Alan Cumming Has Thoughts On X-Men 2’s Queer Subtext

During a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly reflecting on his long career in Hollywood, Alan Cumming cited 2003’s X2: X-Men United as “the gayest film [he’s] ever done.”

“Oh, I think the X-Men film I’m in is the gayest film that I’ve ever done, and that’s me saying that. 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 told EW. “I think, in a way, those sorts of films really help people understand queerness, because you can address it in an artistic way, and everyone is less scared of the concept. 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.”

In a filmography that includes The L Word, Cabaret, Josie and the Pussycats, Schmigadoon! and Spice World, singling out the second X-Men film as his “gayest” may seem like a eccentric choice, but he isn’t wrong.

The franchise’s mutant metaphor has always spoken well to queer audiences, inspiring numerous queer readings of the X-Men and its beloved characters over the years. In X2, the scene in which Iceman reveals his mutant powers to his parents is so unsubtly coded, you’d have to be willfully obtuse not to read it as an allegory for coming out. And it’s perhaps especially prescient to hear Cumming discuss that from the perspective of having played Nightcrawler—a character who has both often been the subject of queer readings with his relationship with Wolverine, but also comes from a queer family himself through his mothers Mystique and Destiny, a fact that was always intended to be the case but was only recently officially acknowledged in the comics.

That said, given everything we’ve learned about Bryan Singer in the years since X2—and in particular about his behavior on set during X2‘s filming—maybe we don’t have to give him points for contributing to Cumming’s perception of the movie as the gayest work he’s been part of.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.