december-2010

he says, although Americans obsess more, on the whole,
about celebrity. “But it’s getting more like that in Britain
as well – the whole thing of people who’ll do anything
to be on television seems to be more prevalent,” he says.
“I like it when people don’t know who I am. It’s an academic
question: if I want to keep doing my job, what do I do?
I could go away and hide in the woods but…”
Doth he protest too much? Maybe, but the evidence
of his work suggests he is not too consumed by his own
ratings. “I do feel that I just do what I like,” he says.
“Even the things that pay the bills are quite idiosyncratic.
I feel I’m on a nice plateau: I get to do interesting work, I
get a certain level of access to things because of what I’ve
“I get to do interesting
work. I’m content. I’m not
out for world domination”
done. I’m content to carry on this way. I’m not
on an upward curve of domination.”
You might describe the cabaret show he brought to
Edinburgh and London in the summer as an ego trip, but
he insists it was in fact his most daunting project to date.
“I wanted to run away the fi rst time I did it,” he says. “It
was terrifying. I’d never stood up before and said, ‘This is
me. I’m Alan and I’m going to sing a song.’ Ask any actor
and they would be horrifi ed at the notion.”
The part in The Runaway appealed to him, he says,
because of its unconventionality: it’s gangland stuff, but
his character, the transvestite club owner Desrae, “is the
strongest, the most rational and the kindest person in it”.
He has also voiced characters in animated fi lms, including
“a tranny Hitler” in Jackboots on Whitehall. He appears
as Sebastian, alongside the “fantastic” Helen Mirren and
a star-studded ensemble cast in a new fi lm version, out
this month, of The Tempest. “It’s nice to do Shakespeare
for the screen, saying those lines for the camera instead
of having to be all bombastic in a theatre,” he says.
Earlier this year the RSC had young actors enact a bizarre
six-week-long dramatisation of Romeo and Juliet via Twitter.
It would not have been Cumming’s cup of tea. “I’m not a
tweeter,” he says. “I really don’t think it’s a good thing that
people sit commenting on the present at the expense of
experiencing the present.” For his own edifi cation he
hopes to fi nd the time to write longer dispatches. “I’d like
to write a book about things that have happened to me
and where I’m from and my life’s course,” he says. “Not
‘I was born and brought up in Aberfeldy, blah blah blah’,
but more short stories about experiences I’ve had.”
For this restless man, the experience, it seems, is all.
Burlesque is out on December 22; The Tempest will be
released in the new year
METROPOLITAN 105