Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Over a thirty-year career, Alan Cumming has been a stage star, a cabaret performer, a memorist, a night-club owner, and a political activist. Animating many of these endeavors are his talents as a raconteur and an m.c., perhaps most famously in his Tony-winning role in “Cabaret” on Broadway, a show he starred in twice. This past Monday night, Cumming brought the latest of his numerous one-man shows, “Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age,” to Studio 54, in Manhattan. Between torch numbers—including Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” and “Mein Herr” from “Cabaret”—he talked about the time he drank a handle of liquor that Florence Henderson sneaked into Carol Channing’s ninety-fifth-birthday party. (Henderson died a few months later, Cumming said, but he has not forgotten her advice: “You never take chances with vodka.”) He talked about how he and his fellow-Scotsman Sean Connery developed pet names for each other (Connery was King, Cumming was Prince), and about the night when his “Battle of the Sexes” co-star Emma Stone brought the tennis legend Billie Jean King and Paul McCartney to Club Cumming, a cozy boitê and queer performance space that Cumming opened in the East Village, in 2017. “It sounds like a joke,” he said. “Emma Stone, Billie Jean King, and Paul McCartney walk into a bar!”
Cumming packed similar stories into his second memoir, “Baggage,” from 2021, which charts his varied adventures in Hollywood. His highly eclectic film and television résumé includes everything from early breakout roles, such as a needy suitor in “Emma” and a recovering social reject in “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” to parts in franchises like “Spy Kids” and “X2.” He donned a tailored suit to play the campaign manager Eli Gold on a hundred and twenty-one episodes of “The Good Wife” on CBS; though he is queer and married to his partner, Grant Shaffer, he told the crowd at Studio 54, “I can butch up when I have to!” Most recently, though, he made a flamboyant foray into reality TV as the host of Peacock’s wildly popular competition show “The Traitors,” in which a group of scheming reality stars play a game of Mafia in a Scottish castle while Cumming presides in a series of plaid kilts and bejewelled capes. Season 2—whose finale aired last week—included betrayals, ultimatums, and several contestant-eliminating “murders” under cover of night. As Cumming aptly puts it, “It’s called ‘The Traitors,’ bitch!”
During a pair of recent interviews (one at a café not far from his apartment in the East Village, the other on Zoom), Cumming spoke often about the value he places on joy and uninhibited fun, pleasures that for him have been hard-won. In his first memoir, the best-selling “Not My Father’s Son” from 2014, Cumming writes frankly about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father as a child in Aberfeldy. These days, he told me, his goal is to hold back nothing and to inspire others to do the same. On Zoom, I inquired about a cute painting of two dogs hanging on the wall behind Cumming in his home. “Oh, that’s a portrait of my dogs, Jerry and Lala,” he said. “It’s made by this man named Brent Ray Fraser, who paints with his penis.” He laughed, then added, “I think it’s a pretty good likeness.”
Hi! I see that you’re searching around for something in your pockets.
Yes! I’m looking for my vitamins. I take so many vitamins now. Thousands. Obviously, I’m into the subject of aging right now.
Yes, you’ve been touring your show about getting older for a while now. How have you been able to find the humor in it?
Well, one of the things that I think is hilarious about aging is that your lips disappear.
You haven’t gone for the fillers yet?
No! I always joke that I’m the only person on American television who has not had Botox. I look at pictures of my lips from thirty years ago, and I think, Oh, my God. I was a Kardashian. And now . . . I’ve gone a little Kenneth Branagh.
Anyways, I kept thinking about how people were reacting to me, and I suddenly felt, like, Oh, I’m actually quite old, and I hadn’t noticed. Obviously, I’m much older than I feel. Why should you live to any sort of regulation with that? Who are these people, the people with the clipboards and white coats and tight sphincters, who get to decide? It’s become a whole thing where people around me are always saying, “Oh, you know, Alan, you’ve got so much more energy than us. I can’t go out. I’m too old for that, I’ve got kids, blah-blah.” Those simple excuses. I was fascinated by all of that, so I made a show out of it. The main message is: don’t let other people dictate to you how to live your life. And keep being curious.
It really keeps you young, staying interested.
Exactly. I joke in the show about how as you get older you’ve got to get younger agents and younger friends, and that I have, maybe, a rather extreme method of insuring I’ve always got younger friends—and also a venue in which to party with them. I bought my own bar.
Your bar is such a scene. I went there recently, and I felt like the average age of the crowd was twenty-two.
They are all so young! I mean, I go there and it’s like Gandhi being brought to the stage. There’s gay gasps when I show up. We’re now doing this live-model life-drawing class, and Moleskine is sponsoring it. Apparently, Martha Stewart said she’d be a model for it. That’s the rumor.
Didn’t you see Martha Stewart fall over at a party once?
Oh, yes! It was at Tina Brown’s house. This was just weeks after 9/11. It was a book party for Simon Schama. And after dinner Martha was outside, and she just . . . went over a hedge. I love Martha. Every time I see her, she’s such a good sport. Once, at the Met Ball, I had a big pheasant feather in my hat, and I turned around and poked her in the eye.
Your hats are epic, and I feel like fashion is swirling around you right now because of “The Traitors.” Everybody’s obsessed with your wardrobe for the show.
The stylist is a really nice guy called Sam Spector. When we thought about the look for it, I said, “Oh, I should be a dandy Scottish laird.” A lot of the clothes in the first season were mine. I have a lot of tartan suits and kilts, so the base things were my own, but he then put on all of these sashes and berets and all the accoutrements. Then this season it was more not my own clothes. It was more about attaching what I was wearing to the themes of the missions. We’ve already started planning a few looks for the next season. There’s joy in it, and that’s what I think people are really responding to. Most fashion today is really joyless. Even the models look like they’re annoyed.
I recently went to see my friend, the performer Alok Vaid-Menon’s show, and they have this great bit about how the whole wave of transphobia is about how people are angry and confused by the joy that trans people have, that they’re able to embrace who they really are, and they risk their lives to do it. People cannot understand that concept of having that much joy in expression. And in a mild way I think that is what I’m doing in “The Traitors.”
How did you get involved with “The Traitors”? Was there part of you that didn’t want to host a reality show?
I mean, I was curious about why the producers asked me to do it, because it wasn’t my bag at all. But, when I met with them, I realized why they wanted me to do it. It wasn’t just, “Hello, I’m Alan Cumming!” I was to be a character, like a James Bond villain, and to camp it up.
It is very camp. I mean, you led a fake funeral march wearing a Victorian mourning outfit.
Yes. Believe me, I am aware. I’ve always said that this is the only time that an American version of a show is more camp than the British version, and I think that’s largely due to me.
The show is wildly popular. You just got picked up for a third season.
I can’t quite believe it. Normally, nobody calls me when I’m on the telly anymore. There’s also a new show I’ve got in Britain, called “Alan Cumming’s Paradise Homes.” It’s such a jammy job—I go around the world looking at people’s dream homes that they’ve built and just sniff around their closets. And only my mom is watching that. But with “The Traitors” my phone, my Insta D.M.s, everything went nuts.
The show is set in an enormous Scottish castle. Did you have a romantic feeling about castles when you were growing up? Did you know anyone who had one?
Oh, they’re just everywhere. I mean, I grew up on a country estate. It wasn’t a castle, but we had these gates that had been locked since blah-blah went off to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. But the big house on the estate had been blown up, because of the death duty (inheritance tax). There was a stable, and the chapel was still there, and you could see where the gardens and the foundations were, but they were covered in grass. There’s a book called “Scotland’s Lost Houses” that talks about this. It was too expensive for all these families to pay death duties, and that was the end of an era for all the poshy posh. I think that’s why the National Trust for Scotland was set up, because we were losing so many beautiful houses.
When friends come to stay with me in Scotland, and they go, “Oooh, a castle!” I think, If it were a drinking game, you’d be smashed in two minutes if you kept doing that.
What is the Cumming-clan tartan like?
Well, there are a couple. The Hunting Cumming tartan is brownish. It’s really nice. I like my tartan. Here’s a funny story: When I got my O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire), which I’ve since given back, I got a kilt suit made. I’ve got this friend called Howie who has a business in Scotland called 21st Century Kilts. He made me a kilt suit in a Hunting Cumming tartan. I tried it on the night before, and I was jet-lagged, because I had just come from Australia. So when my friend said, “Oh, what kind of tartan is that?” I said, “Cunting Humming,” instead of Hunting Cumming. So all I could think about when I went to Buckingham Palace was that I was going to say the C-word to Princess Anne. I thought she wouldn’t like that. All the time I was waiting in the line to get my O.B.E., I was just going, “Hunting Cumming. Hunting Cumming. Hunting Cumming.” But she didn’t ask.
Can we discuss why you relinquished your O.B.E.?
I announced it on my birthday last year. I put out a statement, and was very clear how grateful I was for it, and what it meant to get it at the time, because I got it for my L.G.B.T. activism. But I gave it up for two reasons. The main one was that after the Queen died, at the end of an era like that, you reassess things. I mean, it’s called Officer of the Order of the British Empire. I think if they called it something else, it’d be much easier to keep. But I was an officer of a thing that I find incredibly toxic, and that has caused so much damage and death and destruction and pillage. Also, when I got it, we didn’t have marriage equality here [in the U.S.], and it really caused a stir in this country that another government was looking at [L.G.B.T. rights] and praising me for that. It was great P.R. for that fight. But now it doesn’t do that anymore, and I just felt hypocritical. I did find out that it’s quite difficult to find out where to send it back.
I take it you see yourself living in the United States for the long haul.
I see New York as my home. But over the years I’ve gotten more connected to Scotland. In my new house there, we’ve inherited some sheep. I mean, not inherited, but I let the farmer up the road use my land to graze the big ones before they get sent out to local farms to shag senseless. I’m nourishing studs.
I’ve always felt like New York’s not really America. I do wonder when the time will come when I feel too uncomfortable to live here, to be queer and to be also an immigrant. Being queer in any way is going to get more and more difficult. I’m going to Texas tomorrow with my show. When I go out on the road like that, it’s so heartening, because you go to these places where the government or the legislature is doing such heinous things—just awful, angry stuff. But not everyone’s like that.
When you go out on the road, do you ever feel scared?
No. For my last show, “Legal Immigrant,” I went to places like Arizona and San Antonio, and it was great. After every song I would say, “Oh, that was written by blah-blah. He was a Hungarian American.” I would remind people that if you’re anti-immigration, you’re anti-American. It’s just racism by another name. The scariest place I went with that show was West Palm Beach. I lost control there of the audience. That’s the only time that happened, and, ironically, within spitting distance of Mar-a-Lago. They thought, Oh, it’s the guy off the telly! Then I started saying all this challenging stuff to them. One man yelled, “Go back to where you came from!” And I said, “Where, New York?” Another man went, “Get on with the show!” And I went, “This is the show. You’re in it!” So that was the scariest. Rich, entitled people being challenged.
How did you get into doing solo cabaret performances?
The first solo cabaret show I did was called “I Bought a Blue Car Today” for the American Songbook series for PBS, in 2009. So I’ve been at it for fifteen years. I really enjoy this kind of performance, because you get your theatre fix, and you get such an incredible connection with the audience. And it is terrifying because there’s no veil between you and them. You have to sing a song as you. When I was preparing for the PBS performance at Lincoln Center, my musical director was also doing something in Australia, and so they invited me to come sing there, too. So my first two cabaret dates, never having done it before, were Lincoln Center and the Sydney Opera House.
Oh, yeah, those little hole-in-the-wall venues. Did you have anybody that you’ve ever consulted about how to do a cabaret? Any of your heroes?
Well, Liza Minnelli. Liza was coming to Glasgow to do a concert, and she’d never done a concert in Scotland before. So I called her up, because we were chums. We made a record together, and then we just stayed friends. I still have a hilarious picture of us on Fire Island where she’s just grabbed my balls. Anyways, I went to have dinner with her, and said I’d just been asked by Lincoln Center to do a show, but I was scared. It’s so different from being an actor, so much more vulnerable. Liza gave me some really great tips. She said to think of a song as like a play, and you’re a character in that play. So there’s a beginning, the character’s introduced, and you have some conflict. There’s an arc. It’s actually revolutionary. It’s changed how I think about singing.
Barbra Streisand does it the same way.
Does she? I’m listening to her audiobook now.
Yes, she said she thinks about three-act structure when she sings.
Yes, exactly. Liza said to me, “When I get a new song, I just think, Who is this woman? What kind of fridge magnets does she have?” And I was, like, “Well, that seems a little detailed . . . not sure we need to know about the magnets.” But I have learned from her that you need not worry about being imperfect. And, actually, your imperfection is what makes people like you.
Do you think you’ll keep doing cabarets throughout your life?
I’m developing a new one now.
What’s the theme? Can you say?
It’s called “Uncut.” The theme is about how being an outsider and being perceived as different is hard, but, actually, it gives you such a good perspective on life. And it’s also about having foreskin. So “uncut” means many things: undiluted, complete, uncensored. When I first came to America, as a young man with a healthy sexual appetite, and showed my penis, people were, like, “What is—Oh, my God! What is that? What do you do with that?” Now, as an older man, who’s not had any plastic surgery, I’m feeling the same thing as I felt with my foreskin. I am unhacked, and I feel a bit of a freak. But it’s so interesting that if you stay intact and authentic, which, in many ways, I’ve always thought is a great thing, there are times when people think you’re crazy for doing it. And so you feel like the odd man out, even though you’re doing the thing we’re all supposed to be doing.
But is there something that you like about that tension?
Yes. I feel like an outsider here. I feel like an outsider in Scotland. I feel like it’s a place I’m used to. It makes you stand back and see things in a way that you otherwise couldn’t.
You’ve discussed your childhood so much in your memoirs, but I want to know at what point you decided that acting was going to be the best way to express yourself? When did you become cognizant of it as a career? I know you attended the Scottish Royal Academy of Music and Drama after high school.
I was pretty young. I mean, I connected acting to using my imagination, and I would play when I was a little boy. It was more than performance, initially. Because I lived in such a remote place, I would play on my own, and make up characters and things. And then when I was at school and started to do plays, it was literally the first thing anyone had told me I was any good at. So I just stuck with it. I didn’t realize you could be an actor. I knew that obviously there were actors in the world, but I didn’t realize it was in my possibilities until there was a girl who had been at my school who went to the academy. So it was pretty simple: it was the only thing I was good at, and I could tell that other people weren’t as good at it as me. I had no Plan B. If I hadn’t gone to drama school, I don’t know what I would have done.
I really try to keep it simple with acting. I don’t really like all those processes. I always say I’m not a cheese. I have no process.
Meaning that you feel more instinctual about how you approach work?
I always say that actors used to be called “the players.” And I think that’s the secret. It should be like kids playing. So that’s what I always stick to.
I want to ask about Scottish drama school. Did it try to lead you down a traditionalist path? I know that the British and Scottish acting training systems tend to be highly focussed on classical theatre.
I talk about this in “Baggage,” but it was very much that way when I went to drama school, in 1982, when I was seventeen. I was so young, such a baby, and I got there at a time when all our teachers were still these former grand actors from the fifties and sixties who had been in repertory theatre. So I had a completely outdated and soon-to-be antique view of acting. Now I’m actually glad I had that, and I love talking about that world, because it’s all gone. But it was frustrating, then, to go out into the world as an actor and never have played anyone Scottish or even talked in my own voice as a character.
Yes, you talk in your memoir about how, in drama school, they trained you to drop your Scottish accent to speak in Received Pronunciation, or R.P., which is essentially most of the voices you hear on “The Crown.”
When I started doing Shakespeare, everyone did it in this Englishy accent, which I thought was such a shame. It is so stupid, actually, because I’ve since done “Macbeth” and played Romeo in my own Scottish accent, and it works really well because it is so guttural, and it really helps the language. People have a tendency to make Shakespeare all singsongy, at the cost of it being understood. And I think, Why would you say something if you don’t want people to know what you’re saying?
But, yes, when I got to drama school, I had these voice classes and phonetics classes. And it was very much “you have to be able to do this, otherwise you’re doomed, because you’re Scottish, and nobody’s going to want to employ you unless you can pretend not to be.” Acting to me was talking in R.P. and swanning around a drawing room. That was drummed into you. So I became very good at accents.
Early on, did you feel you had designs on being a leading man? In the early nineties, you did “Hamlet” for the English Touring Theatre, and that production was a sensation in London. Were giant roles like that your dream when you left drama school? Because I also think of you as such a quirky team player, who is willing to take a smaller part if it means you get a chance to experiment.
Well, I’ve felt a variety of things about that. When I got out of drama school, I started working straight away in television and in the theatre. But I also did this comedy act with my friend Forbes [Masson] called “Victor & Barry,” which became so huge, so quickly. And I loved doing that just in the same way I really love doing my concerts now, for the connection with the audience. But at the time I was really, like, “Oh, my God, are we going to be sidelined doing this, and nobody will want us to be actors?” So, after a few years, I stopped.
Then I was doing lots of little short runs with various companies in Scotland, but what I really wanted was to be with a play for a long time and really develop trust. So I got into the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is theoretically exactly what should have happened to me. But I hated it. I thought it was awful. I didn’t really respect the things I was in. I gave them my best shot, of course, but I realized, Oh, this is the thing you thought would make you happy, and it hasn’t. So that was a little disillusioning. I guess that was when I started to think that I was going to have a more idiosyncratic path. Even when I eventually did “Hamlet,” it was kind of weird. I remember reading this thing in the press once, when they have a new Hamlet, they compare them to all the other ones. Next to my picture, there were three terms: “Mercurial, fast, cycling shorts.”
The first Hamlet to wear spandex!
Yes, I ripped off all the traditional things. I had on little boots and little shorts that went just above my knees, and a big, baggy, long-sleeve T-shirt. It was slightly emo-ish—though we didn’t have emo then.
How do you respond when people use the term “character actor” now, in relation to you? Do you find that diminishing?
I don’t know, I sort of do. I think, Well, isn’t every part a character? I don’t quite understand it. I guess it means not the handsome, leading man?
You are very handsome, though!
Thanks. I wasn’t fishing. I do think that when you are the lead person in a film, you’re at the center of it, and everything else happens to you. And, actually, it’s more fun being the other people. But a term like “character actor” doesn’t really mean anything to me, because I can go from playing a tiny little part in this film in Italy, just because I like it, and then to playing a big lead, always back and forward between things. I do think it’s nice to not have the responsibility all the time. It’s a lot of responsibility to be a lead, especially on a TV show, because usually you’re a producer, too, and I certainly feel I’ve got to make sure everyone has a good time at work.
It’s funny you should bring up being at the center of things, because I do think you have often gravitated to roles in which you are holding court, or are sitting at the center of an orbit. I’m thinking of your hosting duties on “The Traitors,” or your turn as the Emcee in “Cabaret,” where you get to set the mood for the whole show.
Well, I really think of the Emcee as someone off to the side. It’s a Brechtian thing. He is watching the show and then coming out to go, “Gosh, that was interesting!” You’re guiding people into what to think and how to feel. So then, of course, what happens is you kind of control them. You can control their emotions. In “Cabaret,” the Emcee makes everyone laugh, and he’s cute and sexy, but then it all starts to go horrible. And he goes, “Well, what’s your problem? You were laughing a minute ago.” And the audience realizes they’ve become complicit. I think the power to affect an audience is huge. I do enjoy being a bit of a Pied Piper.
I think one of my best skills is helping people to be uninhibited. In a way, that’s a form of manipulation, but it’s also because I love fun, and I think everybody should be able to let go. And I think American people, especially, are slightly ashamed of abandon, and I just think they need to be encouraged a wee bit.
You know, I was thinking about this idea of “being off to the side” while reading “Baggage,” because you clearly take so much joy in being an outsider while telling these insidery show-biz tales; you cast yourself as kind of a Virgil in the land of celebrity, helping people understand both its joys and its hypocrisies.
Well, I think that has to do with my Scottishness, which I think is about not letting anyone get away with anything that’s unjust or dishonest or not upfront. Also, because I didn’t come to America until I was thirty, I have a whole life that’s not about the celebrity circus that I am part of now. I think that gave me more perspective.
So you were able to be more of an “Alexis de Tocqueville in Hollywood” type.
Ha, that’s nice. I like that. Yes. I feel like I am not interested in being mean at all. I don’t name people I’ve slept with. But I am interested in conveying to people what my life is actually like, and to give a sort of “behind the smoke and mirrors” version of it. You know, when I wear clothes that are kind of nuts, people will say, “Oh, you can get away with it. I could never get away with it.” Like it’s some sort of crime. Or my other favorite thing people say is, “Oh, but you don’t care what people think.” I always think that’s funny, because I do care what people think. I still want to be my own man. But I think what they’re really saying is, “You’re bold,” because people are terrified to talk from the heart.
I feel that so much in politics, but in show biz as well. Everyone’s got this kind of mask of what they think they should say.
It’s like when they come to take your photo at a party, and they ask to take away your drink. I say, “No! I’m at a party. And guess what? I’m drinking!” What are we saying to people who read this magazine? That no celebrities have drinks at parties?
When you’ve had such scary things happen to you in your early life, those things don’t scare you so much. There’s just so much fear now. I just feel like everyone’s scared, not so much to speak out but of what people will think, or the backlash.
Have you ever gotten backlash for something you said that you felt like you couldn’t handle?
Not really. I guess giving back the O.B.E. Most people were saying, “Bravo,” but the ones who didn’t were vehement. And then recently, when I signed a letter for a ceasefire, people said I was antisemitic and pro-Hamas, but nothing overwhelming. Also, if I’m wrong about something, and I’ve changed my mind, I’ll definitely say it. I’m not afraid to back down from something if I feel I’ve got it wrong. But I don’t see what’s wrong with asking for a ceasefire.
Your character in “Cabaret,” which you played once in 1998, and again in 2014, has had so many different reactions over the years. When you first performed the role, it was seen as so transgressive. You dared to grab your crotch at the Tony Awards!
Well, I think when I did it first, it was the perfect confluence of me feeling happy and secure in my body and in my sexuality. And if you are having fun doing the thing that people are afraid of, it makes it even more scary. In 1998, everybody in this country was obsessed with closing down sexuality and heaping shame on sexuality in political life, such as the Clinton scandal. I was the opposite of that. It’s so funny that Monica [Lewinsky] and I are such friends now. I met her about a year or so later. But there was so much prurience everywhere you went. There was so much shame. “Oh, sex. Oh, a blow job. Shame, shame, shame!”
People would come to the theatre, and I was there having to be the antithesis of that. And my body was . . . it’s been really interesting for me, at certain times in my life, to have been objectified in that way. Because I wasn’t objectified in my twenties. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I started to have my body plastered across buses and billboards, and I was being thought of as sexy in that sort of skinny, butch, Weimery way. But then doing it again, in 2014, what I thought was great was that all the sexy stuff was less sensational. It was still fun, but it was more properly part of the story. The darkness of the story was allowed to come out more, because I think it was obfuscated the first time around by all the people being, like, “Oh, he’s kissing a boy.”
Though, of course, the timing of that revival was still fascinating, because you were doing a show about the end of an era of freedom, right before the 2016 election . . .
I know. As soon as it finished, practically, it was the time of Trump, and I said, “I wish we were still doing it.” But sadly there is always going to be a time that you feel the play is relevant and prescient, because there always have been these awful Draconian attempts to shut down people from speaking out, people telling the truth and people having joy, and people experimenting.
Forgive the clichéd question, but, when you look back on your career, what are you most proud to have done?
The other night I was in San Antonio, and I went out of the theatre to sign photographs and take pictures. There was a young trans man there who said to me, “I really appreciate what you do for speaking out for trans rights. As someone living in Texas, it’s scary right now. It’s just really good to know that someone like you is speaking out for me.” I know that sounds like a prearranged P.R. thing, but, honestly, that’s the answer. When people say they’ve been able to go and confront someone in their family about abuse because they read my book, or when people come up and say they are speaking out about things they feel are right, that is the thing I’m most proud of. There’s a lady in Israel who wrote to me and said she had a stillborn child, and she couldn’t talk about it until after reading “Not My Father’s Son.” She goes around now in Tel Aviv and sticks these stickers of me on lampposts that say “I have access to darkness, but I choose to stand in the light.” She puts them everywhere. Things like that are so much more meaningful to me than—
Having been in “Spy Kids”?
Yes. Although “Spy Kids” is one of those things that is kind of magical, because people come up to say I was a part of their childhood. It’s not, like, “Oh, you’re the famous guy.” They just sort of gasp, and that’s lovely as well. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
