Alan Cumming Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Alan Cumming

Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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 — Alan Cumming

I think you can be as big as you like as long as you mean it. I really do. — Alan Cumming

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! — Alan Cumming

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

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. — Alan Cumming

I love long flights. The feeling of being completely unreachable is something I savor, and the limbolike state of being, having departed but not arrived, somehow allows me to catch up with myself, to regroup and check in. — Alan Cumming

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

You should *have* an experience; it shouldn't just *be* an experience. — Alan Cumming

I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare. — Alan Cumming

I'm Scottish first, and it's odd to hear that I'm a Scottish-American. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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

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. — Alan Cumming

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

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. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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

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. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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

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

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

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

Be who you like as long as you mean it. — Alan Cumming

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

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. — Alan Cumming

But I smell the roses not just to remind myself of how lucky I am, but also to wonder how on earth it all happened. I smell the roses to try and figure out how I came to be in the garden at all. — Alan Cumming

I'm not a fan of Twitter. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

My feeling about work is it's much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa. — Alan Cumming

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

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

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. — Alan Cumming

And so I have grown up wanting to feel secure when it comes to money, but doing so by treating it as something to be enjoyed, shared, and not given power. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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

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. — Alan Cumming

Sometimes people get really sniffy about the films you choose if you've done more dramatic projects or you're classically trained. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

It's really rare for film directors to be that interested in things other than themselves. — Alan Cumming

I think directing in a team is a really good idea because it stops the cult of the director as God straight away, and also you're discussing things on set so it opens it out to everyone and it becomes a totally collaborative thing. And you have someone who supports you when you're feeling a bit insecure. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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 — Alan Cumming

I lie there for a while in the dusk, then make a decision, little knowing how it will affect every facet of my life and fiber of my being for the rest of my life: I say no to shame. — Alan Cumming

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

For yes, being a woman, even one with a penis and for the purposes of drama, 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 to escape whilst at the same time drawing attention to their sexual and secondary sexual characteristics.
And I think that has happened so that men feel they can ogle them and protect them in equal measure. — Alan Cumming

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

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

I was so scared of going back to the theatre after 'Hamlet.' I didn't know if I'd do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it. — Alan Cumming

Most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes. — Alan Cumming

I loved the sound of the snow. It was calm and echoey at the same time, and the world felt a safer place being insulated by it. My — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here. — Alan Cumming

I think people deny themselves by putting themselves into categories. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

Macbeth was the first play I ever read. — Alan Cumming

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

Who Do You Think You Are? — Alan Cumming

I'm quite good, though I say it myself, at making strangers feel at ease. — Alan Cumming

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 — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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? — Alan Cumming

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

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. — Alan Cumming

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

With 'Urban Secrets,' I just really liked the idea of wandering around chatting to people. — Alan Cumming

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)? — Alan Cumming

A sweaty Macbeth with blood on his arms coming in fresh from the battle doesn't interest me. — Alan Cumming

I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they're so universal. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming

He ... knew, in that instant, that his life would not be an easy one-he was different, he looked different, he thought differently. — Alan Cumming

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. — Alan Cumming