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Narrators

Spotlight on popular narrators

Audiobook Narrator
Alan Cumming

Alan Cumming

"You create the entire world--I really like that you create the whole experience."

Alan Cumming
Alan Cumming

Alan's Accolades

Not My Father's Son  AudioFile Best of 2015 Biography & Memoir, Audie Award 2015
Macbeth  AudioFile Best of 2012 Classics
Dracula  AudioFile Best of 2012 Audio Theater
Dracula  Audie Winner 2013
Goliath  AudioFile Best of 2011  Young Adult
Zorgamazoo  Audie Award  2011

 

Podcasts

Talking with Alan Cumming

Alan Cumming is in audiobooks for the characters. "Keeps you on your toes," he says in his sly-sounding Scots brogue. Children's books, especially, offer challenges he appreciates as an actor. "In a kids' book, there tends to be a bigger range--more extremes and lots more characters and different voices." Cumming won the 2011 Audie Award for Solo Narration for ZORGAMAZOO , a middle-grade novel written in rhymed couplets. And he's just recorded the third in Scott Westerfeld's steampunk WWI young adult series, GOLIATH, which gave him a chance to show off his best Austrian accent.

Cumming, known for racy stage roles such as the Emcee in "Cabaret," narrates considerably more adult fare, too. "Once I did an Anne Rice novel, called VITTORIO, THE VAMPIRE. I had to do a scene where a teenage vampire was having sex for the first time, or was being bitten, maybe a combination of both, and it was so intense that they had to stop because they thought I was going to hyperventilate. I was doing lots of breathy vampire acting, and I was starting to fall off the chair. That was my most perilous moment in audiobooks."

For someone who's spent so much time acting on stage and in front of the camera, how does audiobook narration compare? "It's more intense because you just go into this little, dark room and are there for long, long periods of time on your own. You create the entire world--I really like that about it, that you create the whole experience," Cumming says. "And storytelling is a tradition that I really enjoy. In my cabaret show that I've been doing ["I Bought a Blue Car Today"], I tell lots of stories, and I really like that part of it."

What's next for Cumming? He recently recorded MACBETH, a novel based on Shakespeare's play. "It was really fascinating because I'm sort of obsessed with that play, and I'm going to do a production of it next year, I think, and so it was amazing to play everybody."

His deliciously morally conflicted character, political operator Eli Gold, will be back on the third season of "The Good Wife" this fall.

And he might just get to go into that little, dark room and record his own words. "I wrote a novel a couple of years ago [TOMMY'S TALE], and I never did an audiobook of it. It would be quite fun to do the audio of my own book, to go back and revisit it."--Jennifer M. Dowell

Photo by Kevin Tachman

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Photo by Kevin Garcia 

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