Alan Cumming revealed why he thinks “X2: X-Men United” is the “gayest film” he’s ever made.
“And that’s me saying that,” the actor, who starred as Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler in the 2003 “X-Men” sequel, recently told Entertainment Weekly.
He continued: “It’s got a queer director, lots of queer actors in it. I love the fact that something so mainstream and so in the comic book world is so queer.”
Cumming, who is bisexual, added that films like the 2003 box-office hit “really help people understand queerness.”
“[That’s] because you can address it in an artistic way, and everyone is less scared of the concept,” Cumming explained.
“It’s an allegory about queerness, about people having these great gifts and really great, powerful things that they have to hide to exist. Queer people understand what that’s all about,” he added.
The actor hasn’t always liked being part of the superhero film franchise, telling “The Graham Norton Show” in 2020 that he was once paid “lots of money” to fly to a fan convention in Milton Keynes, England.
“There were lots of people and everyone was very nice, but you had to wait to get paid in cash — it was mortifying. I didn’t like it at all, and I felt like a bit of a whore,” he said.
In a blog post on his website, Cumming wrote that he had never heard about the X-Men prior to “X2.”
“The character is really interesting, the message of the film (tolerance of others who are different from us) was very timely and unusual for a Hollywood blockbuster, but the real drag was having to spend over four hours a day having two men poke my face,” he wrote.
“Then there were the harnesses for the tail and for flying, the feet, the hands — which made going to the loo a group effort, the teeth, the lenses, oh, God, don’t get me started,” he added. “When I got the press reel of all my ‘X2’ TV interviews I realized that I had gone ’round the world just moaning on every talk show.”
