5 November 2026 |
The actor talks Old Navy, playing dress up, and The Traitors finale.
“I do feel I’m like a little doll that people enjoy painting and dressing up, and I enjoy it too,” Alan Cumming tells me over Zoom from his dressing room, preparing for his upcoming run in My Fair Lady at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre in Scotland. In a career teeming with curious characters, the Scottish actor has become a bit of an eccentric fashion darling. Donning flowing capes, veils, tartan scarfs, and completely inappropriate pumps for “stomping through the woods of Scotland,” Cumming’s eye-catching looks as host of The Traitors have become fixtures of his public fashion sense. “My style in real life is a bit more, I would say, eccentric casual,” he says. Cumming—along with Meg Stalter, Paris Hilton, Charli D’Amelio and more—stars in Old Navy’s latest holiday campaign, a revival of the brand’s ‘90s Jingle Jet series.
Cumming has become fairly accustomed to his reputation as a sensational dresser: “I think if everybody expects you to be a bit kooky looking, then why not do it? To me, your clothes are about you as an individual. I think there are things that express your individuality, and yet so much of our culture in clothes and fashion is about making you seem like lots of other people. And that’s why, honestly, [I like] Old Navy and the things that Zac [Posen] is doing in that company—making it much more fun and lively and spunky, saying, ‘Hey have some fun with it. Don’t just look the same as everybody else all the time.’”
“I like the sort of camp and theatricality of it,” says Cumming of the campaign, adding that this wasn’t his first time suiting up as a flight attendant. “I wrote a sitcom 30 years ago with my friend, High Life. And this past spring, we made it into a musical and toured it around Scotland, and we were flight attendants in it. So I’ve had some knowledge of being a flight attendant in front of a camera,” he chuckles.
This may not come as a shock: Cumming has a cheeky approach to following fashion rules. “I feel like I’ve never adhered to a dress code in my life. Like when it says black tie, what does that mean? It means you want just everyone to be smart. You don’t have to wear black. I can wear a polka dot suit. I quite like that. I can do what the fuck I like. I’m not being disrespectful. I’m actually kind of being Alan Cumming for you when you want me to be Alan Cumming. I actually quite enjoy being Alan Cumming in those situations,” he says, before describing a more heartwarming instance of getting to be Alan Cumming. “The kids in My Fair Lady, the ensemble, [they were asking me], ‘What should we wear for the premiere for opening night?’ I was like, you know what, you can come to my house in the Highlands, and I have a ridiculous amount of suits. Don’t buy a suit, just come to my house and just borrow something. So then we’re going to have a little fashion parade.”
Later this year, Cumming will appear in Avengers: Doomsday as Nightcrawler, reprising his role for the first time since X2. He hasn’t been shy about describing his negative experience in the 2003 film, and finally got some closure with this year’s foray into Marveldom. “I did actually really enjoy playing [Nightcrawler], but had the worst working experience of my life [on X2], and I don’t see why I need to pretend otherwise. So [the Marvel team] were very very nice about making sure that didn’t happen again. It was actually really nice to go back to that character. A very healing thing,” he tells me, before sharing some fashion news: “This is an exclusive I’m going to give you. I’m going to go to the premiere wearing the exact same outfit that I wore for the 2003 premiere.”
Fans of The Traitors will be excited to hear Cumming’s favorite aspect of the current season, which concludes on November 12th. “The ending,” he says, grinning. “It’s so exciting when you do it, because you don’t know what is going to happen. There’s so many sorts of machinations and things that could happen. But this one ends up in such a brilliant way. It’s incredibly satisfying and edifying. I think it’s actually my favorite ending.”
