Something.” The 61-year-old Tony-winning-Broadway-star-turned-Emmy-winning-reality-TV-host is the consummate chameleon. In just the past year, he’s played the “dandy Scottish laird” host of The Traitors: New Blood, reprised his role as the X-Men’s resident lizard-like teleporting mutant Nightcrawler in Avengers: Doomsday, and took on one of his most emotionally and physically challenging roles as gay bar owner Leo in Tip Toe. The impulse to change—both on screen and off—is therapeutic.
Cumming’s memoir, Not My Father’s Son, opens with a scene of his father taking a rusty pair of sheep shears to his temple in a fit of rage. The trauma followed him into early adulthood, and he experienced visceral anxiety whenever he got his hair cut. Eventually, however, the act of transformation transformed Cumming.
It was “painful,” he says, to be unable to change his hair when he was working on certain projects, like his seven seasons on The Good Wife. That is, when he isn’t using his hands to assume the statuesque pose of his Traitors persona or demonstrate the boxing stance from his Marvel superhero training. Simply talking about a performance becomes a performance, his eyes bulging behind a pair of thick-rimmed black glasses and his arms gesturing widely underneath his faded red T-shirt as he describes the immense physicality required of these recent roles.
The walls of his Scottish home are white and surprisingly sparse. You’d have no idea that the person living there is now, by his own admission, best known for “swanning around” a Scottish castle “like an insane little prince” in increasingly outrageous outfits (so outrageous, in fact, that Traitors contestants often applaud when he enters the room after a wardrobe change). Or perhaps the walls are white so he stands out all the more.
Either way, the Scottish charm is working overtime on a Sunday evening. MEN’S HEALTH: You often talk about your fashion choices with each Traitors season, but what goes into choosing your hairstyle? ALAN CUMMING: There was a feeling that because we were doing the civilian version, we could reboot and bring things down a little.
So, we decided just to go a little more simple and classic with the hair. But it was hilarious, because every morning I would walk downstairs and say, ‘This is toning it down. What the fuck?’ I guess I wasn't dressed as a coffin or a bride.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
