Over a thirty-year career, Alan Cumming has been a stage star, a cabaret performer, a memoirist, a night-club owner, and a political activist. Animating many of these endeavors are his talents as a raconteur and an m.c., perhaps most famously in his Tony-winning role in “Cabaret” on Broadway, a show he starred in twice. This past Monday night, Cumming brought the latest of his numerous one-man shows, “Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age,” to Studio 54, in Manhattan. Between torch numbers—including Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” and “Mein Herr” from “Cabaret”—he talked about the time he drank a handle of liquor that Florence Henderson sneaked into Carol Channing’s ninety-fifth-birthday party. (Henderson died a few months later, Cumming said, but he has not forgotten her advice: “You never take chances with vodka.”) He talked about how he and his fellow-Scotsman Sean Connery developed pet names for each other (Connery was King, Cumming was Prince), and about the night when his “Battle of the Sexes” co-star Emma Stone brought the tennis legend Billie Jean King and Paul McCartney to Club Cumming, a cozy boitê and queer performance space that Cumming opened in the East Village, in 2017. “It sounds like a joke,” he said. “Emma Stone, Billie Jean King, and Paul McCartney walk into a bar!”
Cumming packed similar stories into his second memoir, “Baggage,” from 2021, which charts his varied adventures in Hollywood. His highly eclectic film and television résumé includes everything from early breakout roles, such as a needy suitor in “Emma” and a recovering social reject in “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” to parts in franchises like “Spy Kids” and “X2.” He donned a tailored suit to play the campaign manager Eli Gold on a hundred and twenty-one episodes of “The Good Wife” on CBS; though he is queer and married to his partner, Grant Shaffer, he told the crowd at Studio 54, “I can butch up when I have to!” Most recently, though, he made a flamboyant foray into reality TV as the host of Peacock’s wildly popular competition show “The Traitors,” in which a group of scheming reality stars play a game of Mafia in a Scottish castle while Cumming presides in a series of plaid kilts and bejewelled capes. Season 2—whose finale aired last week—included betrayals, ultimatums, and several contestant-eliminating “murders” under cover of night. As Cumming aptly puts it, “It’s called ‘The Traitors,’ bitch!”
During a pair of recent interviews (one at a café not far from his apartment in the East Village, the other on Zoom), Cumming spoke often about the value he places on joy and uninhibited fun, pleasures that for him have been hard-won. In his first memoir, the best-selling “Not My Father’s Son” from 2014, Cumming writes frankly about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father as a child in Angus. These days, he told me, his goal is to hold back nothing and to inspire others to do the same. On Zoom, I inquired about a cute painting of two dogs hanging on the wall behind Cumming in his home. “Oh, that’s a portrait of my dogs, Jerry and Lala,” he said. “It’s made by this man named Brent Ray Fraser, who paints with his penis.” He laughed, then added, “I think it’s a pretty good likeness.”
Hi! I see that you’re searching around for something in your pockets.
Yes! I’m looking for my vitamins. I take so many vitamins now. Thousands. Obviously, I’m into the subject of aging right now.
Yes, you’ve been touring your show about getting older for a while now. How have you been able to find the humor in it?
Well, one of the things that I think is hilarious about aging is that your lips disappear.
You haven’t gone for the fillers yet?
No! I always joke that I’m the only person on American television who has not had Botox. I look at pictures of my lips from thirty years ago, and I think, Oh, my God. I was a Kardashian. And now . . . I’ve gone a little Kenneth Branagh.
Anyways, I kept thinking about how people were reacting to me, and I suddenly felt, like, Oh, I’m actually quite old, and I hadn’t noticed. Obviously, I’m much older than I feel. Why should you live to any sort of regulation with that? Who are these people, the people with the clipboards and white coats and tight sphincters, who get to decide? It’s become a whole thing where people around me are always saying, “Oh, you know, Alan, you’ve got so much more energy than us. I can’t go out. I’m too old for that, I’ve got kids, blah-blah.” Those simple excuses. I was fascinated by all of that, so I made a show out of it. The main message is: don’t let other people dictate to you how to live your life. And keep being curious.
It really keeps you young, staying interested.
Exactly. I joke in the show about how as you get older you’ve got to get younger agents and younger friends, and that I have, maybe, a rather extreme method of insuring I’ve always got younger friends—and also a venue in which to party with them. I bought my own bar.
Your bar is such a scene. I went there recently, and I felt like the average age of the crowd was twenty-two.
They are all so young! I mean, I go there and it’s like Gandhi being brought to the stage. There’s gay gasps when I show up. We’re now doing this live-model life-drawing class, and Moleskine is sponsoring it. Apparently, Martha Stewart said she’d be a model for it. That’s the rumor.
Didn’t you see Martha Stewart fall over at a party once?
Oh, yes! It was at Tina Brown’s house. This was just weeks after 9/11. It was a book party for Simon Schama. And after dinner Martha was outside, and she just . . . went over a hedge. I love Martha. Every time I see her, she’s such a good sport. Once, at the Met Ball, I had a big pheasant feather in my hat, and I turned around and poked her in the eye.
Your hats are epic, and I feel like fashion is swirling around you right now because of “The Traitors.” Everybody’s obsessed with your wardrobe for the show.
The stylist is a really nice guy called Sam Spector. When we thought about the look for it, I said, “Oh, I should be a dandy Scottish laird.” A lot of the clothes in the first season were mine. I have a lot of tartan suits and kilts, so the base things were my own, but he then put on all of these sashes and berets and all the accoutrements. Then this season it was more not my own clothes. It was more about attaching what I was wearing to the themes of the missions. We’ve already started planning a few looks for the next season. There’s joy in it, and that’s what I think people are really responding to. Most fashion today is really joyless. Even the models look like they’re annoyed.
I recently went to see my friend, the performer Alok Vaid-Menon’s show, and they have this great bit about how the whole wave of transphobia is about how people are angry and confused by the joy that trans people have, that they’re able to embrace who they really are, and they risk their lives to do it. People cannot understand that concept of having that much joy in expression. And in a mild way I think that is what I’m doing in “The Traitors.”
How did you get involved with “The Traitors”? Was there part of you that didn’t want to host a reality show?
I mean, I was curious about why the producers asked me to do it, because it wasn’t my bag at all. But, when I met with them, I realized why they wanted me to do it. It wasn’t just, “Hello, I’m Alan Cumming!” I was to be a character, like a James Bond villain, and to camp it up.
It is very camp. I mean, you led a fake funeral march wearing a Victorian mourning outfit.
Yes. Believe me, I am aware. I’ve always said that this is the only time that an American version of a show is more camp than the British version, and I think that’s largely due to me.
The show is wildly popular. You just got picked up for a third season.
I can’t quite believe it. Normally, nobody calls me when I’m on the telly anymore. There’s also a new show I’ve got in Britain, called “Alan Cumming’s Paradise Homes.” It’s such a jammy job—I go around the world looking at people’s dream homes that they’ve built and just sniff around their closets. And only my mom is watching that. But with “The Traitors” my phone, my Insta D.M.s, everything went nuts.
The show is set in an enormous Scottish castle. Did you have a romantic feeling about castles when you were growing up? Did you know anyone who had one?
Oh, they’re just everywhere. I mean, I grew up on a country estate. It wasn’t a castle, but we had these gates that had been locked since blah-blah went off to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. But the big house on the estate had been blown up, because of the death duty (inheritance tax). There was a stable, and the chapel was still there, and you could see where the gardens and the foundations were, but they were covered in grass. There’s a book called “Scotland’s Lost Houses” that talks about this. It was too expensive for all these families to pay death duties, and that was the end of an era for all the poshy posh. I think that’s why the National Trust for Scotland was set up, because we were losing so many beautiful houses.
