ALAN CUMMING
Actor and TV Host
The actor has long been a household name, but serving as the TV Host on "The Traitors" brought him back to our screens. Soon, he’ll appear as the lead in Brian Cox’s directorial debut.
WHAT’S SOMETHING PEOPLE GET WRONG ABOUT YOU? I am in the really lucky position of having my public persona be pretty identical to who I actually am. I know a lot of people who have to hide parts of themselves or monitor the information they allow the world to have about them, but I feel really liberated. I am an open book.
WHAT QUESTION DO YOU ASK YOURSELF MOST OFTEN WHILE YOU’RE MAKING WORK? Can you see the cogs moving? Of course performance is artifice. It is spontaneity you repeatedly fake. But the trick is to make people suspend their disbelief. So I love it when people get lost in what I am doing and are genuinely worried for me in a play or a film, or when I’m doing my cabaret show and they think I’m just making the stories up as I tell them. That’s when I know I’ve got it right.
“"Serving androgyny and queerness to an America that is being brainwashed into thinking both are the enemy."”
WHAT’S ONE BOOK, WORK OF ART, OR FILM THAT GOT YOU THROUGH AN IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR LIFE? There’s a book called The Trick Is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway, an amazing Scottish novelist, and it is this harrowing and mesmerizing story about going through such trauma and anxiety and slowly losing it. I read it when I was going through something similar, and although maybe you shouldn’t read about nervous breakdowns when you are having one, it was so beautifully written and so raw that it made me realize I was not the only person to ever have gone through something like this. It gave me hope that I would come out the other side, and I did.
IF YOU COULD ATTRIBUTE YOUR SUCCESS TO A SINGLE QUALITY OF YOURS, WHAT WOULD IT BE? I am prepared to be vulnerable.
WHAT DO YOU THINK IS YOUR BIGGEST CONTRIBUTION TO CULTURE? Serving androgyny and queerness to an America that is being brainwashed into thinking both are the enemy.
in your life?
