Interview: Alan Cumming

Stripped Bare

The Sunday Times, February 26, 2006

He’’s just finished directing himself in an art-house horror, soon to star on Broadway and happy in love.— Alan Cumming is feeling comfortable in his own skin as never before, writes Kenny Farquharson

Alan Cumming drops his fork in his pecorino and scallion omelette and succumbs to a huge giggle. He is taking a late breakfast in New York’s Paramount hotel, a lip-glossed showbiz haunt on West 46th Street, just the length of a red carpet away from Times Square. The hotel has a glamorous sweeping staircase that would bring out the inner showgirl in the Rev Ian Paisley.

Cumming is so famous in this town, the table is booked under a pseudonym — today he is “Bertram Moody”. He knows a pleasing day lies ahead. Later he will view the final cut of Suffering Man’s Charity, an art-house horror movie he has directed, and in which he takes the lead role. Then he is due at rehearsals for the most eagerly awaited Broadway show of the year, The Threepenny Opera, which opens next month with Cumming as the main box-office draw.

Cumming’s giggle is not at some wicked celebrity gossip or some luvvie bitching, although he excels at both. No, on his mind this morning, providing unexpected insights into the life choices of a 41-year-old “pansexual” actor in New York, is the memory of his granny, who died in Inverness last year.

“One of the last times I saw her was at my uncle’s birthday party,” he says, with a wistful note in his voice. “I had funny hair, dyed blonde, and he said, ‘What have you got this crazy hair for, Alan?’ And she interrupted and said, ‘Well I like it. And if I was young again I’d be a freak too.’ I was, like — right on, Granny!

“I really loved her, and I feel that I think the same way as her. Her spirit — and I think it’s my spirit too — is very much this thing of enjoying life, and not sitting on the outskirts looking at it. To just go for it.”

And just going for it is what he seems to do best. The evening before we meet, Cumming had appeared on television in an episode of The L Word, a hit lesbian drama. After the show, he went with his boyfriend, a storyboard artist called Grant Shaffer, for a nightcap at a bar near their East Village apartment. And it turned out it was lesbian night.

“It was the worst place I could have gone when I’m doing sex with a lesbian on TV. It was crazy,” chuckles Cumming. Worst and best. The women were evidently delighted with his small screen performance and the night rapidly descended into a session on mojito cocktails. “Now I’m a lesbian icon as well,” he laughs. “I’m covering all the bases.”

So how does being a lesbian icon differ from being a gay icon? “Well, maybe it’s just because the lesbians have newly warmed to me, but they are a bit more, er, touchy. They grab you more, certainly at close quarters last night.” He raises his eyebrows. “It’s weird.”

The Angus accent is still plain in Cumming’s voice, especially the way he says “weird” with two syllables.

The night has taken its toll. Cumming, it has to be said, is looking a little ragged. He is wearing jeans and a bright green sports zip-up top, having arrived at the hotel with a beanie hat pulled down low over his forehead. His cropped hair, his stubble and his complexion all have grey in them. He admits that for the first time in his life he is looking his age, and that he finds this rather galling. But there is still a boyish lightness in his manner and mischief in his brown eyes.

Living in London and then New York, Cumming has led a life of sexual and pharmacological excess, fuelled by vodka martinis, crystal meth and lust for life. All this was thinly disguised in his 2004 novel, Tommy’s Tale, described by the tabloids as “frank, filthy and fun” — a description that accurately fitted the author as much as the book.

Yet lately, many of the things that have been a frantic blur in his life for the past decade have been swimming into focus.

The death of his granny has, says Cumming, helped him to identify what he truly wants most out of life.

For Cumming, this means coming to terms as honestly as he can with what it means to be a man in his early forties in his situation. What it means to be in love like never before. What it means to accept “the animal thing” about men and sex. What it means to confront the demons from his childhood. And what it means to want to be a father to a child.

Cumming has always been fascinated with the sexual state of being a man. Not a bisexual man, he stresses, or a heterosexual man or a gay man. Just a man.

“It’s the whole animal thing. Whatever your proclivity is, as a man you think about it a lot.

“I don’t know why, but a lot of my work has been . . . ” he adopts a lascivious drawl, “of a sexual nature. Last night on The L Word, for example. Or in The Threepenny Opera, where I’m basically a sex addict. I often play people who are ruled by it, or it’s very upfront in their nature.”

In America, it’s interesting to be at ease with your own sexuality.

“For me,” he says, “being a man is about being man enough to accept these things about yourself that are a bit primal, and making your life fit around them in a way that’s more pleasant for all.”

Part of that, he acknowledges, is about finding the right partner. Cumming says he has a fine collection of exes. In his teens he had relationships with men, but when he was 21 he married Hilary Lyon, whom he had met at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

When Cumming was lauded for his Hamlet on the London stage, it brought him awards and fame, but also a nervous breakdown and the end of his marriage. Later he and the actress Saffron Burrows had a two-year relationship after meeting on the set of Circle of Friends. A six-year relationship with Nick Philippou, a theatre director, ended in 2003.

“I’ve had a lot of crazy things happen in my life and it’s taken me a long time to find someone who can handle me, and not just that way,” he gives an arch look, “but being able to handle ‘Alan Cumming’.” He makes those little inverted commas with his fingers. “Also someone who thinks the way I do and is comfortable with all the things I like in life.”

That someone appears to be Shaffer.

Their relationship, he says, already feels as strong as a good marriage. “We live together. We have dogs. We are very much in love and it’s a strong partnership . . . ” He seems about to detail the ways in which it is unlike a conventional marriage, perhaps the “man as an animal” thing again, then thinks better of it.

“I do feel like I’m married. It’s really strong and great, and I’ve never been happier, really, in lots of ways. This is the first time I’ve been able to say this: I actually can’t foresee anything that could happen to us that would be insurmountable to us. Unless one of us fell in love with someone else and wanted to live with them, and that’s the risk you always take.”

All this, plus a routine that allows him more time at home in New York, has made it easier for Cumming to look with a clearer eye at his long-held ambition to have a child. “It’s something we both want to do, Grant and I,” he says. When he thinks about having a child, I ask him, does he automatically think of a boy or a girl?

“I don’t actually think either,” he says.

Really? A person of some kind must come into mind?

“I suppose a wee boy then. A wee boy, now you’ve said that. Yeah.”

A couple upstairs from his apartment have adopted a Russian boy, and he thinks it would be good to adopt a child from another country. So, he wouldn’t take the test-tube approach? Cumming looks horrified.

“No! Not that thing of shagging your friend or something. I find all that so pitted with disaster. Oh Christ! Or someone has your baby and you wrench it from their arms and run off with it? Horrible! I understand why people do it, but there are so many kids in the world [that] need to be adopted.”

Cumming has had cause to ponder what it means to be a good father. He grew up near Carnoustie in a house next to a sawmill, five miles from the nearest bus stop. It was a solitary life that felt detached from the rest of the world. His brother was five years older than him, so the young Alan would often play alone in the forest, inventing dramas for himself.

Early in the mornings, before travelling to Carnoustie High school, his forester father would force the boys both to do heavy work cutting branches and splitting logs. When Cumming was not strong enough to finish a task, he says that his father would hit him. He moved away from home as quickly as he could, getting a job as a subeditor on a DC Thomson pop magazine in Dundee.

A few years ago Cumming and his brother confronted their father about these memories, and Cumming and his father have not been in touch since. Clearly it has been a shadow over his life, and a trigger for much therapy. But now, remarkably, Cumming has found his own novel way of mastering it.

“I do something now that I never used to do,” he says, “I have a house in the country, upstate in the Catskill mountains. And I go there and just chill out, and that has been an amazing thing. My brother [Tom] came and he said, ‘My God, you have bought your childhood!’ The terrain is very similar to where we grew up, in a forest.”

There, Cumming chops logs and wields a chainsaw, just as his father forced him to do as a child. I suggest that many people with the same early experience would do anything they could to avoid echoes of it. So why has he embraced it?

“I’ve travelled away far from where I’m from,” he says haltingly, as if working it out for himself. “And I realise I’ve always been drawn to the forest and wandering the outdoors. Nature things, flowers and the seasons. I love just standing there under the stars. And it’s from how I grew up.

“Were I to sit in the psychiatrist’s chair I would probably say that I am in control of that situation now. I can have the experience of things I liked about doing that, of hard work. But it’s mine. I’m not under the thrall of someone who’s scary.

“I just stumbled along for a long time. I’m more content now, I feel I’ve got my life together. I don’t mean it was a big mess or anything. But I’ve finally got my life in all sorts of areas in a way that makes me happy.”

None of this means, however, that Cumming has lost his desire to provoke, even to shock. The latest manifestation of this tendency is his range of toiletries, led by a perfume called Cumming: The Fragrance. This was launched in America last year with a photograph of a naked Cumming copying the famous Sophie Dahl pose in the advert for Opium. So far turnover has exceeded $1m, according to The New York Times.

The latest additions to the range are a soap, named Cumming in a Bar, and a body lotion, inevitably called Cumming All Over. With a sly giggle he tells me some of the product concepts that had to be rejected on grounds of taste. One was a mouthwash. There are tentative plans for a range of condoms.

A new cinema advert for the range is a merciless send-up of soft-focus perfume ads, culminating in a bedroom-eyed Alan whispering to camera: “I’m Cumming.” It was, he says, “such a nutty thing to do. If you get it, that’s great. It’s such fun to subvert the whole thing. Sometimes the choices I make in my work reflect that.”

Cumming is undoubtedly the busiest Scot in Hollywood. One movie database records that in 2005 nine separate film projects were released that involved him. He is drawn to adventure blockbusters — such as Spy Kids and X-Men 2 — and edgy low-budget movies where he invariably plays someone deranged. In Suffering Man’s Charity, he ends up covered in blood after a particularly gory torture scene.

He has appeared in his fair share of stinkers. There was the Flintstones film, Viva Rock Vegas and the pitiful remake of Get Carter. A few weeks ago he was nominated in the Razzies — the anti-Oscars — for his acting in Son of the Mask. Cumming insists this doesn’t bother him. “I just do the things I like. In terms of mainstream Hollywood films they don’t really write lead roles for skinny, European types who are a bit weird.”

The new Broadway show takes a typically Brechtian approach, with Cumming talking directly to the audience. It echoes the role that made him a star in America and the toast of New York in 1998: his Tony-award winning performance as the MC in Cabaret. Expectations are high, but so are nerves, especially as Brecht is a very brave proposition for middle-of-the-road Broadway.

Cumming’s Scottishness, he believes, is crucial to the way he approaches this kind of role. “The fourth wall [the space separating an audience from the action of a theatrical performance, traditionally conceived of as an imaginary wall] has sort of passed us by in Scotland, and I think that’s really good. You can really connect emotionally with an audience. I tell people here about Johnny Beattie.” He breaks into a 1950s Scottish accent and sings: “Welcome to the ceilidh, come in, come in, come in!”

Cumming pauses, then stares out of the Paramount window to the chill New York outside.

He is thinking again of his granny, and of a curious thing he did when she died, in a kind of tribute to her.

“The day after the funeral in Inverness, after all this crazy family gossip, my brother and I decided we would go across the bridge where we always used to go with her. It’s a footbridge, suspended over the river, and it was always wobbly.

“Grant and I went across. And at first I thought, no, it’s not as bouncy as I remember. But in the middle it was really bouncy! He was laughing, and I was bouncing around and laughing and thinking about my granny . . . ”

He giggles, shakes his head and goes quiet again, stopped short by the sight of himself, boy and man, testing his nerve on a swaying bridge, seeing how high he can bounce.