Alan Cumming: "Tip Toe shows how normalised violence and hatred have become"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Sat in the penthouse suite of a chi-chi London hotel on a sunny Saturday, Alan Cumming is halfway through explaining how hedonism and activism aren’t mutually exclusive when he suddenly stops mid-sentence and stares at his hand. For a moment, he looks confused – then suddenly relieved.

“I wondered what was wrong with my finger – it’s green. But I’ve got green eye make-up on, haven’t I, from this morning,” he says. “And I’ve still got my blotches from my dermatologist zapping them the other day in New York. It’s a good look. I’m glad this isn’t a Zoom.”

This stream-of-consciousness interlude midway through an insightful socio-political analysis is typical Cumming. Later, for example, we’ll jump from how much he loves presenting The Traitors US to the fact that the kitchen of his new Highlands home isn’t finished. And later still, we leap from how the new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, didn’t attend the shindig to celebrate Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2026, despite being one of them (Cumming is also listed, as an Icon) to how the old Inverness sheriff court has been turned into a museum. It’s not that he’s flighty or has a short attention span. Far from it. It’s more that his brain works at breakneck speed and he’s thinking several things at once.

Well, of course, he is. You only need look at his career – his careers – to see that reflected. To go from Scottish 1980s cabaret act Victor and Barry, to the Emcee in Cabaret in the West End and on Broadway, to seven seasons of The Good Wife, to a one-man Macbeth on stage via Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and an X-Men movie, to winning four Emmys for The Traitors US while writing seven books and running his own cabaret club takes some doing.

“Alan’s capacity for invention and reinvention is like no one else’s,” says John Tiffany, the multi-award-winning theatre director. He directed Cumming in The Bacchae, which opened the 2007 Edinburgh International Festival, and Macbeth in 2012 (Glasgow and Broadway). “His curiosity, versatility, ability and indefatigability fuse to embody the essence of a modern polymath.”

In fact, you only need to look at his life right now to see this polymath-y-ness in action. Since he arrived in London last night from New York (where he did attend the Time 100 soirée), he’s been doing publicity for Tip Toe, Russell T Davies’s new drama, in which he plays the lead. After our interview, he’s off to do another photoshoot before flying to Scotland where he’s been artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre since January 2025.

His inaugural season kicked off at the end of May with the Tony- and Olivier-award-winning musical Once and includes My Fair Lady, in which he plays Henry Higgins, and a new play by Martin Sherman, directed by Cumming and starring Simon Russell Beale as Liberace. He’s just finished a tour of Scotland with The High Life: the Musical, which is based on his and Forbes Masson’s 1990s BBC sitcom set aboard the ramshackle Air Scotia. (Sample line: “How’s your arse for love bites, Miss Spurtle?”)

After all that? Perhaps home to the Highlands or possibly home to New York. Or, maybe, to Los Angeles, which is where he was on Tuesday, before he was in New York, before he flew to London yesterday to speak to Radio Times today.

“I saw Liza on Tuesday in LA,” he says casually, like Ms Minnelli is also my friend. “And I’ve got a story about that.” She wasn’t the reason for his visit, though. “I was Emmy whoring. Doing a couple of For Your Consideration events for The Traitors. FYC… I love that! And I love The Traitors.”

How much does he love The Traitors? “It’s such fun, the people are so nice, the production values are amazing and, organisationally, it’s excellent. And it’s this huge hit and it makes me a lot of money. Also, it was completely leftfield for me to do, which I also love. I feel I’ve done that quite a lot in my career, and it’s really heartening when you take a chance, you get it right and you have a good time. It could have been that I did one series that nobody watched and I would’ve moved on. I’ve done that plenty of times with other things. So, for it to be this cultural juggernaut is just great.”

More than that, he says, “I think it’s one of the biggest contributions I’ve made to queer culture. You know, me walking in in a frock on a show that everyone in America loves.” He hopes to present The Traitors US for “all eternity” to keep Lala, his dog, in the style to which she has become accustomed.

That The Traitors US is filmed in Scotland is a bonus. Having lived in New York for 25 years, he’s now spending more of his time in Scotland (hence the new, currently kitchen-less house). “To feel that you’re in a country that has a government aligned with your values is so great. To feel the kindness that I feel around me in Scotland and for it not to be seen as a weakness is so affirming. Of course, there are kind people in America and I live in New York, which is a different kettle of fish to the rest of America, but the government…” He shakes his head, disgusted, furious and weary simultaneously. “It is a fascist country and I’m paying taxes to it. It’s horrible.”

Cumming thinks that the election of Donald Trump was “a backlash against Barack Obama. I love Obama but I do feel he didn’t do us a favour by not letting on about the level of racism and fury he was subjected to. We all thought America was in a much better state than it actually was, because it’s always just teetering on the brink of awfulness. In those Obama years, there was hope, positivity and decency. But people were calling him all the worst things – and now these people have been validated.”

He pours scorn on the idea that Trump is making America great again. “Make America like the 1950s again, more like. When black people would serve you, you could do whatever you liked, and anyone who you didn’t like, you would get the boys to duff them up. That’s what they want. That’s what they’re creating. It’s not a new thing for people to be so bigoted and intolerant – it always has been like that. It’s just been suppressed. What’s shocking now is how public and blatant it is and how comfortable people feel agreeing with it.”

Which brings us to his new Channel 4 drama Tip Toe. In it, Cumming plays Leo, a 59-year-old gay man who owns a bar on Manchester’s Canal Street and lives in a well-to-do neighbourhood of the city. When we first “meet” Leo, he is dead. Murdered. Strung up from the lamppost outside his house by his neighbour, Clive (David Morrissey). From this horrific moment, we then flashback ten days to the beginning of the chain of events that end in a suburban hanging.

While Tip Toe has all you’d expect from a Russell T Davies drama – smart dialogue, big characters drawn boldly, the occasional spine-tingling speech (in the first episode, it’s Paul Rhys’s Melba who delivers it) – it’s not feel-good TV. You could look at it, along with Queer as Folk and Cucumber, as forming something of a trilogy charting gay life over the last three decades in the UK. But Tip Toe is more ambitious than that. It’s an exploration of contemporary Britain as a whole. It’s about the corrosive effect of economic insecurity, the online radicalisation of disenfranchised men, the demonisation of minorities for political ends. It’s about the polarisation and atomisation of society, how we’re all glued to our phones and how everyone is so angry nowadays. All told through a gay lens.

“I’ve wanted to work with Russell for so long and I loved playing this part,” he says. “It was an incredible thing to be a part of and one of the things I’ve done that I’m most proud of. I’m so glad I did it, but I was just so glad to be over it as well, you know? To have the weight of him lifted off me… It was so intense.”

He says that “Tip Toe shows how normalised violence and hatred have become. You’ve got Trump saying he’s going to annihilate a whole race but are world leaders going, ‘How dare you speak like this?’ No. There was no challenge to that level of provocation and bigotry, and that’s wrong. It’s a failure of leadership that they didn’t speak out. If our leaders don’t speak out and demand decency, we’re not going to get it.”

Cumming pauses and allows himself a smile. He says he’s thinking about the King’s visit to America. “I never thought I would say this but poor Charles. How low do you go? I mean, what a terrible job having to go and smile and shake the hand of that president to basically save Keir Starmer’s arse.”

For all that Tip Toe is an arresting, compelling, entertaining piece of television, what good will it do? Clearly, he and Davies hope that it does something. Cumming has starred in Cabaret and Bent, both plays that warn about the rise of the far right, and yet here we are 81 years after the end of the Second World War and the right is in the ascendant across Europe, and America is, according to him, a fascist country.

“Why do we do all these plays from centuries ago? Why do we do Shakespeare? Why did we do The Bacchae, a play from more than 2,000 years ago? Because they have something to tell us – a basic tenet that it’s important for us to hear, to keep hearing. With Cabaret, people get it. They’re like ‘Whoa!’ But it doesn’t stop the thing happening.

“I do think it can wake people up, though, and make them think, ‘Well, f***, I’ve been a part of this’ and – and this is what Tip Toe is doing – provoking them. To stop and draw a line in the sand. So that the next time that somebody says something that’s a bit anti-transy, you won’t just let it go. Art can’t save the world but art can change minds. I wouldn’t do what I do if I didn’t believe that.”

Tip Toe begins on Sunday 31 May at 9.00pm on C4

The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.