ALAN CUMMING / Three

Me: The drugs in the book, I have to say, seem very acutely observed.

Him: [sniggering] The internet's marvellous.

Me: How did you manage that?

Him: Well... I've been around people who've done drugs. [Pause, and then, with deliberate finality] I've experimented with drugs. There we are. ...[later]... Have you seen The Anniversary Party? There's a scene it in when I'm on ecstasy. And that's a big favourite when I've seen that with an audience. It's been hilarious - the cries of recognition.

Me: Did you really sit everyone in the cast down and explain to them what it was like?

Him: Yeah. Because we did a read-through and people were doing such terrible drug acting. I said, when you do ecstasy, this is what happens. This is how you feel. You don't slur your words and get all slow. And also people think it's 'the love drug' - a big sexual thing. Rather than a sensual thing. And it worked. A lot of the people in the film give very convincing performances, never having had it.

Me: Disappointingly difficult to tell who had and who hadn't.

Him: You see? That's the magic.

Me: Although I'm betting Kevin Kline hadn't.

Him: That would be fair to say.

Me: What drug will you never take again?

Him: [Very lengthy pause] Um... uuumm... [Lowering voice to a whisper] Crystal meth.

Me: What?

Him: Crystal meth. It's not nice. It was an accident. It was sort of accidental. But... it was bad.

Me: [slightly taken aback, mindful that crystal meth is a notoriously low-rent variant of amphetemine that keeps the user awake for days] How can you ... how can you take something like that accidentally? I don't know what form you take it in. Do you snort it?

Him: You can snort it. You take it in the same form that you do cocaine. So you can snort it, or smoke it... you can do everything with it. It's very adaptable! But, um... oh, don't print this. Cos it'll be so much... you can say the crystal meth bit, but don't do this bit, OK?

Just to make sure, Alan Cumming reaches across the table and turns off the tape recorder. He then tells me a slightly incredible, but very entertaining, story about the circumstances in which it's possible to inadvertently take crystal meth.

ALAN CUMMING LEFT school at 16, and took a job on Tops, a new pop magazine from the people who brought you The Beano. He interviewed bands, edited comic strips and appeared in photo-love stories for other magazines in the building, like Jackie. He had a great time. When he left, the managing editor asked him to reconsider: given a couple more years' hard work, he felt Alan had it in him to become the assistant editor of Blue Jeans. But Cumming already had a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Dramatic Art.

He took his first professional job when he was still a student - as Malcolm in Macbeth at the Tron theatre in Glasgow. He was 20 when his parents finally got divorced. The following spring, he married Hilary Lyon, who he had met at RSADA. Alan quickly became very busy, with stage roles in Scotland and walk-on parts in TV shows like Taggart. For a while, he was a regular in long-running Scots soap Take The High Road - as a woodcutter who cuts a tree down on top of his pregnant girlfriend and then strangles her. ("A bad boy woodcutter: Jim Hunter. Hunter, you see? RRRRR! My dad was pleased.") His early experiences of public recognition were not good: people tended to take his role a bit literally. He remembers being pinned against the wall of a community centre by a posse of irate OAPs. And the time the man standing next to him in a crowded pub toilet leaned over and hissed, 'Are you the man that tried to kill that wee lassie?' When he confessed that he was, everyone else in the gents' left immediately.

In 1987, the camp double act that Alan and his friend Forbes Masson developed together at RSADA, Victor and Barry, was a hit at Edinburgh. The following year, he went down to London as the star of a production of the play The Conquest of the South Pole. Alan and Hilary embarked upon a life of theatrical respectability. They moved to Crouch End, got a house with a big garden and began thinking about children. "I was in a relationship that I thought was going to last forever," he says. "Being one of those cardigan-wearing actors that are on BBC dramas a lot and do seasons at The National."

Alan began winning theatrical awards. He wrote and directed a short film starring his wife. People started to say that they were the new Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. By 1993, he was playing Hamlet at the Donmar warehouse. Hilary played Ophelia.

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