Alan cumming fan club

ROWENA GRANT-FROST WALKS US THROUGH THE SCOTTISH ACTOR’S GREATEST HITS.

JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (2001) Look, if you’re only going to watch one movie from the early aughts that satirises the soullessness of consumer culture and manufactured pop bands and has a subplot about mind control… make it Josie and the Pussycats. As an added bonus, it’s also set in Riverdale, which means the characters definitely know Archie, Betty and Jughead, maybe. One of the main villains in everyone’s favourite comic-book town is Wyatt Frame (Alan Cumming), a record executive with music label Mega Records, who arrives in Riverdale to find the Next Big Thing – after his Last Big Thing died in a ~mysterious~ plane crash. Wyatt is everything you hate about early-2000s hedonists: he wears tiny glasses with tinted lenses; his hair has an aggressively bad middle part; he has misplaced confidence; and he casually tries to murder people. If this sounds like your kind of thing – and you’d like to make a day of it – why not try pairing Josie and the Pussycats with Spice World for the full ‘Alan Cumming acting alongside girl bands’ experience? You won’t be disappointed.

THE GOOD WIFE (2009-2016) For real, is there a TV show as underrated as The Good Wife? Sure, there is an entire Wikipedia page called “List of awards and nominations received by The Good Wife” (if you are wondering, there have been 190 nominations and 28 wins), but I stand by my original statement: UNDERRATED. The Good Wife centres on Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), a litigator who is compelled to return to her pre-kid career after her dumb husband Peter (Chris Noth) entangles himself in a fun combination of extramarital sex and corruption of public office. When Peter shreds his reputation, his lawyer convinces him to hire Eli Gold (Alan Cumming), a shady strategist who can apparently help Peter win his re-election campaign. Eli is basically a big jerk who helps even bigger jerks become more powerful and jerk-like. He’s also, for what it’s worth, the best thing about The Good Wife: he’s funny, slightly off the wall, and he’s definitely got a tender human heart beating somewhere under his slimy-but-well-dressed skin.

BURLESQUE (2010) Do you remember the first time you saw the Burlesque trailer? Because I do. After gathering round the glowing screen of an overheating laptop with four other people, we all had to take turns convincing each other that this movie was: 1. REAL and 2. not just an ad for Cher’s immortality/wigs and Christina Aguilera’s next album (reader, it was all of those things). Alan Cumming doesn’t have a huge role in Burlesque – he plays Alexis, the ticket seller for the Burlesque Lounge in Los Angeles, which is owned by Cher and is therefore the campest and most appropriate venue for little Ali Rose (Aguilera) to reveal her big singing talent. The best thing about Burlesque is that it speaks to Cumming’s other career as a cabaret artist (The New York Times described him as “ravenous” and “sexual”). He’s a talented man! He can sing and dance! The worst thing about Burlesque is that the director left Alan’s big song-anddance number on the cutting room floor (but it’s available as a special feature on the blu-ray).

ROMY AND MICHELE’S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION (1997) If I were to attend one of my high school reunions (no, thank you!), I can only hope that the whole thing would be like the end of Romy and

Michele’s High School Reunion: I’d be there with my best mate (hi, Jane!), we’d both be wearing matching shiny outfits and we’d be unselfconsciously freestyling our impressively coordinated dance interpretation of Cyndi Lauper’s most banging hits. Oh, and our shared date would be our ex-high school crush, who has blossomed into a handsome, helicopter-owning billionaire named Sandy Frink (aka Alan Cumming). As much fun as Romy and

Michele's is (it is very fun, five stars), it also neatly highlights how easy it is to feel trapped and self-conscious about what adult ‘success’ should look like and how life should play out. Life isn’t always about getting jobs, finding boyfriends, wearing power suits and inventing post-its. Sometimes, it’s about twirling, spinning and swaying on the dancefloor until you get to go home in a helicopter.

EMMA (1996) Before Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse was Anya Taylor-joy, she was Gwyneth Paltrow; and before Mr Elton was Josh O’connor, he was Alan Cumming, with charming, puffy hair and long sideburns to boot. If you didn’t read Emma at high school, the story basically goes like this: Emma Woodhouse is polite, charming and wealthy, and fancies herself as a bit of a matchmaker. When she’s not politely sipping tea, wearing bonnets or sitting in drawing rooms, she’s trying to initiate romantic relationships between unsuitable people. She means well, but she’s also a little bit oblivious. One of her attempts at partnership is between Mr Elton (Cumming), the local vicar, and Harriet (in this era, Toni Collette), a young and naive friend of Emma’s who has only recently finished boarding school. At first Mr Elton seems nice, but he’s not interested in Harriet at all – he wants to marry Emma, which makes things a bit awkward, doesn’t it? Eventually, Mr Elton reveals that he’s really a bit of a money-grubber and Emma finally figures out what love is all about. Aww. Alan Cumming, meanwhile, pivots from charming gent to pompous social climber with aplomb.

GOLDENEYE (1995) Goldeneye is the James Bond film that changed Bond films. Directed by New Zealander Martin Campbell, it moved the series past the limp noodle Timothy Dalton years (1987 to ’89) and created the blueprint for the shirts-off, Speedos-on Daniel Craig years (2006 to now). (Martin Campbell, for what it’s worth, also directed Casino Royale.) In Goldeneye, Bond is played by Pierce Brosnan, and the baddie is played by A SPOILER I WILL NOT REVEAL. One of the baddy’s henchmen is Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming), a creepy Russian computer programmer who is probably working on the 2020 Trump campaign as we speak. Back in the ’90s, though, Boris was working in the bowels of Siberia, where he wrote code for a pair of weapon satellites. Despite his evil ways, Boris isn’t exactly your classic Bond bad guy – he’s more annoying than menacing and more opportunist than committed, cold-hearted killer. Next to Brosnan’s earnest, beautiful, gun-toting Bond, Cumming is scene-stealing, lurid and a hoot. They make a great pair.

SPY KIDS (2001) After his turn in Goldeneye, Alan Cumming must have figured he’d like to do the whole ‘bad guy’ thing again, but this time with pint-sized spies. Enter Spy Kids, a movie you might remember from your childhood that keeps living on in franchise form into your adulthood (a Spy Kids animated series was released on Netflix in 2018). In Spy Kids, Cumming plays the wonderfully named Fegan Floop, a cravat-wearing wizard type who hosts a television show called Floop’s Fooglies. On the surface of things, Floop seems like he MUST be the bad guy: he invents evil machinery that kidnaps people! He has made a robot army completely out of thumbs! He has arched eyebrows and a scary laugh! Eventually, though, we learn that appearances are deceiving: Floop is actually just a weirdo inventor and the real bad guys are – spoiler alert – the dude who played the T-1000 in Terminator 2 (aka Robert Patrick) and Tony Shalhoub from TV’S Monk. There are also a bunch of subplots that I can’t quite explain, so maybe just fast-forward through the scenes that don’t feature Alan Cumming.