Interview: Alan Cumming

PEOPLE know I'm kind of wicked and I say things. I think they really respond to you if you're open

Whether he's treading the boards as a gold-kilt-clad Greek god, or advising America which way to vote in the Presidential elections, Alan Cumming knows one thing for sure – people want to look at him

Alan Cumming pops his head out of the ground-floor meeting room where he's just finished a phone interview. His cigarette is ready-rolled in his hand, his hair's tousled and dark in a short bob that gets tucked into a trucker cap. He looks a little bit sleepy, like he wouldn't have minded an extra hour in bed this morning. "Wanna come?" he asks, waving the little roll-up, so off we troupe. Cumming's in Scotland getting ready to slip back into that gold kilt and head off on tour as Dionysus in John Tiffany's visually stunning Greek tragedy The Bacchae which opened the Edinburgh Festival last year.

Cumming's role was a show-stopper, audiences loved his camp humour (those years in cabin crew sitcom The High Life paid off) and his star status. Tiffany's Dionysus is a petulant pop star of a god, by turns preening and needy, then vengeful and terrifying. The role demanded an actor who could command the stage – who could fill the shoes of a god – and that's exactly what Cumming did.

Part of the excitement about The Bacchae was the fact that the Greek tragedy was director Tiffany's first show following his era-defining Black Watch. But mainly the frenzy was about Cumming. Dionysus may have been a god returning to Thebes, but his return almost paled into insignificance against the story of the Carnoustie boy coming home to play on a Scottish stage for the first time in 16 years.

"It was intense, really scary," he says with a smile that shows his dimples. He tells me a story to capture the height of the frenzy. It was opening day and he was presenting at an awards ceremony. As well as the room being scattered with magazines bearing his picture on the cover, as the compere thanked him for taking part, she (Cumming puts on his best west-coast meedja accent) said, " 'Well, Alan, the nation's cultural hopes rest with you'." It's the kind of hyperbole for which we Scots have a particular talent.

As it was, Cumming lived up to expectations and now, after stints in Aberdeen and Inverness, The Bacchae will be heading to New York, where he lives these days. So is it the frenzy of last August all over again? "The brochure for the Lincoln Center is, like, Ralph Fiennes is doing this Beckett thing and Laurie Anderson's doing this and then you get to the centre page and there's a picture of me and all these quotes." He mimics gagging. The pressure is there but it's obvious Cumming loves it.

He talks quickly, dropping sentences midway through if they don't quite work for him. His soft Scottish accent rises and falls like Perthshire hills, but it now bears traces of his hometown, New York. It's no surprise really, he's lived there since 1993 and it's fair to say America loves Alan Cumming. And yet his irreverent, saucy and usually tongue-firmly-in-cheek humour, his sensibility and sexuality – he married his partner Grant Shaffer in London in January 2007 but has had serious relationships with women too – is, well, hardly middle America. "People know I'm kind of wicked and I say things," he says with a raised eyebrow. "I think they really respond to you if you're open and you say what you think because not many people do that."

He says that his mum, who still lives in Scotland but spends time with him in New York, sometimes picks him up for being too open. "But I just tell her, I'm a grown-up, this is how I live my life and so I'm honest about it.

"I play parts that are often provocative and challenging in some ways for an audience, but they also see me as cheeky and warm in real life which makes them less scared of me. There's a duality in that. I'd like to think that they like the fact that I am what I am and I say what I think and they're refreshed by it."

WHETHER HE'S PLAYING venge-ful gods, sexually ambiguous nightclub singers or nerdy boyfriends, there's something about Alan Cumming that makes people think that each role is just another aspect of him. Why, I ask him, does he think that happens?

"Rob Marshall (director of Chicago] said something to me," he says and quickly, "I'm too embarrassed to actually say it, but ..." Oh no, you've got to say it, I tell him, the story won't make any sense otherwise. For a moment I wonder if he's fishing for compliments but as he stutters and stumbles over his words, he does seem genuinely embarrassed. What Marshall told him was this: "You are a star, Alan. Whatever you do, even if you just walk on, people will want to look at you." Cumming hesitates. "I'm really embarrassed, but I think in a way, what I took from that was, and this is what links back to the parts, is that you let something of yourself come through. It's not the same in every role, of course, but you're allowing the audience in and they're interested in you, whenever you're on the screen they're interested in you. That's above just being actor and playing a role, it's that people are interested in me as a person."

When Cumming graduated from the RSAMD and then had his first hit in Scotland with The High Life, written with co-star Forbes Masson, he never had a masterplan. Even when he was playing Hamlet at the Donmar in London and dabbling in film he was just "rolling through life". But then there was, after a nervous breakdown, the end of his marriage to actor and writer Hilary Lyon, and therapy. Cumming worked on the demons from his childhood in Perthshire, which was marred by his father's violence, and started to put himself back together. And then came the life-changing role of Emcee in Cabaret, first in London and then in New York. After that everything changed.

"The production was amazing," he says, "but also for me as a person at that time I was like, 'here I am, I'm fine, I'm very sorted out as a person, I'm very together'. My personal life and my professional life just came together."

So what does he put his success down to?

"I go with my gut," he says. "When I went back to America (after The Bacchae last year], the writers' strike was looming and people were saying to me, you need to do a big film, there might not be films made for a while, blah blah." He rolls his eyes. "The two films that were nearly going to happen, one was a Jennifer Aniston vehicle and the other one was a Sandra Bullock vehicle." In the midst of this, he was asked if he'd like to be in The Seagull on stage. "It was like 25 pence a week," he says with a laugh, but he could walk to work and he fancied it. "Out of the cosmos came this really great play with a really great actress (Dianne Wiest] and a really nutty Russian director. So I did it and it was really great."

As well as the performance, Cumming had fun with his fellow cast members. One night, they went to a club run by a friend of Cumming's featuring circus performers. "They had this amazing big balloon in the middle of the floor and you had to take your clothes off down to your pants and get inside it. There was a guy in there, so I said hello and then Kelly, who was in the play, arrived in there too, and then of course your pants start to come off and there were photographers ..." Just an ordinary couple of pints after work with Mr Cumming then.

"The next day when I went into work, Dianne was like, 'what did you do last night? Kelly told me she was in a balloon with you in her bra and panties? What happened?' " And then there's a long giggle.

Cumming's not shy about his sexual past, present or future. He's been open about his relationships with both women and men and his desire not to be limited to one label.

"I think the whole thing of having to say what you are is a dangerous thing because it's like a uniform, it has a kind of menacing quality for me. I think it's a bit more fluid, as it were. A lot of people in life, not just in the gay community, close themselves off to the possibilities of things because they have a sense of 'I am this person and I like this and I wear these clothes'. It's like a horse with blinkers on. That worries me and I'm resistant to it.

"When you are like, 'maybe I'm this, or maybe I'm that', it makes people, sometimes to its detriment, feel that they can somehow hook into that." What does he mean? "Well like, a lot of people feel a bit more relaxed about being flirty when they're around me." Oh, you up the frisky quotient, I offer? "I totally do. I sometimes feel I'm like a little pied piper," he says, wiggling his fingers as though he's playing a tin whistle.

Sometimes Cumming's sexuality is characterised as that of a naughty boy in a sweetie shop who can't choose between midget gems and licorice allsorts, but there's a much more political aspect to Cumming, and not only in relation to gay rights. "I'm working with the Obama campaign," he says with a twinkle in his eye. "I love him. He's so inspiring."

Cumming was recruited by a Barack Obama campaigner when he organised a Rock the Vote event in his local bar in New York's east village. "If you came to the bar and registered to vote you got a free Cumming product (his fragrance range which includes Cumming In A Bar soap] and a free beer," he says with a grin. "The gay community, which is a community that is really discriminated against in the United States, is not very politicised. I got about 50 people registered to vote – I was really pleased – it's a tiny little gay bar.

"What is so great when I get awards for when I've used my voice rather than being an actor is that people are actually giving you an award for being you, not playing a character. That's a really great thing, more than getting plaudits for how you do your job, it's how you are as a person."

With a knock at the door, our time is up. In small talk he tells me that he's going to see Liza Minnelli later that evening ("She's a friend and a darling") and I tell him, so am I. "Maybe I'll see you there?"

That night, as hundreds of overexcited men and women file into the concert hall, I wonder what the chances are of bumping into Cumming. Most people are seated and there's a buzz of anticipation as well as the odd couple of notes of Cabaret and giggles from women in their sixties and seventies who are acting like teenagers at a gig. Then he appears, the same trucker cap pulled low over the mop of hair. He files into his row near the front and if anyone recognises him they're doing that typically Scottish thing of pretending that they don't. As the lights dim, I lose sight of him and then the show begins.

An hour or so of show-stopping tunes later and what Cumming hasn't banked on is Liza Minnelli's old-school Hollywood charm, which includes name checking the Scots actor and telling us that he's a "great friend" and "so much fun". The spotlight roves the room, Liza squints into the crowd, and finally Cumming stands up to take his bow to heartfelt applause.

When the show finishes, I nip down and say hello. As I approach he's surrounded by middle-aged women thrusting little bits of paper at him and asking for photos. "It's for Marina, my daughter," one sequin-clad lady says as he squiggles his name on the paper in his hand. "She just loves you in Spy Kids." Cumming smiles and graciously signs and then poses for a photograph. As the autograph hunters drift away, I step forward.

"Hello," he says, grinning. "Well, that was embarrassing," he adds, raising his eyebrows until they disappear underneath his cap. Hardly, I say, and his smile turns into a grin. Alan Cumming's a big star, he knows it and he loves it. I don't blame him.

• The Bacchae, His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, tonight (tel: [phone]); Eden Court, Inverness, June 26-28 (tel: [phone]), then the Rose Theater, Lincoln Center Festival, New York, July 2-13 (tel: [phone]).