By Hadley Freeman -
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To most actors, hearing that they are a lot more fun in person than their work generally is to watch would sound like an insult. But Alan Cumming will not, I think, take it that way. This is not to say that he is a bad actor, because he isn't. He has just appeared in a lot of really, really bad things – as well as the occasional great thing. His upcoming work for the year gives a perfect reflection of his career in general: on the one hand, he's in the excellent TV show, The Good Wife, on Channel 4, and will also be seen in Julie Taymor's upcoming film version of The Tempest.
And on the other, he is in the long-awaited-by-no-one live-action film of The Smurfs, which, despite the presence of blue people, is unlikely to be this year's Avatar. Then there's the film that we were supposed to talk about in the interview, Dare. But Cumming never once mentions Dare, and when I ask him about it he quickly changes the subject. Which is just as well, because there's not much to say about a movie that is as bad as you'd expect a star vehicle for the anaemic Emmy Rossum to be, and the only vaguely enjoyable scenes in it are the very few with Cumming, who plays an imperious actor, and – in what must be a strong contender for the most random star cameo of 2011 – Sandra Bernhard, playing a child psychologist.
Cumming is often described as "prolific", which is true but also a euphemistic way of saying that his career has been baffling. One year he was in Emma, playing an excellent Mr Elton; the next, Spice World. He may have won an Olivier award (for Accidental Death of an Anarchist), played Hamlet and starred in The Bacchae, but he also appeared in Josie and the Pussycats, Garfield the Movie and Burlesque.
Looking at his CV, one is left with the impression that Cumming is not a man who takes his career overly seriously, and it's one that would seem to be confirmed when I ask what work he's most excited about this year, and he slaps on the table a bottle of the latest in his line of eponymous perfumes, called, inevitably, The Second Cumming.
"My feeling about work is it's much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa," he says when we meet up in a restaurant in New York, just a few blocks from his apartment on the Lower East Side.
One high-profile job that would likely have been miserable to make is the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, also directed by Taymor, which Cumming quit last April. It has since become mired in stories of spiralling costs, injured actors and delays. While most celebrities would make tactfully bland comments about how they wish the play nothing but the best, Cumming – perhaps because of his levity about career-climbing – goes deliciously off-message.
"My GOD, that was a lucky escape. Jesus Christ! Talk about dodging a bullet there!" he says, eyes wide.
So why did he quit? "Because it just fucked me about. It kept getting delayed and delayed, and so I was like, 'OK, time to move on.'" But surely it must have been awkward with Taymor, considering you were also working with her on The Tempest? "Yeah, it was a bit awkward. She wasn't best pleased when I quit. But the thing about Julie is that she's very blinkered about her work, and then things go into the ether. So the next time I saw her for The Tempest, it was like it never happened."
It is partly because of his belief that personal experience counts far more than professional kudos that his friendly face scrunches into anger when talking about Richard Chamberlain's recent comment: "I wouldn't advise a gay leading man-type actor to come out." Rupert Everett made the same point in a radio interview: "I just never got a job [in Hollywood], and I never got a job [in England], after [coming out.]"
"I think it's so mean-spirited," says Cumming, taking off his dapper jacket like a dandyish boxer preparing to fight. "If you're living a lie, that's not healthy, and I think it is really irresponsible of [Chamberlain] and Rupert to say these things." But do they not have a point – that audiences don't seem able to accept actors who they know to be gay playing heterosexual lovers onscreen, and therefore their acting opportunities are instantly limited?
"But it's not about your work," he says, scornfully biting out the last word. "It's about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message. I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone like me, and if I cannot be open in my life, how on earth can they? Anyway, it's an academic question: how can you know [that coming out affects your career]? Some people get less work than others and it has nothing to do with sexuality."
Not being open about his sexuality is a charge no one could level at Cumming. He once described himself as "a frolicky pansexual sex symbol for the new millennium" and was previously married to a woman and, now, a man, the graphic artist Grant Shaffer. It was partly for Cumming's work for LGBT rights and Aids charities that he was given an OBE in 2009. Did he feel any compunction about accepting an OBE, considering how much he hates, as he says, "all that bowing and scraping around the royals"?
"Um, well, no, no," he says, uncharacteristically hesitant. "I think what swung it for me was that it was equally about doing work for gay rights as it was for my work, and for that to have been in the citation and shouted out at Buckingham Palace – I was really proud of that."
Cumming was born and raised in Perthshire, Scotland, and it does not sound like the happiest of childhoods. He suffered, he says, "physical and emotional abuse" from his father, and the two didn't speak for many years after Cumming left home to study acting. Matters were not helped when a tabloid newspaper twisted comments Cumming made in an interview and claimed he said his father had sexually abused him, which was not true.
"That was awful," he says quietly. "I was on the red carpet going to a premiere of Annie – Annie, of all things – and I got this call on my mobile . . . "
To do, or not to do, an Elton
The British press is just one thing that Cumming doesn't miss since having moved to New York in 1997. "I'll do a visual of why I prefer being here than being in London. This is London [he makes a moue of disapproval]. And this is New York [he makes a face like a teenage girl who has just spotted Justin Bieber]. You see?"
He is based in New York full time now, particularly since his civil partnership with Shaffer two years ago. Although Cumming has spoken in the past about his desire to adopt a child, he says he and Shaffer "discussed it but the moment passed".
Not inspired by Elton John, then? He raises another dry eyebrow. "I'm inspired by Elton in many things, but not in this case," he deadpans.
Cumming is about to turn 46, and there are kiss curls of grey around his temples. Although this former London party boy says "going out dancing is still one of my favourite things", these days this is more likely to happen with friends at the house he and Shaffer own in upstate New York than in a warehouse rave. But maturity has not dimmed his enthusiasm for the quirky and the fun over the starry and career-boosting. A chance meeting with a food stylist earlier that week thrilled him at least as much as the lunch he had that day with West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin: "A food stylist! Can you imagine?"
The week we met he was casting his vote for the Oscars. Will he be going to the ceremony? "Oh no, those things aren't much fun. But when I did once go, I got pushed out of the way twice, in one weekend, by Diana Ross. Literally, her hair went into my face. And one of those times, she was pushing me out of the way to get to the dancefloor to dance to one of her own songs. Isn't that just the best?"
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