Actor Alan Cumming has remained one of the most outspoken queer celebs in Hollywood for years but talking about being bisexual time and time again gets old, he told The Huffington Post.
In a sit down with host Alex Berg about his new memoir, You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures, Cumming addressed LGBTQ visibility and politics as someone in the spotlight. When asked if he gets tired of talking about being queer, he said, “Sometimes.”
“It’s a two-sided thing. You’ve got to keep talking about it enough so you can stop talking about it,” Cumming said. “And I just think, it’s like being Scottish. You know, I get like ‘Scottish gay’ or ‘Scottish queer’ or ‘Scottish bi’ actor whereas like if it was just somebody else, they’d just say, ‘actor.’”
The reason he gets these “prefixes,” he said, is because there isn’t enough queer visibility to normalize his identity. He said it’s the same situation for any minority fighting for equal rights where issues have to be continuously addressed until “people aren’t bothered by it anymore.”
“People are scared of the other and I guess being the other is fun and I enjoy being the other and I enjoy being outside,” Cumming said. “But also, I get a little tired of [it] because the people that you need to talk to about [it] don’t really want to talk about it.”
As a queer face in Hollywood, “The Good Wife” actor also addressed the ongoing controversy of whether transgender actors should be cast to play trans roles. The most recent situation involved cis actor Matt Bomer who was cast to play a trans woman in an upcoming film called, “Anything.”
Cumming praised the “blossoming of the trans world and trans issues over the last few years.” But he described the situation as “difficult” and acknowledged the different sides of the argument.
“I wish there were more trans characters in general and I wish there were more trans actors playing them,” he said. “But at the same time, I don’t think necessarily it always should be a gay person playing a gay part and stuff like that or like a straight person playing a straight part.”
Watch the clip above to hear Cumming elaborate on his thoughts and check out the full interview below.
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