Alan Cumming grabs his phone, eager to show me his latest discovery — the Delta One lounge at JFK airport, through which he passed en route to Los Angeles the previous week. “Look!” he exclaims in his alluring Highland purr, showing me something resembling a small microwave. “It’s a machine that cleans, then dries your glasses — a carwash for glasses! Next time I use that lounge I’m going to take every pair I own.”
Reclining in a leather chair in a London hotel on a Saturday morning, he’s wiry and alert at the end of a week that began with a flight from Edinburgh to LA and back, via New York. He displays only slight weariness when his husband (previously civil partner) of 19 years, the American illustrator Grant Shaffer, calls from Inverness airport on his way to their Highland home unable to collect the hire car. “Sixt do not rent to celebrities, sportsmen or royals,” Cumming explains after hanging up. “Isn’t that ridiculous?” He dictates a text to his assistant. “Get us a car from non-f***wit car rental people. Thank you.”
Actor, writer, TV presenter and host of America’s version of The Traitors, Cumming, 61, takes delight in the small things. To quote his friend the actress Lisa Kudrow’s tribute in Time magazine, which named him one of its “100 most influential people” of 2026: “He chooses joy, he chooses glee.”
He is in London for two days to promote a wide array of projects — notably Tip Toe, a five-part Channel 4 drama by the Queer as Folk and Doctor Who screenwriter Russell T Davies, and his first season as artistic director of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in the Perthshire town of 3,000 inhabitants that lies 50 miles from Cumming’s home town of Carnoustie.
As host of the US version of The Traitors in JanuaryGetty images
He’s amused at his life as an “old, rich traveller person”. It is at total odds with his childhood on a vast country estate, where his father, the head forester, mentally and physically abused Cumming and his older brother, as he recorded in his heartbreaking 2014 memoir Not My Father’s Son. “I was never safe,” he wrote. “I never knew exactly when it would come, and that, I know, was his favourite part.” He recalls how his father once dragged him out of the kitchen, threw him on a workbench and held him down “like an animal” as he shaved his head with rusty sheep clippers.
Cumming escaped, via drama school in Glasgow, to an eclectic career packed with theatre successes, including a Tony in 1998 for his Emcee in Cabaret and an Olivier award in 1991 for his lead role in Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which he also co-adapted. He has starred in blockbusters such as GoldenEye and X2: X-Men United (his character, Nightcrawler, returns this year in Avengers: Doomsday) and hit TV shows including The Good Wife and Schmigadoon!
He’s also in demand as an awards host, hence his stint at the Baftas last year for its television awards and in February for its film awards at the Royal Festival Hall.
The latter turned, in Cumming’s words, into a “shitshow” after the BBC broadcast racially offensive outbursts by the Scottish Tourette’s activist John Davidson. Davidson was in the audience for I Swear, the film about how his life had been blighted by the lack of understanding that his taboo utterings were completely involuntary. Although aware of his condition, the BBC seated him near a microphone. Then, despite a two-hour delay, it broadcast Davidson shouting the n-word while two black actors, Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo, were on stage. They were “disgusted” and “repulsed”. For a few days the deeply distressed Davidson was in the eye of a huge storm led by people who, again, failed to grasp the nature of his condition.
matt holyoak for the sunday times magazine. Suit and vest by ISSEY MIYAKE HOMME PLISSE
“It was an international scandal. Then poor John gave this interview saying, ‘I’m not a racist. I called Alan Cumming a paedophile too.’ ” This was when Cumming was introducing a segment featuring Paddington Bear. “Oh great! He’s equal opportunities and my name and ‘paedophile’ were in the same sentences all over the world,” he says.
Yet during the event Cumming had no idea that he’d been called a paedophile or of the subsequent racial slurs. “I had a thing in my ear and you can’t hear very specifically what’s happening. I haven’t actually asked them, but I don’t imagine that Delroy and Michael B Jordan heard the actual slur either, — they were probably just, like, ‘Well, there’s someone shouting in the audience.’ ”
Cumming was still oblivious to what had just happened when he read an apology from the teleprompter. “I watched myself back. I was very smiley, I didn’t do it with the gravitas and tone I would have used had I known. That pissed me off.
Performing a number from Cabaret at the 1998 Tony awardsReuters
“It was bad, bad, bad, bad leadership,” he continues. “Bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly, who really had not prepared and let people down.” Cumming, and the Bafta audience, hadn’t been warned Davidson’s outbursts might be offensive. “They just said, ‘There’ll be noise.’ You could say they didn’t know, but they clearly did, because apparently John had said the n-word at a party the day before. They were thinking of shouting at me during the dress rehearsal to see what I’d do, but they didn’t.”
Many in the public eye keep shtoom for fear of pile-ons, but Cumming is vocal about what he believes in. He openly supported Scottish independence in 2014 alongside Nicola Sturgeon, with whom he remains friends. He publicly criticises President Trump, having held dual UK-US citizenship since 2008. He’s best known for his gay rights activism: in 1999 he came out as bisexual after being married to the actress Hilary Lyon from 1985 to 1993. He shot a “drama-queeny” naked cover for Out Magazine to end incessant speculation about his sexuality.
With his wife, the actress Hilary Lyon, in 1993. The pair divorced that yearShutterstock Editorial
Coming out as bisexual in 1999
Now he’s starring in Tip Toe as Leo, the vivacious owner of a bar in Manchester’s Gay Village, who in the opening scenes is murdered by his neighbour Clive, a dour, homophobic electrician. The drama is an ambitious state-of-the-nation work that addresses everything from urban decline, working-class emasculation, post-Brexit fury (on both sides) and the rise of websites such as OnlyFans. It risks didacticism but swerves it because Davies’s script “is so nuanced, with no black and white, so with every single character you can see why they’ve arrived at this place”.
A central theme is the growing hostility and increase in hate crimes towards LGBTQ people. Leo and his friends bewail how much better things were 15 years ago. Does Cumming agree? “I’m not Leo,” he clarifies. “But it’s a very scary time. There’s been a huge backlash from populist political movements that use fear to galvanise against all the things that had been getting better, a backlash against trans people, queer people, people of colour, against that notion of accepting people into your community from elsewhere.
“There’s a normalisation of violence and hatred and what Tip Toe does really well is show how this rhetoric going unchecked manifests in violence. Words matter, and all these words that were slow and insidious are now less insidious and more blatant, and what it means is that people die and we don’t mind. Even just the other week when Trump was saying, ‘I’m going to annihilate an entire race,’ people weren’t, like, ‘How dare you?’ ”
Cumming is outraged by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that trans women are not considered women for the purpose of single-sex provision. Conversation turns to probably the world’s most famous transgender person, Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as the Olympic gold-medallist Bruce Jenner, now the Kardashians’ stepmother and an active Republican. “She got her passport renewed and it said she was a man. So now she’s pissed off and appealing to Trump. What the f*** did you think was going to happen? Have you not been reading the news?”
In Edinburgh with his friend Nicola Sturgeon in 2021Alan Cumming / Instagram
We move on to the Harry Potter author, JK Rowling, who posted a picture of herself smoking a cigar on her yacht to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling. “I found everything about that photo so sad. What do you think? That trans people shouldn’t exist? I can’t stand it. Feminism has been forever blighted by these people saying, ‘Oh, we’re for equality, just not your equality.’ I’m a feminist. There should be equality between men and women, but also between trans men and women. It’s always the people who are most in trouble who get a good kicking in the teeth.”
When appearing as guest host on the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! last year, Cumming gave an impassioned monologue about the state of America. “Some of my team were frightened I’d be deported after that. But I wasn’t scared for myself. I live in a rarefied bubble and have another passport, another life in a country that’s progressive, whose values are aligned to mine. I get death threats on my Instagram. But I don’t count them.”
matt holyoak for the sunday times magazine. Shirt and vest by ALEXANDER YETMAN, Trousers by CECILE TULKENS, Shoes by SEBASTIAN TAREK, Glasses models own
At least most of the time he doesn’t. He recalls one occasion “which really scared me” at his remote home in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. “People had been saying on Instagram, ‘We’re coming to get you and do blah blah blah to you.’ Then the lights went out in my house. I had this vision of people coming up the hill with pitchforks to attack me. Of course nobody came. The lights going out was a coincidence. I was not irrational to think this. But that was a turning point.”
Both times Trump has been elected Cumming has sworn he’ll leave the US, yet he still has his Catskills and Manhattan homes, as well as his New York cabaret joint, Club Cumming, where he regularly comperes. “I’m definitely spending less time in America, but in New York last week it felt so great.” The election of the Democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani has “made such a difference to the feeling of hope. New York is such an island anyway, literally floating off the coast of America. But before Mamdani, kids who work at my club were saying how they worried about going on the subway. You don’t hear that any more. It’s heartening.”
With his husband, Grant Shaffer, in 2009Getty images
Cumming has stated he made a deliberate decision “to say no to shame” and “to stand in the light”. He has always quashed narratives that success “healed” his childhood trauma and that his work ethic is a rebuke to his father for calling him “worthless”. Yet, he concedes in his memoir, his childlike, mischievous air may well be the result of “living my life backwards. I had to be a grown-up when I’d been a little boy, now I was tending to the little boy inside who never had the chance to properly play.”
Right now he’s touring Scotland with the stage musical version of The High Life, the cabin crew sitcom that was his 1990s TV breakthrough. He films The Traitors at Ardross Castle, near Inverness, directly after Claudia Winkleman has wrapped the British version. His show features mostly reality stars — “Lord of the Flies with Botox” — and he adopts the persona of a “dandy Scot laird. In one show I dressed as a coffin! It was hilarious.” This year the format has become so popular that he’ll film a second “real people” version.
In the cabin crew sitcom The High Life with Siobhan Redmond and Forbes Masson, 1994Shutterstock
There’s also Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Cumming discovered this beloved arts institution, founded in 1951, three years ago while filming a travelogue. “I thought, what the f***? It’s incredible.” A year later he applied online for the artistic director role, “like a normal person”. When he won it he promised to be a “pied piper”, luring famous friends, as seen when Ian McKellen and Graham Norton showed up to the queer festival he organised in January.
His debut season starts this month and includes the first revival of the Broadway and West End musical Once, King Lear with the Scottish actress Maureen Beattie in the title role, and Simon Russell Beale playing Liberace in I’ll Be Seeing You, a new play Cumming is directing. Cumming will also star as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady.
Ticket sales are healthy but Cumming ruffled feathers by replacing the theatre’s popular repertory programme, with separate runs for each show. “In my first year I had a little trouble,” he concedes. “I felt what I brought far outweighed my shortcomings of being someone who’d never run a building before. I’ve changed a lot and that includes getting rid of toxic energy that is not helpful to anyone. My energy doesn’t work with closed-off people. But when all this stuff was thrown in my face, I just thought, you know what? I’ll not take any money.” He hasn’t drawn a salary since. He doesn’t need the money, he admits; The Traitors alone makes him a fortune.
By now Cumming’s people are itching for him to move on to his next engagement. He stands up, midway through indignantly relating how Bafta apologised and asked to talk to him. “I was, like, ‘What? No! I don’t want to talk to you any more.’ ”
matt holyoak for the sunday times magazine. Suit, vest and belt by ISSEY MIYAKE HOMME PLISSE
So he’ll be back to host next year? Cumming laughs. “Right before it started, I said to my agent, ‘Remind me, I never want to do this again.’ ” He was already fed up at how the organisation had botched his travel plans and how no food was available at rehearsals when he was hungry. “And it’s a tough gig. You’re trying to be funny for a bunch of people who are used to very generic, middle-of-the-road things, so you’re fighting against the quirky personality they want you to bring to it. That’s a battle.”
His team virtually drag him off now. The sense is Cumming has once again overstepped some invisible celebrity barrier with this diatribe. Not that he cares. As he’d said earlier, “I always think, God, how sad people think you’re really brave and noble just because you’re speaking the truth.”
Tip Toe is on Channel 4 this month. Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s 2026 season runs from May 23 to December 31; pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com
Opening image: Matt Holyoak for The Sunday Times Magazine. Grooming: Sven Bayerbach at Carol Hayes Management using Maria Nila and Hourglass. Styling: David Nolan at Monday Artists. Knitted top by Cecile Tulkens, jeans by Martine Rose. Special thanks to The Standard, London, Townhouse 8 Suite