Alan Cumming Says Stanley Kubrick Restored His Faith in Movies 25 Years Ago – and Made It Hard for Other Directors Since Then

Attention, directors: If Alan Cumming has been in your movie at any time in the 21st century, you can thank Stanley Kubrick. And if at any point Cumming seemed annoyed at you, you can blame Kubrick.

At least that’s what Cumming said. In an interview with TheWrap about “The Traitors,” the Peacock reality show for which he’s been nominated for an Emmy for hosting, Cumming enthusiastically detoured into a discussion about his appearance in “Eyes Wide Shut,” Kubrick’s final film, which was released in July 1999, 25 years ago this summer.

“It was very memorable,” Cumming said of the experience, which both restored his interest in acting in films at a time when he was losing it and made him question the way other filmmakers have directed him since.

Mind you, Cumming didn’t have much of a role in the film, a dreamy and kinky reverie in which Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play a married couple whose relationship is fraying as Cruise’s character, a doctor, wanders around New York and slips into a mysterious underworld of ritual orgies conducted by masked celebrants. Cumming appears in one three-minute scene as a hotel clerk who tells Cruise that the man he’s looking for has already checked out; the Scottish actor, who was 34 when the film was released, counters Cruise’s steely gaze with flirtatious tics and innuendo-laden glances.

At the time, Cumming was a British stage actor best known for his performance as the Master of Ceremonies in Sam Mendes’ revival of “Cabaret” on London’s West End and then on Broadway, where he won a Tony Award. He’d acted in a few Hollywood movies – the James Bond film “GoldenEye,” “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” the Spice Girls’ “Spice World” – but he wasn’t feeling as if he wanted to pursue a career on the big screen.

“I had done a couple of films in Hollywood and done a few big films in Europe,” he said. “I was kind of new blood on the scene, but I felt disillusioned about being an actor, actually. I just thought, Is this it? Am I really going to be happy doing these big movies? I didn’t feel very challenged.”

But when he got the chance to send an audition tape for “Eyes Wide Shut,” he didn’t pass up the opportunity to work with the director of “Dr. Strangelove,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Shining.” Cumming’s agents told him that Kubrick might need him the following week or it might not be for three months. “I thought it was going to be Stanley’s last film,” he said, “so I decided to take some time off and wait until they needed me.”

He went back to the U.S. to do press on another movie – so to kill time until the Kubrick movie was ready for him, he decided to have some fun. “I had a really raucous time,” he said with a grin. “I partied for a few months and ended up writing a novel [called “Tommy’s Tale: A Novel of Sex, Confusion, and Happy Endings”] based on that time.”

Then he got the call to come to London for “Eyes Wide Shut,” which was set in New York but shot in the U.K. Once there, Cumming got a quick lesson in how to act around the legendary Kubrick. “Everyone painted him as this big scary monster,” he said. “And if you give someone that energy, they will give it back to you. But I stood up to him, actually.

“Within seconds of meeting him, he said to me” – and here Cumming shifted into an imitation of Kubrick’s gruff New York voice – “‘ You’re not American !’ And I said, ‘I know. I’m Scottish.’ He said, ‘You were American on the tape!’  And I just went, ‘Yeah, that’s because I’m an actor , Stanley.’ He just sort of went, ‘ooh.’

“And after that we got on like a house on fire.” Cumming laughed. “He wasn’t a bully, but I can see how he could have felt like a bully if you’d given him a bullied energy. And what I gave him was like, ‘Don’t f–k with me, Stanley Kubrick. I’ve been waiting for six months to do this little part.’” Another laugh. “That’s what I was saying, basically.”

By then, “Eyes Wide Shut” had been shooting for a full year, on its way to setting a record for the longest continuous shoot at 400 days. Once they began filming Cumming’s brief conversation with Cruise, he saw why it was taking so long.

“It took a week to do that tiny scene,” he said. “A week . If you did it now, you’d probably be home by lunchtime. But it really reinvigorated my interest in acting, because every single time we did a take, I knew exactly why. He was really focused on little moments or even little gestures. The detail and the intricacy made me think, Gosh, acting can be really fun.

“He was so invested in every little detail that you were, too. And by the end of the week, I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let me out of here.’ He actually wanted me to stay and do it more, and I would’ve stayed but I couldn’t. He begrudgingly let me go, and we stayed in touch afterward.”

But Cumming was right about “Eyes Wide Shut” being Kubrick’s last film: The director died in March 1999, six days after showing the final cut to Warner Bros. Since then, Cumming said he often has reason to think about the experience.

“Now when I do a film or something and the director says, ‘Oh, that was perfect, let’s do one more,’ I think, A) Why do one more if it was perfect? And B) You’re not going to say anything? You’re not going to say why we’re doing it again?

“Other people say, ‘Oh, just try another one.’ Stanley would be like, ‘OK, look at the monitor here and see the way your lip moves there. When you say that word, look in this direction…’ Every time you did a take, you were so excited to try and get it right for him.”

An interview with Alan Cumming about “The Traitors” will appear in the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

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