Alan Cumming on Bafta racial slur incident: “Bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly”
Alan Cumming has opened up about his experience as host of the unfortunate night of the Baftas, when a racial slur was thrown at the stage, and derailed the evening.
Cumming was the presenter of the February ceremony when Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson yelled a racial slur involuntarily at Sinners stars Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan, who were presenting the first award of the evening.
In a new interview with The Times, Cumming has shared his disappointment in the organisers of the ceremony for their lack of preparation, which meant that he had no prior warning about Davidson’s condition.
“It was bad, bad, bad, bad leadership,” he said. “Bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly, who really had not prepared and let people down.”
Though Cumming was told “there’ll be noise”, he had not been warned about the likely nature of Davidson’s outbursts. He also didn’t hear the slur as it happened, and explained that he was “oblivious to what had just happened.”
As such, Cumming was critical of his handling of the incident: “I watched myself back. I was very smiley, I didn’t do it with the gravitas and tone I would have used had I known. That pissed me off,” he added.
Even before the evening commenced, Cumming knew this wasn’t something he wanted to take on again: “Right before it started, I said to my agent, ‘Remind me, I never want to do this again’,” he explained.
He added, “It’s a tough gig. You’re trying to be funny for a bunch of people who are used to very generic, middle-of-the-road things, so you’re fighting against the quirky personality they want you to bring to it. That’s a battle.”
Sharing his own experiences of the evening, Davidson revealed earlier this year that he had also shouted a “homophobic tic” toward Cumming, while outlining that he had no control over the symptoms of his condition.
In April, Bafta published an independent review by RISE Associates into the evening, which, the Board of Trustees said, “Identified a number of structural weaknesses in BAFTA’s planning, escalation procedures and crisis coordination arrangements.”
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