Alan Cumming: I want to play Lady Macbeth
As he prepares to play a drag queen in new TV drama The Runaway, the colourful Scot tells Benji Wilson why his acting CV is intentionally full of surprises.
By Benji Wilson 3:36PM BST 30 Mar 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8416451/Alan-Cumming-I-want-to-play-Lady-Macbeth.htmlThere aren't many actors for whom playing a flamboyant transvestite in a 1960s gangster series would be a typical role, but then for Alan Cumming the atypical is the norm. His CV, from Eyes Wide Shut to Sex and the City to this year's The Smurfs movie, contains no discernible pattern.
"There is no logic," he says. "That would be the running theme of my working life. One of the reasons I wanted to do The Runaway was I'd just started playing Eli Gold [in the hit US drama The Good Wife, for which he received an Emmy nomination] and so I was playing this repressed man in a suit. All of a sudden I got an offer to play a transvestite in this operatic gangster series. And I just thought it would be the opposite end of the spectrum."
