Alan Cumming was in London this week doing publicity for Russell T Davies’s new drama Tip Toe, and he said the part at the centre of it all is the lead role. He described the series as an intense new drama and said it shows how normalised violence and hatred have become.
The timing matters because Cumming is already juggling several careers at once. Since January 2025, he has been the artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where the inaugural season began at the end of May with Once. The season also includes My Fair Lady, in which he plays Henry Higgins, and a new play by Martin Sherman that he is directing and in which Simon Russell Beale plays Liberace.
Cumming said he had always wanted to work with Davies, a writer whose television dramas have long travelled widely and who has a reputation for drawing sharp, intimate performances from his leads. Tip Toe adds another high-profile screen role to a career that has moved between theatre, television, film, books and cabaret, and it arrives while he is still carrying the day-to-day responsibilities of running a theatre.
That workload has been piled on top of travel between London, Scotland, New York and Los Angeles, along with photoshoots and more publicity work. He said he has just finished a tour of Scotland with The High Life: the Musical, based on the 1990s sitcom he made with Forbes Masson and set aboard the ramshackle Air Scotia.
The overlap is typical of Cumming’s current moment. He won four Emmys for seven seasons of The Good Wife, but he is also back in a role that asks for as much stamina as glamour. During one appearance, he laughed off a physical curiosity, saying he wondered what was wrong with his finger because it was green, before realising he had green eye make-up on from that morning and still had blotches from his dermatologist zapping them the other day in New York.
John Tiffany, who knows the breadth of Cumming’s work, said his capacity for invention and reinvention is like no one else’s. He added that Cumming’s curiosity, versatility, ability and indefatigability fuse to embody the essence of a modern polymath.
For now, Tip Toe gives Cumming another showcase at a moment when he is already at the centre of one of the busier stretches of his career. The question is not whether he can do the work. It is how long he can keep doing this much of it at once.
