Alan Cumming was bored. It was the late Nineties, he was making a film called Buddy with Rene Russo, and Hollywood wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “I was young and wanted to have fun,” the Scottish actor recalls, “but I felt like I was always missing the party.” Russo tried to shake him from his torpor: “You’re making studio movies, you’re in Hollywood – Alan, this is as good as it gets,” she told him. How depressing, he thought.
Returning to London for some time off – “a really debauched few months” that he later wrote about in the novel Tommy’s Tale – Cumming was cast by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut after a long audition process. The role was minuscule – one scene as a flirty hotel receptionist – but Kubrick spent a week filming it, demanding over 60 takes. Most actors would have despaired. Cumming didn’t. Instead, he was “totally reinvigorated” by Kubrick’s famed fastidiousness, rediscovering exactly what had first drawn him to acting. “Every detail was so exciting,” he remembers. There was mutual respect; Cumming believes his attitude of “I won’t be taking any s***, Mr Kubrick” helped land him the part. “We just had a lovely time together.”
