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I grew up with oppression
By Nick Curtis, Evening Standard 04.10.06
Alan Cumming: used to oppression
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Alan Cumming treats life as a smorgasbord of possibility, to be tasted with an open mind. The 41-year-old Scottish actor embraces whatever comes his way; whether that involves sleeping with beautiful people (of both genders), overindulging in booze or recreational drugs, or making it in Hollywood, where he's been much in demand as a quirky oddball ever since he took Broadway by storm in Cabaret in 1993.
Today, there's grey in his close-cropped hair and a hungover rumble to his voice, but his puckish enthusiasm is undimmed as he talks about returning to London and to the stage in Martin Sherman's Bent. First produced in 1979, starring Ian McKellen, it's the study of Max, a gay man in hedonistic Thirties Berlin who goes to awful lengths to deny his true identity to survive in a Nazi concentration camp. This time directed by Daniel Kramer, Bent couldn't be more different from Cumming's cinematic roles in Spy Kids or X-Men 2.
"It's easy to do trashy films," Cummings begins, in his familiar indiscreet manner, as he sits nursing a reviving coffee in a cafe near the Trafalgar Studios, where Bent opens tomorrow night. "Well, not trashy, but films of less portent. But if I do a play, I want it to mean something - and Bent is the most visceral modern play I have ever been a part of. You feel the connection with the audience, that they are f***ed up by what is happening on stage."
Bent is indeed harrowing. Cumming says that some scenes affect him very badly: he comes offstage, trembling and sobbing, to be comforted by fellow actors, all unnervingly dressed as Nazis.
"This play challenges people. Not just about gayness, but about hatred in all forms. It's about accepting who you are, and about not getting complacent, because it could happen again.
"In America," where, Cumming adds, he has made his home, since 1993, "hatred is being used as a political tool again. Bent is also about living under tyranny, and I think we are living under tyranny now of various kinds. There's the tyranny of terrorism, which makes everybody scared. And Bush is a fascist - if you look at all the basic tenets of fascism he fits the bill.
"With the election coming up, he basically went around the country whipping up hatred over gay marriage and abortion. There was a huge hike in gay bashings. It's palpable. I feel very in tune with what Sherman has to say about living under tyranny and accepting yourself."
"Well, I had a nervous breakdown when I was about 28, so that kind of cleared the decks," he deadpans. The breakdown came shortly after he played an acclaimed Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse, and shortly before he first played the outrageous Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret there.
He is irritated when people assume that doubts about his sexuality sparked the breakdown, insisting he was always happy with its fluid nature. He slept with boys in his teens, married fellow drama student Hilary Lyon in 1985, and after their 1993 divorce dated his exquisitely beautiful Circle of Friends co-star Saffron Burrows for two years before becoming ostensibly gay again.
"People get confused if you do it with boys, then with girls, then with boys again," he says. "They assume you must be in turmoil. But I really wasn't." Even now, peppering his conversation with references to his boyfriend of two-and a-half years, American illustrator Grant Shaffer, Cumming says he's still attracted to women and has the occasional fling. "I keep my hand in," is how he puts it.
The roots of his breakdown actually lay in his childhood. Cumming grew up in Carnoustie, 15 miles from Dundee, in a house next to a sawmill, five miles from the nearest bus stop. His forester father was a tyrant, forcing Alan and his older brother, Tom, to cut branches and split logs before they went to school in the mornings. When they couldn't manage the work, he would hit them. No wonder both boys left home as soon as possible, Alan going first to work for Glasgow publisher DC Thomson, then on to drama school.
"My dad was very violent to us, and it scarred us both," he says bluntly. "And as the play shows, if you live under oppression, you not only begin to think it's normal, but that it's your fault." After his breakdown and a period of therapy, Cumming and his brother visited their father, long divorced from their beloved mother.
"Going back is a classic thing for people who are abused in that way. You go back and give [the pain] back and say, 'This is not mine any more.' That was really one of the most difficult things I've ever done."
His father never responded, but Cumming saw him last year at his maternal grandmother's funeral. "We were standing in a line, shaking hands, my brother, my mum, my wee nephew beside me, and suddenly it's like, 'Oh God, here comes my father,'" he says. "When he reached us, his girlfriend said: 'My granddaughter wants your autograph.' I thought Tom was going to explode."
These days, Cumming seems to be amused by his life, even the rougher parts, and especially by his career. "I am, I am," he agrees. "People always say, 'Oh, all your dreams must have come true, you've gone to Broadway and Hollywood, you live in America.' I never dreamed those things, yet I do have that life. That's why it's funny - because it's so unexpected."
Last time we met, he was marvelling at the fact that he'd been given his own chatshow on American TV, on which he interviewed his friends and started a nationwide debate on whether Halle Berry's breasts were real.
This time, he's got his own cosmetics line, the products sporting schoolboyish variations on his name (Cumming All Over for the moisturiser) and advertised by Alan spoofing classic fragrance ads. He's both tickled and rightly ashamed that the producers of Bent indulged his vanity and airbrushed his saggy chin on the poster.
On the other hand, celebrity has given him power. His presence, both as director and star ensured the green-light for his latest film, the low-budget Suffering Man's Charity, and he's recently produced another, Sweet Land, in which he and Alex Kingston play a farming couple in Twenties Minnesota. "We had, like, nine children in the film," he says, "and the awful thing is that we both sort of fancied our eldest child. Which was weird."
He says he still thinks about adopting a child, but it's not at the forefront of his mind. And although he's clearly very much in love with Shaffer, whatever the parameters of their relationship, it's unlikely they will be undergoing a civil partnership ceremony while they are in London.
They will go back to New York when the play finishes its run in January, though Cumming is beginning to see his adopted home in a new light. He was in love with it when he moved there 13 years ago, but the city is starting to feel like "a progressive-liberal, fascinating island" floating near a hostile continent. He could always move back to London. There are plenty of stage roles I'd love to see him in ...
. Bent is at the Trafalgar Studios (0870 060 6632) until 13 Jan 2007.
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