Alan Cumming adopts a Canadian accent for his latest role

When Alan Cumming read the script for the film Drive Back Home, he felt a strong connection to its lead character, Perley. Like Cumming, Perley has one brother and an abusive father, is gay and grew up in a small town. But while the Tony-winning actor grew up in Scotland, Perley is from New Brunswick. 

"Even though our situations and our circumstances were very different, I really did relate to that person," Cumming tells Q's Tom Power. "The need to get away from a small community or from an abusive parent when you are looking to that parent to guide you and protect you. And when they are out of control, it's a very frightening, terrifying prospect that you have to go into the world on your own."

Drive Back Home chronicles a 1970 road trip from Toronto to New Brunswick that Perley takes with his estranged brother, Weldon (Charlie Creed-Miles). After their father dies, Perley goes on a bender and ends up in a Toronto jail cell after he's found having sex with a man in a park. The police call Weldon and tell him that if he picks his brother up, they won't press charges. At the behest of their mother, Weldon drives from his home in New Brunswick to retrieve his brother and bring him home. 

Cumming learned that this was a common tactic used by Canadian police officers against queer people in the '60s and '70s to shame them for their sexuality. By forcing queer people to have a family member pick them up in lieu of prison time, they outed them to their relatives. 

"There's a whole generation of queer people whose stories just haven't been told," he says. "And we need to be reminded of what that was like and to honour them. They persevered and they managed to find a way to thrive and survive."

On the road trip, Perley and Weldon talk about their lives and their recently deceased father, who was abusive to both of them. But he was particularly abusive to Perley anytime he showed signs of queerness. 

"I know what that feels like," Cumming says, adding that it helped him portray Perley realistically. 

Cumming believes that his father's abuse gave him the skills to become a good actor. When he would come home as a kid, he'd have to immediately assess his father the same way he would an actor in a scene: "You've got to understand the energy in a room. You've got to understand someone's mood. You've got to sort of react accordingly to try all those things."

Though parts of Perley's life reminded him of his own, Cumming didn't find making Drive Back Home too painful. Screenwriter and director Michael Clowater made sure to include a good amount of humour to even out the film's more difficult content. 

"It's got this weird, quirky, little fun energy," Cumming says. "I am so glad that we managed to keep that in the end product because it was something that really attracted me to the script and to the tone of it."

The full interview with Alan Cumming is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Alan Cumming produced by Catherine Stockhausen.