LOS ANGELES _ Alan Cumming sits cross-legged on the bed in his room at the W Hotel. His face is locked in concentration as he cycles through his list of acting credits to find the answer to the question of how often he's played characters based on real people. When you have as many credits as Cumming, doing such a search can take time.
Finally, he smiles and says, "I once played General Batista of Cuba, but that was ridiculous."
That performance was in the 2000 comedy film "Company Man." The consensus is that Cumming's role as Ted Tinling, the tennis player turned fashion designer, in the film "Battle of the Sexes" is one of the rare times Cumming has seriously played a character based on a real person. The film looks at the 1973 tennis exhibition match between Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell).
Part of the story deals with how King put together the first all-female professional tennis league as a way of protesting the inadequacies in pay between men and women. Tinling, who had designed traditional tennis outfits for years, became the official designer for the new league bringing blasts of color to the tennis world. He also was a confidant for King as she was dealing with issues surrounding her sexuality.
One of the reasons Cumming had a difficult time remembered how many roles have been based on real people is that he looks at every role the same way � whether it be voicing a Smurf or delivering a soliloquy on stage as Hamlet.
"They are all just characters to play," Cumming says. "It's like when you are doing a movie that is an adaptation of a book or something. Reading the book isn't that valuable because you might have things you'll be bringing into it that aren't in the script. You have to play the script."
And he's being playing the script for decades since graduating in 1982 from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. Since then he has put together an extremely diverse collection of credits from stage work in "Cabaret" to playing Nightcrawler in "X-Men 2." He's worked with the Spice Girls, Liza Minnelli and starred in "The Good Wife."
He was Glitch in the re-imagining of the "Oz" story in "Tin Man" and worked for Stanley Kubrick in "Eyes Wide Shut." Of working for Kubrick, Cumming explains that most people think he was this terrifying man but he found the director to be quite funny.
There's no rhyme or reason for the roles Cumming plays other than the role just feels right.
"Sometimes there's a little more planning to it where I want to do a certain play or work on a TV show that shoots in New York because I would be close to home. I like it that people ask me to do weird things. That's why I wanted to be an actor. In America, people don't want really don't want to see their movie stars as actors but just in the same things," Cumming says. "When people say I was so different in something I always tell that that's because I'm an actor. I became and actor to be able to play a lot of different parts."
As for "Battle of the Sexes," Cumming decided his approach to playing Tinling was to do his best to capture his spirit. That was made easier by the fact that Tinling lived a life that was so fascinating he could easily be the subject of his own movie. Along with becoming known for his work in fashion, Tinling was a tennis champion, author and spy during World War II.
"Battle of the Sexes" focuses mainly on King and Riggs. Cumming knew that his would be a minor role in terms of the number of scenes he would be in but recognized early how important Tinling was to King when the top-ranked female player in the world was struggling to deal with all her sexuality.
"Billie Jean talked about him and said he was very influential to her and guided her. She was very, very fond of him," Cumming says. "I spoke to some of the other tennis players and tennis journalists at the U.S. Open and you could tell how beloved he is. He had a deep empathy for people.
"What's so fascinating about that time is that it's so hard for me to imagine that people would know someone was gay but would never ever, ever think of mentioning it. That reign of silence people went through was really very crazy."
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