Alan Cumming spoke to BuzzFeed about The Traitors, Cabaret, and his soothing new collaboration with Virgin Atlantic.
We’re meeting due to the latter, as the actor is partnering with Virgin Atlantic to celebrate the airline’s new LAX Clubhouse. He’s narrated a bedtime story, fittingly titled, “ReLAX and Unwind with Alan Cumming.” I ask him how he relaxes, and on top of the usual — no phone before bed, reading, a cocktail on a plane — he replies, “It’s usually about getting away from people.”
These are the two sides of Alan Cumming. There’s the famous one we know, who talks about having “accidentally packed” a “fabulous pair of sneakers” that he was supposed to return after a recent photoshoot. Then there’s the Alan who, when he’s not being “famous Alan Cumming, or Traitors Alan Cumming, or red carpet Alan Cumming” prefers to wear clothes that can be described as “pajamas in disguise.”
“I don’t ever want to be recognized, ever. It’s not something that I seek. It’s just a part of my life,” he tells me. “I try to be kind and have my own boundaries. Like, maybe I don’t want to have a photo right now on this plane or whilst I’m picking up my dog’s poop.”
He recalls one night in particular: “On my 40th birthday, which was 20 years ago, I had a big, weepy crying fit the night before. I’d been drinking. My husband said, ‘Is it because you’re turning 40?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s because I don’t want to be famous anymore.’ I was at Sundance, which is really intense, you’re constantly being poked in the head. And I just thought, ‘I don’t want this to be my life anymore. It’s just too much.'”
So what changed? “I then thought, even if I stop making films and stop everything, it’s still going to happen for years. So that was when I realized I’ve just got to deal with it,” he continues. “With my success, I’ve got nice homes that I can go to, and they’re sanctuaries — people don’t know where I am, it’s away from everybody. That’s definitely something I’ve created to get away from being recognized. But it’s part of life, you know? Luckily, if people didn’t recognize me, I probably wouldn’t get to have those nice homes. So that’s the bargain that you have to live with.”
There’s a decent chunk of people likely recognizing him now due to his magnificent hosting of The Traitors. Is there a moment that went on behind the scenes that viewers probably wouldn’t know about? Aside from the “gargantuan amount of people running around and trying to avoid being on screen,” he begins, “Last year in the episode, when we were on the boat, there was a huge storm. We weren’t allowed to get off the boat because of health and safety.”
“Me, the contestants, and some of the crew ended up going on this two-hour journey in a fucking mental storm,” he continues. “We’re tilting so far over that the sea was actually on the window. Such projectile vomiting from Sandra. The only person, of course, who was totally fine with it was Kate from Below Deck. She was like, ‘Is there any drink? Is there any liquor here?’ Things careening off the shelves, people upstairs vomiting, and the cameras falling into the sea. And then Kate and I just shooting the breeze and having whiskey.”
If there’s a fitting image of Alan, it certainly seems to be of the man sipping cocktails as the waves crash around him. I ask him about the storm inside the traitors’ turret this season. “At a certain point you don’t have any control over it because we’ve named the traitors,” he responds. “There’s a certain amount of advice that they get, and in their interviews they are talking to people — it’s a conversation.”
“It’s so interesting to me that this series had these so many traitors being completely bonkers, chaotic, and dystopian in betraying each other — and then, for it to end in such a lovely way, with four people all trusting each other. In a funny sort of way, it mirrored what’s going on in America right now,” he adds. “It was the ending we all needed.”
As his star power on The Traitors brings him to new audiences, I ask if he is ever frustrated to still see his sexuality mislabeled. “I let that one go,” he responds. “I mean I try to, when I have a chance to, define myself as bisexual. But if people say gay — I like queer, actually, because it’s more all-encompassing, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with what you do with the contents of your underpants. It’s more of a sort of sensibility as well. I quite like that.”
Something else with a queer sensibility, as Alan puts it, is The Traitors itself. He explains, “The Traitors is such a queer show. There’s me at the center of it, being super queer with all my crazy outfits. Two of the winners this year are queer people, and that’s so lovely. I really did push to have a better representation in the show, and that’s certainly worked.”
“With all these draconian, horrific things, laws, and attitudes against the queer and trans community in America right now, I think it’s a really positive thing to see so many queer people and, hopefully, trans people in a show that also celebrates dressing up, androgyny, femme-ness, and queerness,” he continues. “Hopefully we challenge people: If you like all that and you love this show, maybe you shouldn’t vote for a party that is trying to demean and destroy those people’s lives.”
For Alan to keep bringing up politics is unsurprising, given his history of activism and the fact that one of his most iconic roles is that of the Emcee in Cabaret — for which he won a Tony award. There’s another revival of the show on Broadway right now, starring Adam Lambert in the role, who’s spoken about how he’s had to stop the show to call out audience members for laughing at an antisemitic joke at the end of the song “If You Could See Her.” I ask Alan if he thinks that audiences are likely to react to the pre-WW2 story differently amid the the current administration.
He’s quick to remind me that he hasn’t played the role in a decade. The laughter, he says, is “not a new thing.” He recalled, “I think people are embarrassed, or they do think that’s funny. Obviously, now, we live in a time where antisemitism, racism, homophobia — all these things are validated because of the leaders we have elected.”
“I always think you can’t blame people for being racist or whatever, if the government of their country is being racist, too. That’s why you need good, kind, decent leaders. As we don’t have that right now, it’s not a surprise to me that that’s happening more and more often. It’s just obviously very dangerous,” he adds. Though he hasn’t spoken to Adam, he notes that the key theme of the show is to explore the “slow, creeping nature of fascism” amid a spectacle of fun — as he puts it, “the Emcee’s job is to say to people, ‘Well, why are you not laughing anymore?'”