Alan Cumming: Oh The Guilt!

Cumming is promoting a film called Any Day Now, which has already earned a glut of film festival awards. It tells the story of a gay couple in late Seventies LA — a recently out of the closet lawyer and a drag artist — and their struggle to legally adopt a boy with Down’s syndrome. “To begin with I was anxious about the tone of it,” he admits. “I thought, ‘Oh, here we go, I’m playing a drag queen — because every gay man is a drag queen in the movies’ but I thought the result was genuinely moving without being schlocky or schmaltzy. Which is kind of miraculous when you think of all the elements.”
Any Day Now is, on one level, a message film, “hopefully not in a knock-you-over-the-head-with-it way,” he says. “But like any phobia — and you could include homophobia in that — as soon as you’re exposed to it you see it’s not that scary.” He says that he’s incredibly proud of the end result. “And there are very few things I would say that about. I can count, probably on one hand, films I am very proud of.”
This is not, incidentally, the sort of thing that actors tend to say to journalists. But he keeps talking.
“A lot of the films I do I wouldn’t go and see if I wasn’t in them. I mean, I can sometimes watch a film like The Smurfs,” he says, frowning at the ceiling. “But it’s just that it doesn’t take up much of my life, being a Smurf.”

The Times.

Alan seems a nice-enough chap, but I don't think I've ever seen any film that Mr Cumming's been in.
And I've never got the feeling I've missed out.
Looking forward to his book though, May The Foreskin Be With You.
It is, as they say in the trade, forthcoming...