. And the first three shows you did at Emberle weren't that good. My brother kept... He was a good talisman. He would say, yeah, it happened that show, but it was a bit rubbishy. What? Well, it was kind of rubbish.

It wasn't very good. So Mark would often just be very blunt. And there was one particular stand-up show where he'd turn about... He'd been a year in Spain, learning Spanish. And he came back and he said, whoa, what are you doing? This is good. This is good.

I'm doing something good. Yeah, something's happened. And nothing, all that had happened is I've got the feet under the table, learned how to do my technique of stand-up, which is essentially I'm doing sketch comedy in my stand-up. But I've developed a narrator who says, why is it? Why do we have dinosaurs for 165 million years?

If there was a god, why did he say, I want to test drive monsters for 165 million years? What about humans? Should we get the humans like us? No, no, no, no. I want to do monsters first. and I want a hundred and sixty-five million years. What will they do?

They're going to go, like pirates. Yeah, like pirates. And then they got to poo and eat and screw and that's it. For 165 million years, that's not good, God. That's what I want to do. So you can get into that and I can act out God and then I act out all the dinosaurs. And I gradually, I thought everyone was doing this and not,

it's not a standard way of doing stand-up, apparently. But I've come such a, it was such a weird, you know, going from sketch comedy through, street performing into stand-up, that is odd, and then going into drama after that. So that's what I bring to the Hamlet table is I've just, I've had such an odd career that I've got to be doing something different. They may not be quite everyone's cup of tea, but it's different. Because I know how to perform two people as opposed to at people in the street.

We were there, just like they were in Shakespeare's Day. They'd only started building the theatres, you know, of one generation before. Before that, we hadn't had theatres in England. since the Roman times. That's over a thousand years because Christianity said, no, you can't do, no, you can't talk about that. No, no, no revenge plays. No, it's all going to be about religion for a thousand years.

And then, and then it got better. So, yeah, that's what I think I bring to the hammer table, all this strange training, accidental training. You know, with no one saying, now I'll read this from a book. I've just sort of worked it out slowly. Can I ask a question about, you mentioned Monty Python, and we were very lucky because it was on public television in America. and my parents had watched it in college,

and then it was sort of always running. And as we sort of became interested in comedy and we were watching Saturday Night Live, we were watching it. And we loved it, but we knew it was a thing that had been on, you know, it was a repeat of a thing that had already happened. What was that phenomenon like when that show started? How old were you, and how were you watching it?

Was it something you watched at boarding school with other boarding school kids? And obviously it was seismic. Yeah, it was seismic. There was a radio show that proceeded it called The Goon show. Peter Sellers, a guy called Spike Milligan, and they did stuff that all the pythons watched. So the idea was it surreal, didn't have ends,

went off in tangents, did weird things. They don't watch that, and they started doing it when it's at 69. So I'm not watching it at 69. Even when it finishes in 73, I'm still too young, and I'm at boarding school, and they don't let you watch television, the ones I was at. And Dad started giving me Goons tapes, so I'm getting surreal comedy coming into my brain through these tapes,

because it's full, you could have a tape recorder, and you could listen to those. And Dad would record them when he was working out in the Middle East, and because they had radio for Europeans, and here's the Guncho from Radio Dubai. So that's the bizarre things I first learned on. And then a friend of my set mother, she said, here's a tape of the Pythons live at Drury Lane in this big theater. They played there, which had been a real big rock star. a rival they'd done it they'd done all the tv series then they did drury lane and all these people from bands started turning up and they go wow we're a big hit um and that tape i listened to

loads and loads on that and then i got holy grail i got an audio cassette of that and i started listening to that and i started repeating it memorizing it and repeating stuff and then i realized i needed to see i so i didn't actually see the tv series until later and then i thought i think i get the films and the cassettes of the films really early on. So I just started inhaling it matching time handkerchief. Got a cassette of that, which is a bit weird because it is actually three different

sides of a two-sided record because they mixed spooling on one side. And so I just was inhaling these things and thinking, these are my people. These are my gods. And I need to do this stuff. So that's how that came through. But I was a little bit behind the loop on it.

But because of audio cassettes and repeats and things, I could just listen to it my own time. And it was again and again, a bit like a mantra, a bit like I found my religion. Well, it is true that I think all of us are lucky to have known early on what it was we wanted to do. I think people in a lot of places are going to be lucky to see you soon. Australia, I know you're going to do your show. You mentioned Philadelphia, Boston, D.C. are all coming up.

And Tampa's coming up as well. Yeah, so those are all coming up. I'm not sure when this is going out. Hopefully it's going on sooner rather than later. But, yes. Yeah, yeah, we'll get you out next week. But before we let you go, Josh has to ask you our speed round question. I also just quickly on the hamlet because it is, you know, as you've said and you're not wrong, Shakespeare can be intimidating, but it is an adapted, I don't, I mean, truncated is the wrong word, but it is.

Well, no, it is that's abridged. I mean, because the point is, there were three versions, and he never signed off on any of them and said this is the definitive one. So you have to make your own mind up on how you do. do it. The four and a half hour version, I don't believe they were performing that back then. I think he added it saying, oh, you want the director's cut of this play? So somebody printed it, apparently, without his permission. And they kept doing this. And they think, well, why didn't he just print his own? Ben Johnson got all these things printed. Anyway, so you have to go into those plays.

And the first quarter, second quarter, and first failure, and choose what you want. And that's what my brother did with his academic writing and saying, that's no good. We're going to keep this. This is weird. That's strange. He repeats himself there, so we're not doing that. And we're doing that. So we all, three of us, my director, Selena Cadell, we chose it. So that's how we did. So it is a two-hour production, but most productions should be less than the four-and-a-half-hour, endless version, because I don't think that's the right version to do.

Yeah. So just if you're thinking about going to see it, it is accessible, and it is fully Shakespearean as well. And it is visceral, all the beauty of the poetry. But if you're a fan of Shakespeare, I think you like it. If you're not a fan of Shakespeare, I think you'll also like it, because people walk out going, I get it now, I get it now, because we've made it into a play. The story is a real person. You know, if you know Am Hamnet, the idea that he wrote it all about his son, it isn't about his son. It's about Saxo Grammaticus was the historian in Denmark who wrote about this guy,

Amluth, who was from Jutland, who came to England and fought a battle and married a woman and went back and fought her, and his uncle killed his father. And so that was a legendary story, not a myth story, but a legendary, so it could well have been true or elements of truth in it. So that story turned into Hamlet. And he did have a son called Hamlet, but that's a different thing and full of great imagination. But this is Hamlet and we made it work. And so that's why it's sold 65,000 tickets down. It's just going on and on and on.

I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to go on forever around the world. Yes, Australia, New Zealand, beckon. All right. Here we go. Speed round questions, Susie. You can only pick one of these. Is your ideal vacation relaxing?

adventurous or educational? Well, I'd say educational. What is your favorite means of transportation? Cube in London. All right. If you could take a vacation with any family, alive or dead, real or fictional, other than your own family,

what family would you like to take a vacation with? Family. The Flintstones. Yeah, lovely. If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one member of your family, who would it be? Well, it would be with my brother. Lovely. It's cool. We're 50% the same, 50% totally different. Yeah. Perfect.

What would be your dream destination for a family vacation? A desert island with a lot of education. What is your hometown? What do you consider your hometown? hometown is probably London or Los Angeles or New York. Well, London, if you had to get more families to come visit London, if you were in charge of sort of getting that, how would you tell them to come? What would you recommend? London has everything. Don't worry about the weather so much, but we do just have everything.

We have politics. We have sports. We have arts and entertainments. We have filmmaking. It just has everything. So if you're excited by anything in life, then go to London because it has it all. And then Seth has our final questions. First of all, I will say one of the greatest things, because I just went back to London for the first time in 10 years and remember that I saw you perform in Brixton in maybe 1999, 2000.

Big Room, Bixen Academy? Oh, wow, yeah, yeah. One of the great live performances, so I've ever seen. Beautiful. All right, my last question is, Susie. Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? I have been to Grand Canyon. And was it worth it?

Yes. Once you're there, you go, oh, there it is. It was worth it particularly because we flew over, I think it's Lake Las Vegas. And there was a wild Mustang mother and father and a baby fall drinking from the lake. And he thought, wow, that is real. that is real. No one's set that up. They're just three of them in the middle of the day,

drinking from the lake. I thought, how beautiful it is that? So that made it for me. I feel like for as big as that canyon is, you could have gotten that deer drinking from a lake somewhere else. It was a horse. It was a horse. Wild Mustang.

Introduced by the conquistadores, you know? Oh, there you go. Oh, my God. Thank you so much. Always a joy to see you, Susie. Really appreciate it. Great to talk to you guys. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Let me tell you about Susie. Grew up and I'd in witches in Yambinously. Six years old to boarding school right after playing football. Criding till she got beat.

And then was done with it. Cried until she got beat. Those tears stopped running. Cried until she got beat. Later she'd she. She caught her tongue. Directed the bullshit show. So fighting in the streets.

Performing in the streets. Unicycles So fighting in the streets Went solo We're floating in And a crush fit Soar fighting in the streets Doing hit