This week’s Take Ten guest is Alan Cumming.
In this episode, we get into his top moments hosting The Traitors, like “When Phaedra [Parks] said to pilot Pete [Weber], ‘This ain’t The Bachelor, and I don’t have to kiss your ass for a rose.’” We also discuss how to spot a liar and his continual surprise at some contestants’ “illogical dopeyness”.
Also, with the reprisal of his X2: X-Men United Nightcrawler role coming up in Avengers: Doomsday, Cumming says it was great to overwrite the memory of the 2003 X2 set with a new, more positive experience. It’s been widely reported that the cast threatened to walk off the X2 set back then, due to director Bryan Singer’s behavior.
Alan Cumming, host of ‘The Traitors’
Peacock
“There were things that happened on the [X2] set that were just shocking to me,” Cumming says. “The working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable. And we all have talked about it in various ways over the years… Going back to it after all these years was great because I really liked the character, and so to go back and play him now and also this film is like superhero soup. There’s so many of them in it. I just can’t keep up.”
And Cumming spilled some tea on the new ‘Romy and Michele’ sequel. Back in 1997, he played Sandy Frink, opposite Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino. While he says he can’t say much about the upcoming sequel he does admit that “a lot of the people come back”.
Alan Cumming, Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino in ‘Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion’ (1997)
Buena Vista
Recalling the original Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion film, he says, “I had no idea what the f–k I was doing. It was the first ever film I’d made in America. I couldn’t understand why they cast me. I still can’t. I mean, I’m good and everything, but it was this big studio film. And, you know, Lisa was huge. Friends was the biggest show in the world, and Mira had just won an Oscar! It was a big deal, and I was the lead boy in it. I mean, I’m grateful, but I didn’t really didn’t know… If I’d over-thought it, I might have done it differently and not as well. But, I didn’t even know how you pronounce ‘Tucson’. I thought it was ‘Tuckson’. That’s how dopey I was. So yeah, I will be pronouncing Tucson correctly in the sequel. I can tell you that.”
To find out more, including Cumming’s ideal day, the song that would be the theme tune for his life, and his bizarre belief about Martha Stewart(!) click on the video above.
