‘It’s been a good life’: No regrets for Alan Cumming

Alan Cumming is a difficult man to keep up with. This is true as the subject of an interview, in which his lilting Scottish brogue unfolds at a mile a minute; it’s also true of his life more broadly. Lately, he’s found that people of his generation are slowing down – staying home more, avoiding the parties and pleasures that were once de rigueur.

Alan Cumming is fascinated by ageing – both the physical process of it and all the baggage it brings.Credit:Peter Ross

“They feel out of the habit, they feel self-conscious, they feel they don’t belong,” he says; because of this, his friendship group has started to skew toward the young, or at least, youthfully-inclined. “I’m always on the lookout for friends who want to go out dancing and have a laugh.”

Cumming is just shy of 58 years old. He is, by his own admission, fascinated by ageing – both the physical process and the baggage it comes with. The indignities of it are not lost on him (“Your body changes, you forget things”), perhaps more so because he is going through the process under media and fan scrutiny.

“We get such mixed messages about ageing. I get told I’m this boyish, spritely thing, and then I’m told I’m a silver fox and a daddy,” he says wryly. “It’s all over the place.”

To Cumming, the only real problem with getting older is that people stop behaving the way they did when they were younger. Their curiosity begins to flag. They become complacent. At the same time, they idealise their halcyon days.

“Looking back and saying, oh, it was a better time then, is actually kind of lazy. You just need to go out more.” He laughs impishly. “Just because you’re not having the fun you used to have, doesn’t mean other people aren’t.”

He is a person who is still, gleefully, having fun. Last year he did a dance project, inspired by the life of poet Robert Burns, just to see if he could (“It was exhausting, and it’s still painful, but I did it,” he says). This month, he brings his cabaret show Alan Cumming is Not Acting His Age to Australia, which will see him belt out hits by Barbra Streisand, Adele, Lauren Bacall and more.

Alan Cumming in Cabaret.Credit:Sara Krulwich

Also set to be released this month is his latest movie My Old School, a documentary about the strange case of Brandon Lee, a Glaswegian high school student who was eventually unmasked as a man in his 30s named Brian McKinnon. McKinnon fooled fellow students, parents, and incredibly, his teachers – some of whom had taught him when he had attended the school years earlier as a genuine adolescent. The scandal made headlines across the UK.

“It was one of these cultural moments,” says Cumming. “As Scottish people, we think we’re pretty canny – we think we can spot a chancer. But we were completely duped by this person.”

Though McKinnon agreed to be interviewed for the documentary, he declined to appear on film. Cumming stands in for him, his understated yet charismatic performance adding another layer of complexity to an already inscrutable character.

Alan Cumming in a scene from My Old School.Credit:Madman

Cumming sees McKinnon as a tragic figure – stuck in his past, unable to move on from his unrealised dreams. In his own life, Cumming prefers to live very much in the present. To suck the marrow out of life and leave nothing on the table.

“People say, oh, something’s on my bucket list, and I always think – go and f—ing do it then. You might die tomorrow.”

This puts him in mind of a conversation he had with his husband, Grant Shaffer, early in the pandemic. They were discussing bleak, practical considerations: where they should go, what hospitals they could access, how they could stay safe.

“At one point, I said to Grant – I’d had a few drinks – ‘And also, Grant, you know what? If the worst comes to the worst and we die, it’s been sparkling.’”

It was a clarifying moment. When death comes, he wants, above all, to approach it without regrets.

“I don’t want to die feeling like I’ve not achieved things I wanted to achieve or lived as much as I could have lived,” he says.

“It’s a lovely thing to think, oh, if I were to go right now, it’s been a good life.”

Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age will be on at Enmore Theatre in Sydney on January 12 and 13, and at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne on January 14. My Old School is out on January 19.

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