Category: Entertainment

There can’t be many people having more fun in their jobs than Alan Cumming. Whether it’s giggling his way around Scotland in a camper van with an outrageously rude Miriam Margolyes for Channel 4, sending up musicals in the gleeful song’n’dance parody Schmigadoon! or doing cabaret at his own bar Club Cumming in Manhattan, the phrase he repeats most often when talking about his various projects is: “It was a hoot!”

His latest memoir, Baggage, recounts hedonism aplenty, unexpectedly becoming the toast of New York as the emcee in the musical Cabaret on Broadway in the 90s. But that book came after a much more sober and surprising 2014 memoir, Not My Father’s Son, recounting the abusive behavior of his father during his childhood in Angus, Scotland. The disconnect between a person’s public persona and the fuller story of their life is one that fascinates Cumming and it’s the trigger for his latest one-man show, Burn, based on the life of poet Robert Burns, premiering at the Edinburgh international festival.

In popular imagination we think of Burns as “romping in the hay and ploughing, and ‘Oh, here’s a poem!’” says Cumming. But the actor had “inklings” there was more to Burns than that. “And actually I think he was quite a tortured soul.” In writing his own autobiographies, Cumming thinks he’s changed his particular narrative – he is not only the boyish pansexual performer in circular specs with a mischievous grin that glints at me over Zoom, but also a man with a complicated past and a commitment to emotional frankness . He wanted to do some of the same for Burns, to undermine the sentimentality, the inclination “to biscuit-tin” him, as Cumming puts it. “To make someone into this figure that does n’t reveal their wholeness of him and hides any chance of finding out the real person.”

A lover of drink and women, Burns had numerous affairs and illegitimate children while married to Jean Armour. “I was initially drawn to him when thinking about desire,” says Cumming. “How we have to constantly battle with having the life that we want and controlling our desires. I thought it was interesting the way he lived his life: his sexuality and promiscuity and the mess he made.

“He was a rock star,” Cumming adds, “but a rock star who had a huge hit – his first book of poems was massive – and then the difficult second album.” After success in his 20s, Burns dedicated himself to collecting and arranging folk songs and burned through his earnings, taking up a job as an excise officer to make a living, then dying in poor health at the age of 37.

It was a tumultuous life, and delving into it brought plenty of surprises for Cumming. Discovering, for example, that his letters from him were n’t written in Scots like his poems from him. “Writing in Scots was a choice for him, like the Proclaimers coming along and singing in Scottish accents, it’s radical and amazing.” And finding out that it’s generally agreed Burns was bipolar. “It’s not a controversial thing any more in academic circles to say that,” says Cumming. “There are surveys where you can see the manic phases in both his output from him and his libido from him, and records of doctors’ visits and depressive times. He has this energy schism going on in his life from him.” Burns’s spirit may now preside over merry celebrations of haggis and Hogmanay, but having pored over his letters from him Cumming could n’t help but ask: was he happy? “He never seems joyous,” says Cumming. “I don’t think he was as happy as we’d all like him to be, and that was a shock.”

All these themes and more will weave their way into Burn, and just as the research offered up the unexpected for Cumming, the show itself comes in a surprising form, as a dance theater piece. There’s some film, some text, but it’s mostly movement. “I’m 57, it’s not the time to be doing your first solo dance piece!” he chuckles at himself. But this is Cumming getting in touch with his true self from him. “I’ve always slightly regretted that I’m not a dancer,” he says.

Cumming has danced on stage before, of course, and the roots of Burn go right back to Cabaret, when he reprized his award-winning role in 2014. “I was 50 and I remember thinking: I’m never going to be this fit again, dancer-fit. I felt sad that something I’d really enjoyed was over. And then I thought, maybe I’ve got one more thing in me, and I put that out into the universe, thinking it might be another musical, or I might dance a bit in a play. I didn’t expect this.”

The universe answered him – or rather Cumming’s network of friends, producers, choreographers, directors and festivals nudged the idea along, including movement director Steven Hoggett, with whom he’d worked on The Bacchae for National Theater of Scotland. At some point the dance idea collided with his “inklings” about Burns and the two combined to become Burn, Hoggett co-creating with another choreographer, Vicki Manderson, and featuring music by Anna Meredith.

Making the show is definitely pushing cumming physically. “The last workshop, I was exhausted,” he says. “I had to go home and lie in baths of various salts.” He had to switch his digs because one place he was staying had no bath for his aching body of him. (He lives ordinarily in New York, with illustrator husband Grant Shaffer, although you get the sense there’s not much “ordinary” in his hectic schedule.) But he’s delighted to be dancing. “I tell stories with writing, I use my face in my acting, but to tell it completely with your body is a great thing,” he says. “And I don’t think it necessarily ends when your body isn’t capable of doing everything it could do.”

By which he means, bodies beyond their 20s and 30s have something to offer too. “I love seeing older people dance and move.” Cumming also loves how dance can make you loosen your grip on linear storytelling. “You’re forced into letting things go, the normal way you interpret narrative.”

Here’s a fact: Cumming actually made his dance debut in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake – the famous gender-switched version where all the swans were danced by men – playing one of the autograph hunters. He shared a flat with Bourne and hung out with the dancers. “I knew a few swans intimately,” he says with a little dreamy smile. “That was magical.”

He has a few dance people in his circle, including Mikhail Baryshnikov (whom Cumming says is “hilarious”, telling a tale about surprising the ballet legend in a dressing room wearing some indecently tight shorts that “needed to be pixelated”). A protege of Baryshnikov’s, Aszure Barton, choreographed Cumming in The Threepenny Opera. “She said, ‘Oh, I want to choreograph something for you and Misha’ but I was too shy.” He felt he was n’t enough of a dancer, but now he thinks the strict expectation that a dancer is someone with a particular technique and physique only stymies the art form. “In other art forms you are allowed to be raw and real and to tell your own story and I think dance has been remiss in that and basically says: these are the confines, you have to be able to do these things, otherwise your story’s not valid here.”

Cumming laughs in the face of boundaries generally, as he continues his omnivorous career. There’s a role in the new Marlowe film starring Liam Neeson as the private detective; there’s a second series of Schmigadoon! that he’s filming in Vancouver when we speak, spoofing the musicals of the 60s and 70s; and there’s another jaunt with Margolyes, extending the tour from Scotland to California. Having known each other a little, the idea to pair up came after being on the Graham Norton show together and they’ve since become close chums.

“We leave little WhatsApps for each other all the time, you’d be shocked by some of them,” he laughs. “There’s zero filter. She’ll say, ‘Darling, now I’m sitting on the loo so if there’s strange noises you’ll know what it is.’” Filming with Margolyes is like a Carry On movie, he says. “She always manages to top me in the naughtiness.” It’s a motley mix of projects that keeps him happy, and feeds all the aspects of a multifaceted performer. “I want to do good work, I want to do interesting things that challenge me,” he says. “But I do want to have fun.”

Pslow of movies have been pinned on seemingly foolproof plans that go catastrophically awry in execution; less common is the movie that hinges on a scheme so ill-advised, so rife with potential for disaster, so guaranteed to end in failure that one wonders why a character would even try it in the first place.

The new film I Love My Dad falls into the latter category, which was precisely what star Patton Oswalt drew to it. His face-voice combo from him has that special something that makes a person a sought-after character actor and winning comedian, memorable yet unobtrusive. He’s shot hours of stand-up specials, appeared in at least one episode of all your favorite sitcoms from Parks and Recreation to Curb Your Enthusiasm (though he counts Arrested Development and Just Shoot Me! as the ones he most wishes he could’ve booked ), and amassed movie roles from beloved comedies to the voice lead of Ratatouille to an awards-tipped dramatic turn in Young Adult. “If they ask me, I do it!” I laugh. “I like doing stuff.” His against-type performance of him as a townie with more to him than his exterior of him as a disabled sad sack opposite Charlize Theron presages his latest gig of him, which pushes him to new extremes of discomfort.

Oswalt throws all of himself into a role most actors wouldn’t touch with rubber gloves: hapless Chuck, the one deadbeat dad to rule them all, a man introduced taking in a dog he finds with his young son and then furtively tearing down a “ LOST DOG” poster with the pooch’s picture as the boy asks whether it might have an owner. He’s swindled and corner-cut his way through life, rising to the top of an online chess league by copying moves from an automated program. His most egregious misdeed of him forms the basis for the film and comes from the real-life experience of writer-director James Morosini, who also appears onscreen as his own stand-in Franklin. Upon getting blocked by Franklin on Facebook, Chuck whips up a dummy profile using photos of a kindly diner waitress and engages the fruit of his loins from him in a catfish flirtation that turns sexual with skin-crawling swiftness.

Even if the sexting wasn’t visually represented in the most awkward scenes of intimacy between two men this side of Wet Hot American Summer (and it is), the taboo-teasing performance would still require as much empathy as an actor can muster. Oswalt soon realized that only by meeting Chuck on his level of him, however contemptible, could he hope to access the mindset that goes through with an idea so stunningly bad as to be impervious to success.

“I think he’s one of these people who, very fatally, wants credit for wanted to do the right thing,” Oswalt tells the Guardian from a Manhattan hotel room. “So it does n’t really matter if his plan is going to be successful or just outrageous, it’s all ‘do n’t people see I eventually want to do right by my son even though I’m not following through on cualquier cosa?’ He’s taught himself that if he does an amazing apology later, it doesn’t matter what goes wrong. Unfortunately, that’s shaped his life from him.”

This is the work of an actor, honed to its essence. At the core of some stomach-turning choices, Oswalt located an impulse he could tap into, seeing Chuck’s self-destructive bonehead moves as an exaggerated form of the same ethical shortcomings we all live with. “I’m absolutely guilty of that, too, wanting to do well, and thinking that alone counts,” Oswalt readily admits. He came to see that not so much separates his own imperfections from Chuck’s, particularly in terms of parenthood, which forces us all to come to terms with our varying levels of human limitation. His daughter de ella Alice may be just out of her tween years, but their relationship enabled him to imagine a not-so-happy version of it.

“This is the first one where I really play a dad who’s trying, in his messed-up way, to repair things in a relationship that’s really gone wrong,” Oswalt says. “That’s a very new perspective, for me, that I had to learn how to embrace. I haven’t done a parent just dealing with parenthood before. Playing the father of a son who’s in his twenties, I have to at least have an idea in my mind of what it was like when he was five, eight, twelve, and the ways I messed that up. This led to a lot of emotion for me, remembering the way my daughter was at those ages. What if I’d been neglectful and shut her out of her? That’s so alien and cruel to me. How does this guy compartmentalize, even if he it’s subconscious, some real self-loathing? How do you get out of bed in the morning carrying that load? His only way of him is to take this desperate measure and rationalize it for himself as helping a kid who does n’t know any better.

The clarity and lack of hesitation with which Oswalt delved into the nuts and bolts of acting endeared him to Morosini, though they bonded first as kindred “massive film buffs.” In this askew portrait of paternal devotion, they both saw links to the hysterical mania of Frownland and the excruciating cringe of Toni Erdmann, while Morosini traced his influences from him back to the mother-daughter discord of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. “These messed-up relationships manifest in madness,” Oswalt explains. It’s in conversations like these that he’s most engaged and animated, a genuine love of the game explaining a staggeringly prolific career soon to enter its fourth decade. Soon, he’ll appear in an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy saga Sandman, a graphic novel that entered Oswalt’s life sophomore year of college. “The books really shaped me so much,” he says. “They felt me ​​in a good direction.”

The Sandman job falls more squarely within Oswalt’s purview, which tends toward the side of the nerd-approved. In a memorable guest stint on Parks and Recreation, he improvised a minute-long monologue detailing his wackadoodle plans for the Star Wars franchise. He’s popped by Agents of Shield, contributed a little voice work to Eternals, and co-created the MODOK streaming series. As the authority on comics-based media (“Not the authority, maybe an authority,” he’s quick to correct, adding that “there’s an Illuminati council of us”), he’s more qualified than most to comment on the state of the MCU super-union. Marvel’s total industry domination can’t last forever, and he sees expansion as the key to remaining creatively vital. He imagines a modern-day equivalent to the circa-’50s Hollywood studio system, under which benevolent managerial neglect led to some of the American cinema’s finest works.

“Some people, like Buster Keaton, very freewheeling, got crushed by the studio system,” Oswalt explains. “But others like Vincente Minnelli and Michael Curtiz thrived, doing amazing things using that system. To go deeper, here’s my question: when will Marvel unknowingly hire their Douglas Sirk, a guy who comes in and smuggles in all kinds of hidden richness they don’t even see at the studio? That’s gonna be great … We don’t know yet, what a 20, 30, 40 million Marvel movie looks like.”

From there, he’s off, waxing rhapsodic on the thrilling potential of lessened oversight, his line of reasoning bouncing from a little-remembered Aquaman run in the ’80s to the much-maligned surrealist sitcom ‘Til Death. He’s seen everything you’ve seen and would love to discuss it, just five minutes of our conversation covering the early works of Ramin Bahrani, the ‘hugely underrated’ recent action throwback Run & Gun, and the grassroots phenomenon springing up around Tollywood masterpiece RRR . A perfect stranger starts to see what it means when an actor is described as “good in the room”.

In his easy and affable demeanor, Oswalt makes an unexpectedly apt choice for a man confident in his ability to smile and shrug his way out of any predicament. He uses his innate liking of him for unsavory purposes in the case of I Love My Dad, but offscreen, that’s the secret to his longevity of him in an industry notorious for chewing actors up and spitting out. He’s earned his stripes from him, built up his share of fame, lost love, found it again – it seems like he’s done it all, and he’s just glad to be here.

More than anything, he sincerely likes his job, that rarest privilege of all. An offhand question about his one-line bit part of him on Magnolia leads to an excited recollection of getting flown out to Reno, taught to play baccarat by Paul Thomas Anderson, and then hanging from a tree costumed in a full-body wetsuit on a brutal Californian morning in July. Oswalt still remembers the sagacity that the director shared with him on that day: “I only got to read the one page of the script I’m in, so I’m confused. I’m a croupier, and now I’m in a wet suit? He wouldn’t say why, he just said, ‘You’re the first frog who falls out of the sky.’ Eventually, I got what I meant.” And now it’s on to the finer points of foreshadowing, when it works, when it doesn’t, who’s gotten it right, etc ad infinitum. One gets the sense he has a million stories like this, and that he would gladly spend eternity sharing them.