Alan Cumming Quotes

Kids are more genuine. When they come up and want to talk to you, they don't have an agenda. It's more endearing and less piercing to your aura.

It's interesting, for me sappy means sentimental and something that gets you in your heart, gets you emotional. That's what I mean. Also, of course, it means that I'm slightly setting up the audience that there's a bit of fun involved, as well.

I don't understand this but I never felt any shame about my sexuality and the idea that I found boys attractive as well as girls

Pantomime is a big thing in the cultural calendar of my country, you know. So subtlety's not my forte.

Be who you like as long as you mean it.

Had I not had the childhood I did, would these traits not be so at the forefront of my personality? Who knows? All I know is that I am the product of all the experiences I have had, good and bad, and if I am in a happy place in my life (as I truly am), then I can have no regrets about any of the combination of events and circumstances that have led me to the here and now.

I come more to Scotland than I ever used to, so I feel more connected to it, more part of the zeitgeist. You know when you realize you have a choice and I'm choosing my homeland. It's funny: when you get older these things creep up to you.

You do get really exhausted doing films. You work such long hours, and after a while, things can get out of perspective, just like if anyone's tired, things get on top of them.

I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I'm a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I've lived my life backwards.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

There are some days when you don't feel like being Alan Cumming.

I was horrified when Richard Chamberlain and Rupert Everett said gay actors should stay in the closet. They were saying to people that they should live a lie and not be liberated, to live in fear of being found out.

Nowadays people don't know how to handle it if all the ends aren't tied up and they're not told what to think in films. And if they're challenged, they think it's something wrong with the film.

I think people deny themselves by putting themselves into categories.

These kinds of events, though seemingly glamorous and sophisticated from the outside, are often organized with the finesse of a kindergarten nativity play, and one whose teachers are all lapsed members of Narcotics Anonymous.

Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He's hardcore to play because he's displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens.

Actually I like working kind of fast, because if you got it, why bother doing it over and over?

I'd been depressed before, of course. But I'm talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I'm talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog. You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.

If you are a cabaret artist and you are mostly singing other people's songs, you're asking them to rethink a song, listen to it in a different way. The most impact you can have while asking them to re-listen to a song is if it's a song they know very well.

You can't go through sustained cruelty and terror for a large swathe of your life and not talk about it and be okay.

Often for me, if I hear a song I know, it clicks for me and I hear it in a different way and I think, I could sing that song. I've got something to say about that song. Wanting to connect with an audience and wanting them to rethink songs; it is actually important to do songs they're familiar with. Also, I love those songs. In a way, I think I've changed people's perceptions of what a cabaret show like this could be.

really made me feel that women have been coerced into a way of presenting themselves that is basically a form of bondage. Their shoes, their skirts, even their nails seem designed to stop them from being able

Sometimes with people I know, they're playing the hunky action guy and there's resistance to them coming out because it's so connected to straight masculinity. There's a plastic kind of movie star who has a very short shelf with very small kind of ambition. I see that but I still don't agree with it.

I usually can find a way to do a character to make it real and work. But sometimes it's a struggle sustaining that, because there's such a level of personal involvement and personal, physical, and emotional distraughtness.

In my first year at drama school, I did this kids' show called 'Let's See.'

I like working on things that are very different and that involve different disguises.

Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.

You'll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.

When you're on TV, you come into people's homes. In theater and film, they go to you - to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it's very different.

Go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly, you will be okay.

And we have the same colour eyes. When I look into his, I feel I'm looking into myself.

I don't feel I'm a compulsive person. I multitask. I'm really well-organised, and I have lots of people to help me.

Actors aren't stupid, mostly, and if there's a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director's going for, if you're aware of that too, you can do things to help that.

I have no regrets in my life even the crazy things I've been in. It all made me the I am today and I wouldn't change anything. I'm happy with who I am!

Usually, there's a story I've told that leads up to why I'm singing the song. The whole concept of the show was about being authentic and connecting with these songs. The best way to do that was in a room with an audience and for people to listen to that.

The most important opinion, of both my work and my conduct in life, is my own.

Who Do You Think You Are?

It is a startling thing, the need to feel utterly believed.

I love a film where I get squished by two dumpsters or I fly through the air.

Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts - what was said, what happened where and when - what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.

I never take anything for granted, and I never forget how lucky I have been, and am.

Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.

So the experts think we could have an AIDS-free generation in Africa by 2015, even if the mothers are positive.

I don't avoid anyone but I always think some people hate me.

It's hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I'm sad to say that this method works. If you don't give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do.

It's about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message. I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone like me, and if I cannot be open in my life, how on earth can they?

It's actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you'll be okay.

Once in a while it's good to challenge yourself in a way that's really daunting.

My mum always told me I was precious, while my dad always told me I was worthless. I think that's a good grounding for a balanced life.

It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another.

Macbeth was the first play I ever read.

Here my advice to young gay person or actor its to be yourself and not to be pressured into what other people want you to be

It's exciting to be with really, really good people. Some people make you feel like you've got to up your game. Working with good people is always good.

Look at him he's just now getting ready and dressed and its 6 fucking minutes to the show! God fucking musicians.

We both lacked the same thing in our childhoods - the love of a father ... We both sought to fill that lack in our adult lives with family and love, as everyone does, but also with thrills and sometimes periods of recklessness. Luckily, I have always come back from my recklessness. Tommy Darling did not.

When there's an adult person who's scaring you, you grow up pretty quickly.

You know what I hate most of all in the whole wide world? ... More than people who think that if you're bisexual it means you'll fuck absolutely anyone (especially them)?