Top 70 Alan Cumming Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another.”

— Alan Cumming

2. “Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life.”

— Alan Cumming

3. “I have no regrets in my life even the crazy things I’ve been in. It all made me the I am today and I wouldn’t change anything. I’m happy with who I am!”

— Alan Cumming

4. “Most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes.”

— Alan Cumming

5. “I don’t avoid anyone but I always think some people hate me.”

— Alan Cumming

6. “My mum always told me I was precious, while my dad always told me I was worthless. I think that’s a good grounding for a balanced life.”

— Alan Cumming

7. “I’m not a fan of Twitter.”

— Alan Cumming

8. “I’m Scottish first, and it’s odd to hear that I’m a Scottish-American.”

— Alan Cumming

9. “It’s actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you’ll be okay.”

— Alan Cumming

10. “If you are a cabaret artist and you are mostly singing other people’s songs, you’re asking them to rethink a song, listen to it in a different way. The most impact you can have while asking them to re-listen to a song is if it’s a song they know very well.”

— Alan Cumming

11. “Once in a while it’s good to challenge yourself in a way that’s really daunting.”

— Alan Cumming

12. “Nowadays people don’t know how to handle it if all the ends aren’t tied up and they’re not told what to think in films. And if they’re challenged, they think it’s something wrong with the film.”

— Alan Cumming

13. “A sweaty Macbeth with blood on his arms coming in fresh from the battle doesn’t interest me.”

— Alan Cumming

14. “Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He’s hardcore to play because he’s displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens.”

— Alan Cumming

15. “There are some days when you don’t feel like being Alan Cumming.”

— Alan Cumming

16. “I’m quite good, though I say it myself, at making strangers feel at ease.”

— Alan Cumming

17. “I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I’m a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I’ve lived my life backwards.”

— Alan Cumming

18. “It’s interesting, for me sappy means sentimental and something that gets you in your heart, gets you emotional. That’s what I mean. Also, of course, it means that I’m slightly setting up the audience that there’s a bit of fun involved, as well.”

— Alan Cumming

Featured in: Fun Quotes

19. “It’s exciting to be with really, really good people. Some people make you feel like you’ve got to up your game. Working with good people is always good.”

— Alan Cumming

20. “I come more to Scotland than I ever used to, so I feel more connected to it, more part of the zeitgeist. You know when you realize you have a choice and I’m choosing my homeland. It’s funny: when you get older these things creep up to you.”

— Alan Cumming

21. “I was horrified when Richard Chamberlain and Rupert Everett said gay actors should stay in the closet. They were saying to people that they should live a lie and not be liberated, to live in fear of being found out.”

— Alan Cumming

22. “I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare.”

— Alan Cumming

23. “Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.”

— Alan Cumming

24. “You do get really exhausted doing films. You work such long hours, and after a while, things can get out of perspective, just like if anyone’s tired, things get on top of them.”

— Alan Cumming

25. “It’s really rare for film directors to be that interested in things other than themselves.”

— Alan Cumming

26. “With Urban Secrets, I just really liked the idea of wandering around chatting to people.”

— Alan Cumming

27. “Actors aren’t stupid, mostly, and if there’s a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director’s going for, if you’re aware of that too, you can do things to help that.”

— Alan Cumming

28. “I don’t feel I’m a compulsive person. I multitask. I’m really well-organised, and I have lots of people to help me.”

— Alan Cumming

29. “Pantomime is a big thing in the cultural calendar of my country, you know. So subtlety’s not my forte.”

— Alan Cumming

30. “Be who you like as long as you mean it.”

— Alan Cumming

31. “The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story’s going to end and how it’s going to go. But on television nobody knows what’s going to happen, even the writers.”

— Alan Cumming

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

32. “I like working on things that are very different and that involve different disguises.”

— Alan Cumming

33. “I cried for my granny and my mum and every working-class woman who had sacrificed like them and been denied proper closure and emotional balm because they had slipped through the system, no, had been failed by the system, and hadn’t the means to do so. I.”

— Alan Cumming

34. “My feeling about work is it’s much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa.”

— Alan Cumming

35. “You’ll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.”

— Alan Cumming

36. “For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don’t think you’re very good at it – which is rubbish. You’re missing out here.”

— Alan Cumming

37. “I love a film where I get squished by two dumpsters or I fly through the air.”

— Alan Cumming

38. “Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.”

— Alan Cumming

39. “When there’s an adult person who’s scaring you, you grow up pretty quickly.”

— Alan Cumming

40. “I think people deny themselves by putting themselves into categories.”

— Alan Cumming

41. “In my first year at drama school, I did this kids’ show called ‘Let’s See.”

— Alan Cumming

42. “I was so scared of going back to the theatre after ‘Hamlet.’ I didn’t know if I’d do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it.”

— Alan Cumming

43. “When you’re on TV, you come into people’s homes. In theater and film, they go to you – to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it’s very different.”

— Alan Cumming

44. “I love long flights. The feeling of being completely unreachable is something I savor, and the limbolike state of being, having departed but not arrived, somehow allows me to catch up with myself, to regroup and check in.”

— Alan Cumming

45. “Kids are more genuine. When they come up and want to talk to you, they don’t have an agenda. It’s more endearing and less piercing to your aura.”

— Alan Cumming

46. “Macbeth was the first play I ever read.”

— Alan Cumming

47. “So the experts think we could have an AIDS-free generation in Africa by 2015, even if the mothers are positive.”

— Alan Cumming

48. “Usually, there’s a story I’ve told that leads up to why I’m singing the song. The whole concept of the show was about being authentic and connecting with these songs. The best way to do that was in a room with an audience and for people to listen to that.”

— Alan Cumming

49. “It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down.”

— Alan Cumming

50. “I usually can find a way to do a character to make it real and work. But sometimes it’s a struggle sustaining that, because there’s such a level of personal involvement and personal, physical, and emotional distraughtness.”

— Alan Cumming