Acclaimed Scottish actor Alan Cumming stars in the new hit mystery series Instinct, which made some late-arriving history by being the first American network drama with an openly gay lead character. Cumming spoke with Dominic Corry in Los Angeles.
What was it about this role that made you want to commit to a TV show?
Well, it's really just that it's such a confounding character. There's so many different layers to it. He's sort of a fuddy-duddy professor, a bit of a dandy. He kind of is a former spy. He drives a motorbike. He's gay. And I guess the challenge was to make them all into one sort of whole person.
He's also a little bit on the spectrum. He was a child musical prodigy. There's a lot going on. And also, he opens up a can of whoop-ass sometimes. And that's quite a nice thing to be able to do in your 50s.
This is the first gay lead character on an American network drama - is that a big deal for you?
Yes. It's an incredible thing and also a terrible thing at the same time. And it was also one of the reasons I wanted to do the show. It's another layer to the character that makes it interesting to play, but sort of socially and politically, and especially in the time that we find ourselves in America, where gay people are being persecuted again and their rights are being removed and the president is actively condoning it by his silence, violence and persecution against the LGBT community, I think it's all the more important that we should have a character with a healthy, successful same-sex marriage on network screens.
Alan Cumming and Bojana Novakovic in Instinct.
What do you personally bring to the character?
I brought my genius. Ha! I am married to a man, so I brought that to the table. But I was also very conscious of the fact that I think most times when we see gay characters, on American television especially, their gayness is, like, the prime thing. The gayness is somehow a problem. And what is really refreshing about this and what I was definitely advocating was that there's a successful relationship here and they're very supportive of each other, and it's also the fourth or fifth most interesting thing about the character.
Do you feel more pressure as the lead compared to being a supporting character on The Good Wife?
Absolutely you feel more pressure, yeah. Because if people don't like you, then the show is f***ed. Yes. Definitely. I am actually quite a relaxed person. I'm aware of things like that, but ... I hope people like it. I hope it's a great success. I hope we keep doing it. At the same time, really what's important to me is the experience we had making it. I had a really lovely time. We danced between takes. One of our camera guys had a little speaker. We would dance, every day, all the crew. Things like that mean more to me than how it ends up.
Do you enjoy doing the action scenes, i.e. opening up a can of whoop-ass?
In the pilot, there's a scene where I have to bring down a serial killer, and they were all going, "Alan, the stuntman is going to do this." And then they said, "Well, would you like to try once just to see if you can do it?" So I did it, and you know, I'm quite fit, and I brought the man down. And all the crew clapped. And I was, like, "Are you clapping because I'm old, or because I'm butch-er than you thought?" The older I get, the more I enjoy doing whoop-ass kinds of things.
Lowdown
Instinct premieres Monday, June 18 at 8.30pm on Prime.
