Alan Cumming on selfie etiquette, meeting Elizabeth Taylor and why he supports Clinton
No one may quite understand the idiom “a picture is worth a thousand words” better than Alan Cumming. His new memoir, “You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures,” seeks to tell his life story through the medium of photographs.
“I like writing about my life: I think I’ve got quite a fascinating life,” Cumming told Yahoo News and Finance Anchor Bianna Golodryga. “I think it’s kind of a crazy life and so I wanted to [write] about it, but not in a kind of normal you know, ‘I was born and this happened and that happened.’… Photos became a way of literally letting people see a snapshot of my life.”
While the book is filled with beautifully staged portraits, Cumming writes that he’s been taking selfies since the 1980s. Though having one’s picture taken comes with the territory of being a celebrity, he confesses that sometimes he doesn’t want to take photos with fans, especially when he is with friends, at a bar or cleaning up after his dog.
“I love a selfie, and I do take selfies with people a lot, but sometimes I don’t want to,” said Cumming. “I think it’s an interesting thing: We all have to de-condition ourselves to assuming that everyone, every time and anywhere in the world can just do a selfie. It’s just becoming ridiculous.”
The actor, who has played everyone from a conniving political consultant in “The Good Wife” to the emcee at the Kit Kat Club in “Cabaret,” still sometimes gets starstruck. One of his favorite celebrity encounters was with Elizabeth Taylor at Carrie Fisher’s birthday party.
“I got a bit nervous and I chatted to [Taylor] for a second, and then I kind of wandered in to get a drink, and Carrie was like ‘What are you doing here? Get back in there and flank that legend!” said Cumming. “We [Taylor and Cumming] bonded over being dirty.”
But he still hasn’t met every reality TV star or politician, including Donald Trump. He did sit near the GOP presidential candidate at Saturday Night Live’s 40th Anniversary special.
“He was there, and over the aisle away from me was Sarah Palin, and I thought, Why did I end up in this section?” said Cumming.
Cumming, who is a dual citizen of Scotland and the U.S., is a Hillary Clinton supporter.
“I just feel that as a former secretary of state, having had access to all this intelligence for so long, she’s a much more informed, and much better and a much calmer person to take on the responsibility of trying to liaise with all these other countries, and trying to work out how to stop it,” said Cumming.
He also considers Monica Lewinsky one of his best friends. Though he thinks bringing up the Lewinsky scandal in the debates by either Trump or the moderators is “obviously a bit of a low blow,” he compared Clinton’s handling of the issue to how a diplomat would handle conflict.
“She stayed in that marriage, she made it work, she compromised, she, with diplomacy and skill, made a success of something that must have been incredibly painful for her, and I really admire her for that,” said Cumming.
