Enlarge imageBy Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Cross-dressing comic Eddie Izzard plays it straight, at least in terms of his wardrobe, as head of a family of con artists out to steal the American dream in a new TV drama, "The Riches."
The show marks the first major foray into U.S. television for Izzard, 45, the self-described "executive transvestite" who made his name performing stand-up routines dressed in heels, makeup and women’s clothes.
While there is nothing ambivalent about Izzard’s gender identity on the FX cable network series that debuts on Monday, his character is anything but straight and narrow.
He and fellow British performer Minnie Driver co-star as Wayne and Dahlia Malloy, a married couple who belong to a clan of nomadic grifters of Irish descent in rural Louisiana called the Travellers.
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In the biggest scam they have ever pulled, the Malloys and their three kids break from the Travellers, go on the run with a big chunk of the clan’s treasury and seek to blend into a gated, suburban community by masquerading as another family.
The show’s title, "The Riches," comes from a well-heeled couple, Douglas and Cherien Rich, who die in a car accident during the Malloys’ getaway, and whose identity, possessions and house the Malloys adopt.
That sets the stage for a new life that will prove the ultimate test of their talents as scam artists and their very sense of identity.
CROSS-DRESSING 10-YEAR-OLD
Wayne, a fast talker with little education and his hot-tempered, drug-addicted wife must struggle to assume their new roles as lawyer and homemaker while trying to avoid arousing suspicions.
They face the ever-present danger of detection by vengeful members of their former extended family of Travellers -- an actual underground subculture in the rural American South whose members number in the thousands.
In a twist on the theme of identity, the Malloy’s younger son, Sam, is depicted as a 10-year-old boy with a penchant for dressing in girls’ clothes.
It’s a twist that Izzard and the producers insist was decided before he joined the cast, but he has brought his own real-life experience as a heterosexual transvestite to help shape the role.
"I’m basically playing my dad’s reaction to anything that I would have done if I were Sam, and what I would have wanted to wear when I was that kid at that age," Izzard told reporters.
The show’s strangers-in-a-strange-land premise borrows from early shows like "The Beverly Hillbillies" to more recent offerings like Mafia saga "The Sopranos" and the polygamist family drama "Big Love."
"I wanted to write a show about a family who pretends to be someone who they’re not. I always felt that’s sort of what I was doing in my own life," the show’s creator, Russian-born playwright Dmitry Lipkin, told a recent gathering of TV critics.
Lipkin moved to Louisiana at age 10, without knowing a word of English, and said he still finds America "the most upwardly and the most downwardly mobile country in the world.
"The show is kind of an extreme example of that," he said.
For Izzard, an executive producer on the show, the American dream represents "the place where people came from monarchy systems and aristocracy systems to go and make a lot of money or to practice religion and be really weird."
