Alan Cumming's Queer Sensibility

In one of the film's most disturbing moments — and this film is full of disturbing moments — John turns Sebastian's body, lying in a grotesque heap at the foot of the cellar stairs, on its back. A fountain of blood spurts out, covering John from head to toe. The blood continues to flow, on and on, until John is drenched in it, and theatergoers are literally covering their eyes.

"I wanted people to be recoiling from that," Cumming said, "and I wanted it to go on too long. … If you do that, if you keep going on too long, if it's too much, you make people uncomfortable. I wanted them uncomfortable." He added: "In that moment, it's a splatter film. Just for that moment."

Cumming looked excited when I asked him if the baptism in blood was meant to evoke thoughts of AIDS. "No, I wasn't thinking of that, but I love that," he said. "I love that someone might bring that to it. And any way that you take it, it's awful that your lover's blood is spurting all over you."

The Scottish actor and his partner of two years, Grant Shaffer, an American, got married in the U.K. earlier this year, after which he released a statement saying: "Not only are we so happy to be able to celebrate our love for each other, but also to be able to do it in a country that properly recognizes the rights of same sex couples. As residents of America, we would have loved to marry there, but we hope that soon the civil rights that we have been afforded in the U.K. will be available to all gay Americans, and we look forward to celebrating not only our marriage, but the end of prejudice."

What's next for Cumming? In the works is a British project currently titled Coming Out, in which he co-stars with Catherine Zeta-Jones as a gay cabaret star who coaches a Welsh rugby team after the death of his father. He's also starring in Tin Man, another "cracked-out" project: a psychedelic, sci-fi, miniseries version of The Wizard of Oz. But that's not all: Cumming is doing the voice of Hitler in Jackboots on Whitehall, an animated, alternate version of World War II in which the Scots defeat the Nazis.

Cumming seems happy to defy categorization or even definition. Even when he was a kid, he said, he wasn't quite like everyone else, although he admits: "I wanted to be normal, too. And then I grew up, and I'm glad I'm not."