Alan Cumming talked about his role as Nightcrawler in X-Men 2 while on NBC’s Late Night Conan O’Brien show Friday night.
Among his revelations are:
Nightcrawler holds his arms, closes his eyes and tilts his head back when he teleports.
"When he teleports in the comics, it goes 'Bamf!' That's what it says," Cumming said. "So there was this thing about this 'bamf' was going to take place. And there was all these different ways I was going to do it and finally we just settled on that."
Regarding the tail: "Sometimes it would be an actual tail that was strapped on with a harness, which would like boing me in the face. Other times, it would not be there at all and the computer would do it after. And sometimes, I would do a lot of scenes with Halle Berry - she plays Storm and our stories are sort of together - and sometimes instead of my big tail I would have this little, quite large actually, black stub thing sticking out the back. I would wear this for the special effects people. But honestly, it was hilarious because it looks like a dildo. I was backing up Halle! After three months of being blue and flying around, you want to get a laugh out of everything."
On keeping his appearance secret: "I'm a new one. I wasn't in the last one," he said. "Nightcrawler's always been an X-person, but he's not been in the film before. So they're very, very secretive. I would have all this blue makeup on, and they would make me wear this sort of cloak with a hood. I looked like the Grim Reaper. I could sort of see through it, but I would have to work from my trailer to the set with this on, so in case of paparazzi in the trees, they would just see the Grim Reaper. And I used to call it my burka. Not only did I have to be in makeup in four hours, but then cover my head in public.
"But then, an official photo shoot that I did, the photo got leaked out. But I was squatting and I had a hole in my trousers for the tail to come out. You could see my underpants and then they were going to Photoshop the trousers on top of the underpants. And that photo with the underpants showing was leaked. It was on all the Internet and newspapers in Britain and everything.
"And there was a big thing on these fan sites, 'What's thing this with Nightcrawler showing his underpants? Is he gay? Is he gay?' And then they're going, 'I always thought he was gay.'
"It was just the weirdest thing. It was bad enough that even though I was wearing this burka for months and now everyone thinks that I'm going to be playing this gay super-hero with his Calvin Kleins sticking out of his costume."
Regarding licensing: "I'm going to be a doll, I'm very excited, an action figure," he said. "Even when I've been doing my book tour, people have been coming up with Nightcrawler things.
"But the best thing is they're doing these cards with your picture on it. Some of them have to be signed by the real person so that maybe if you buy the thing, you go, 'Hooray, I've got so-and-so..'
"So my publicist said, 'Alan, they want you sign 1,500 of these little cards.' And I was like, 'Uh-huh, me no think so.' And then they said, 'We'll pay you $1.50 a card' and I was like, 'OK!'"
--Comics Continuum