NOT ACTING HIS AGE
YOUTH-OBSESSED CULTURE HAS NO RESPECT FOR ELDERS, ALAN CUMMING SAYS
Alan Cumming has woken up in his home in the Catskill Mountains in New York State. The visiting deer the actor calls Fiona and Fabio haven’t tiptoed into sight yet, but there’s a hummingbird at his window. His calm, however, has been disturbed by a furor that has broken out some 5,600 kilometres away.
In the U.K., commentators have been up in arms about the animated satire The Prince, in which eightyear-old Prince George is portrayed as a spoiled snob, the Queen drops F-bombs and Prince Philip is a sort of walking cadaver. Cumming, invested as a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2009, voices Prince George’s butler. (The show streams on HBO in the U.S., but is not yet available in Canada.)
Does Cumming think the Royal Family will see the funny side?
“I don’t know,” he says. “If they appreciate satire, they might ... It’s quite tender, actually — my character with George, it’s a really lovely relationship. It’s not as mean as people think.”
He says there’s “a kneejerk reaction” whenever you do something about the Royal Family, and his advice to those who have been upset by it is to “watch it.”
He never met Meghan
Markle during his years in U.S. television, he says, or Harry, but he admires them for “removing themselves from a situation which they found abusive, not just keeping their heads down and staying in ‘The Firm’ and being bullied, which they obviously were. I absolutely have sympathy for them.”
Cumming, who won an Olivier award in his 20s, played a Bond baddie in Goldeneye and performed a one-man Macbeth on Broadway, calls things as he sees them. He’s a warm presence, still boyish, with an impish laugh.
Other breaking news on this day includes the announcement that Jodie Whittaker will quit Doctor Who. Cumming’s name often crops up in lists of possible actors who could pilot the TARDIS (although he appeared in an episode in 2018 as James I). If they asked? “I would be tempted,” he admits, “I did talk to them about being Doctor Who when it first rebooted (in 2005). I had a long lunch with Russell T Davies. It never actually came off, obviously, but if you’re someone of my generation it’s sort of a boyhood fantasy.”
He’s a child of the 1960s and ’70s, 56 now, and a U.S. citizen since 2008, after growing up on a country estate on the east coast of Scotland, where his violent, abusive father was the head forester. He wrote about his childhood in the 2014 memoir Not My Father’s Son, and is still surprised, he says, by the galvanizing effect it has had on so many people to “deal with their abuse or issues in their life that they had been ashamed of.”
The followup, Baggage, due out in October, will tackle the idea that he has “triumphed.”
“This American thing, it’s all about ‘winning’ here,” Cumming says. “I wanted to address that. I haven’t won, I haven’t been cured — no one who has had trauma or abuse does. You just manage it. You have to acknowledge it’s still there and will come back and affect you.”
In his memoir, Cumming reveals how he had a breakdown in his 20s and suffered traumatic flashbacks to the violence and humiliation meted out by his father, such as the time he held him down and brutally sheared his head as if he were a farm animal.
He has, though, built a career with range: from an admired 1993 Hamlet (opposite his then-wife Hilary Lyon as Ophelia) to sitcom success in the BBC series The High Life, a Tony award-winning master of ceremonies in Cabaret on Broadway, Hollywood acclaim as the mutant Nightcrawler in X2: X-men United, and U.S. television gold as political consultant Eli Gold in long-running show The Good Wife.
He’s now back in Scotland performing at the Edinburgh International Festival. His new show of storytelling and song, Alan Cumming is Not Acting His Age, explores aging in all its complexity.
“The biggest thing,” he says, “is why do we make something that is inevitably the worst thing that can happen to us?”
He feels old enough “to have wisdom,” he says, and “this obsession with youth we have is really damaging ... I think I’m the only person on American television not to have Botox. Everyone has it. Even young people have it, this thing of literally freezing yourself ... and now I’m the freak because I look like I do, or someone of my age who hasn’t had things done to their face. We are the crazy, weird ones. We don’t value aging or respect our elders.”
He would like to age like Samuel Beckett. When the pandemic struck, Cumming was playing the caustic, blind Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame in England opposite Jane Horrocks and Daniel Radcliffe.
He is a positive person, but it’s an important balance for him, he says, to do some things that are very bleak. “I have great access to darkness,” he says, “but I choose to stand in the light.”
He’s married to the San Francisco-born illustrator Grant Shaffer, making him a real-life contrast to the closeted mayor Aloysius Menlove he plays in comedy musical Schmigadoon! on Apple TV+.
“I never felt shame about my sexuality,” Cumming says. “When I was married to a woman, she knew I was bisexual. I had boyfriends before her and girlfriends after her.”