Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

As soon as I landed I was plunged back into my life in Cape Town. I was picked up at the airport by my driver, Hodges, a huge African man whose laugh was so bassy and reverberating that the entire car shook when I said something that set him off. It reminded me of my old habit of standing up against a speaker in a club to feel the beat. When Hodges laughed, I really felt it. I went straight to the set for a makeup test, then a wardrobe fitting, then back home to the downtown apartment building where most of the cast were barracked, where a lovely manicurist (or nail technician as she preferred to be called) was waiting to reattach the acrylic nails that Desrae sported and I had relinquished before I left for Cannes. Another thing I relinquished was my body hair. Desrae would not have entertained a hairy arm, and therefore neither did I. Before the first day of filming this series, I had spent an evening in the company of a product called Veet, which, though well known to the female species by other names such as Nair, had hardly ever entered my mental periphery. It is now, however, forever seared into my brain. Do you know what Veet/Nair does? It dissolves the hair off your body. Surely this was an invention of the Nazis? You rub it on, sometimes to very sensitive parts of your anatomy, and very soon the hair just dissolves. It is not a pretty procedure, and it sure as hell doesn’t smell pretty either. But because of Desrae, Veet became a part of my toilette, and I would h...